WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

I have a couple of friends that I message via Signal and even convinced my dad to use it a while back, but here in Brazil WhatsApp is _everything_, and I doubt most people care about this at all. In my case, I'd love to just go over to Signal fully but then I couldn't talk to family, friends, and probably couldn't even book a haircut or pay my taxes (my accountant messages me on WhatsApp).

It's one of those where unless just about everyone were to go over to Signal, most people won't, because keeping track of messages in two apps is quite hard.

That leaves me stuck in this ecosystem, which is quite sad.

I do agree that just accepting this is not the way to go, and also that slowly making changes is a valid approach.

I do want to qualify though, for those who aren't in a WhatsApp-heavy country, how things work.

I looked at my latest messages and beyond all my friends and all my family, I have my accountant, my landlord, my barber, HOA, groups for birthday party invites (where you're asked to confirm attendance), a painter, etc. In many restaurants, if you want a reservation, WhatsApp is the only way. For people who work in Brazil (I work remotely for a company abroad), a lot of work communication happens on WhatsApp.

Again, this is not to say that not dong anything is the way to go! But I think abroad some people don't understand the extent to which WhatsApp is used here. Someone mentioned iMessage for instance and I don't think I know a single person who uses it. Most Brazilians have Android phones too.

But what would prevent people from using WhatsApp to talk to businesses and Signal to talk to friends? I have been using multiple channels with friends forever: phone call, mail, email, MSN Messenger, Facebook, IRC, ICQ, WhatsApp, Threema, Signal, Slack, Discord, Matrix, ... What sucks is when I can't reach a friend. But I never saw it as a problem that I had too many choices to talk to them :-).

I don't really understand this "It has to have 100% of the market" stance. I don't want monopolies, I don't really understand why someone would say "this monopoly sucks, but I really want a monopoly so I won't ever change unless it is for a better monopoly".

Where it breaks down is for group conversations. If Person A won't use Signal and Person B won't use WhatsApp, you can't easily have group communications. And it only gets worse as the number of people in the group goes up.