Here's a thing I don't understand - why is everyone obsessed with copycatting?
By aiming for feature parity you, as a business or service, are letting a competitor dictate your roadmap. And what's worse, with features they have already shipped.
As a general case, I think you make a good point. But in this particular case, WhatsApp really is pretty perfect as far as messaging goes - the only issue is the terms of service, so it makes sense for Signal to have the same features, but without horrible ToS.
That's a scary thought. You're effectively saying that small-screen, asynchronous, human-to-human text based communications have been solved, with no further improvement possible.
I think partially almost every business has their roadmap influenced by what their competitors do. Note that WhatsApp/Instagram/Facebook didn't come up with Stories either.
That said, it'll never be just feature parity - Signal's moat compared to Facebook products will always be better privacy.
Here's a thing I don't understand - why is everyone obsessed with copycatting?
By aiming for feature parity you, as a business or service, are letting a competitor dictate your roadmap. And what's worse, with features they have already shipped.