Signal UI is mediocre. I want it to succeed, but both WhatsApp and Telegram are simply a lot more convenient to use.
WA and Telegram have a pure web client when you want to quickly have access to your chats without installing anything.
If you decide to install the standalone clients you'll find that Telegram is vastly ahead of Signal. You can change the spellchecking language and add dictionaries, you have a lot more options for formatting messages (code blocks etc...), it deals better with multimedia content like inline audio, it's a lot faster and less resource-hungry.
The only reason I still bother with Signal is because I know that, in theory, from a security perspective it's the better of the three. In practice it's by far the worst though.
This post sums up my feelings exactly. Signal is objectively ugly and has quite a lot of display bugs that there's really no excuse for in a messaging app. Telegram is (subjectively) beautiful - they really nailed the UI - and is by far the nicest to use of the three. WhatsApp is both hideous and horrible to use. I wish I could drag people away from it, but even having had my WhatsApp status set to "WhatsApp is spyware, message me on Telegram" for the past 3 years, not a single person has switched.
You're right, I've come back 5 days later to correct myself. I've been using Signal a lot more in the last week and actually nearly all the things that I would say justified the use of the word "objectively" are now fixed. They were all bugs, rather than design choices - things like inconsistent padding, and a tiny unpadded input window when typing long messages. It's actually pretty nice now.
WA and Telegram have a pure web client when you want to quickly have access to your chats without installing anything.
If you decide to install the standalone clients you'll find that Telegram is vastly ahead of Signal. You can change the spellchecking language and add dictionaries, you have a lot more options for formatting messages (code blocks etc...), it deals better with multimedia content like inline audio, it's a lot faster and less resource-hungry.
The only reason I still bother with Signal is because I know that, in theory, from a security perspective it's the better of the three. In practice it's by far the worst though.