Alternatives to Whatsapp for Jamaicans as Facebook Messenger, Instagram to merge soon

Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg has plan to make WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Instagram communicate seamlessly as reported in “Facebook to merge WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram messaging”, published JANUARY 25, 2019 by Queenie Wong and Lori Grunin, CNET.

While Whatsapp is ad-free and has E2EE (End to End Encryption), Facebook Messenger and Instagram are not encrypted.

Knowing Facebook, this is just another way to add data to their social Graph and sell it to Third party Advertising companies.

Or worse, with the CIA, the FBI or even GCHQ as predicted in my Geezam blog article entitled “WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger may be sharing E2EE Keys with the NSA”.

So are there alternatives to Whatsapp?

Alternatives to Facebook merging WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Instagram

Actually there are three (3) alternatives as laid out in the article “3 WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger alternatives”, published February 15 2019, by Jason Cipriani, CNET:

1.      Signal

2.      Telegram

3.      Apple iMessage

The previous 2 work on Android devices.  All these options sport E2EE and come with VoIP calling.

However Apple iMessage is great once you have an Apple device. At least you get FaceTime and iMessages from a close group, itself a great security feature.

Telegram is especially handy, offering encrypted chats with self-destructing messages. Of the two, it has the same look and feel like Whastapp, making users feel quite at home. It is both app and browser based and its messaging feature, called Secret Chats, allows the sender of a message to enable and disable E2EE for each conversation.

Signal is possibly the simplest and best. It is renowned for its E2EE, which is applied by default on all conversations. And yes, it was indeed endorsed by Edward Snowden.

Still, I wouldn't mind if all of these apps could make calls to landline as opined in my Geezam blog article entitled “Microsoft, Signal E2EE needs Free Local, International Mobile and Landline Calling”.

So, are you ready to jump ship?