WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

I guess this was expected, but it makes me feel really powerless in the sense that I can't really move away from WhatsApp.

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 had this problem some years ago. Eventually I just told everyone I would be uninstalling whatsapp on date XX/YY, which I then did. Some people installed signal and stayed in touch, others didn't. Life didn't change much. Now I'd like to move to my own matrix server but I think appx 0.0% of my social group would follow me down that rabbit hole. :-(

More extreme, a friend of mine one day eliminated his cellphone entirely but kept Skype on his laptop. So now it's email or nothing with him and sadly it's been nothing for some time now.