I’m the developer of a small messenger, so take this with that in mind. The honest answer from the other side of the fence: there is no trick. A messenger only works when the other person has it, and most people won’t install a second app for one contact.
What has worked for me, a little: not asking people to “switch”, but to keep one conversation somewhere else. One person, one thread (a partner, a sibling, a friend you talk to daily). If that one thread is pleasant, the second one follows on its own. Asking a whole family group to move at once fails almost every time.
The other thing that helps is removing the sign-up cost entirely. My app (FlickerTalk, Android, AGPL) has no account and no phone number: you open it, show a QR code, done. Chat history stays on the phone, and if the other phone is off a mailbox holds the message end-to-end encrypted until it’s picked up; we can’t read it. Limits, since this is a privacy community: it’s 1:1 and small circles only, no large groups; on a direct connection the other phone can see your public IP; and Google delivers the wake-up notification (not the content). Not a WhatsApp replacement for a 60-person family group. For the one person you actually want to talk to privately, it’s enough.
I’m the developer of a small messenger, so take this with that in mind. The honest answer from the other side of the fence: there is no trick. A messenger only works when the other person has it, and most people won’t install a second app for one contact.
What has worked for me, a little: not asking people to “switch”, but to keep one conversation somewhere else. One person, one thread (a partner, a sibling, a friend you talk to daily). If that one thread is pleasant, the second one follows on its own. Asking a whole family group to move at once fails almost every time.
The other thing that helps is removing the sign-up cost entirely. My app (FlickerTalk, Android, AGPL) has no account and no phone number: you open it, show a QR code, done. Chat history stays on the phone, and if the other phone is off a mailbox holds the message end-to-end encrypted until it’s picked up; we can’t read it. Limits, since this is a privacy community: it’s 1:1 and small circles only, no large groups; on a direct connection the other phone can see your public IP; and Google delivers the wake-up notification (not the content). Not a WhatsApp replacement for a 60-person family group. For the one person you actually want to talk to privately, it’s enough.