Signal set the industry standard for encryption and privacy, and it's what I tend to point people towards. The one down-side is that it is still tied to your phone number, so solutions like Element/Matrix or XMPP with OMEMO might be a little better for some use cases. My wife, kids and I use Conversations(.)im for our intra-family chats and use Signal for talking to everybody else.
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I love Signal, but was unable to convince enough of my network to migrate. They are mostly stuck using Meta's spyware (Instagram and Whatsapp). In the end, Telegram seemed like a good mid-way for enough of my friends and peers.
I am a fan of Signal but mine has been broken for like six months now. Anyone else getting this bug? I try to open it and get an error 'Couldn't open Signal, send a bug report to troubleshoot' etc. I sent the bug report to the developer team at the address provided but they couldn't really figure it out. I've tried deleting the app and reinstalling and all that to no avail.
As many others have said already, I loved signal until they ended sms support. I'm not going to have two separate messaging apps. Especially when 90% of people I know won't use signal and don't care about encryption. I just use the Google messaging app, which in my opinion is way better than Samsung's app. I enjoy rcs support and as I understand it, there is still e2e encryption.
That being said, if I'm doing anything illegal I'm going to force the people to use signal or something safer. As much as I love Google, I'm not going to trust them to keep me out of jail. Nudes would probably be the most sensitive thing I'd trust Google with.
Oh and I dont mind the Facebook messenger app if you use the secure mode. Hate Facebook though, just the messenger is ok.
Been using Signal for a very long time now, with my SO, parents, brother and a few friends. But it's inevitable to also use WhatsApp side by side. Selling/Buying on the local marketplace? WhatsApp. Workplace colleagues? WhatsApp. That group of buddies where only 1 or 2 converted to Signal? WhatsApp.
I've been using Signal for over 10 years now, since it was TextSecure. Never looked back.
I would just use XMPP, but it's not easy to use for people without technical knowledge.
I think Signal is trying too hard to be secure, and they are missing a lot of convenience features.
For example, you can't migrate from Android to iOS or vice versa. You'll lose all your messages and groups.
Or it's really hard to export all the photos someone sent you. I get that my iCloud library isn't as secure, but I really want to make sure I don't lose those photos if I lose my device. The photos aren't that sensitive.
The security notifications are also well-meaning, but hard to make sense of. You sometimes get notifications for changed security numbers, when people change their phone, sometimes folks show up twice in groups, etc. It's all a bit hard to understand and difficult to use.
And finally, it seems that messages are sometimes delivered a bit unreliably or with a long delay.