So one of the key differences was that when I loaded Telegram, I had a list of contacts ready to go, people who already had Telegram. I sent a message to a few people via iMessage using the "Invite Friends" menu item.

When I tried Signal, I saw an empty list and had to add numbers / find people myself. Not much in the way of onboarding IMO. My complaints are likely met with "duh, that's how it works, idiot", I believe that's just how Signal is designed as it's a privacy-centric app.

I'm just looking for a non-Facebook WhatsApp alternative, rather than a complete focus on privacy and E2E messaging, so I don't think Signal is "bad" but it's not what I'm looking for. I just want Facebook out of my life and its grubby hands off my data.

I installed both Telegram and Signal yesterday and both showed me a list of my contacts on their platforms. The list was actually substantially longer on Signal, in fact.

There were some permissions settings that I didn't pay close attention to, but maybe you didn't allow the app to control your calls or see your contacts on setup?

> When I tried Signal, I saw an empty list and had to add numbers / find people myself

That's not how it works; Signal directly gives you the list of contacts that are available, just like Whatsapp or Telegram.

The most likely is that you had an empty list because no-one in your contacts have it.

Where do you live? It's interesting to hear about an area where most people are running signal.

Here in the UK WhatsApp and messenger are the only ones that most people I know are using.

I'm pretty sure it's not my area, I just tell everyone I converse with to use signal and most of them do.

When I switched family on Xmas day 2019 it took hours for contact data to sync so that it was possible to message each other. WhatsApp setup took seconds to propagate. Luckily I was eventually able to persuade it was worth waiting for signal.

I saw someone with this issue on HN the other day. Though I've never had that myself, you can apparently pull down to refresh the contact list within Signal after tapping the "write new message" (white pen on blue background) icon.