WhatsApp is not perfect and certainly its code not being available for inspection is one of its flaws. However, it did bring security to the masses. I mean I am pretty sure the security it offers is enough for 95% of people. I would not use it for sending documents stolen from NSA, but for the rest of cases - it gets you covered. Security very often need to be balanced with convenience - with WhatsApp you get immense boost of protection without sacrificing much convenience. One could argue, that you could get better security with Signal - true, but first you'd need to convince all your family and friends to install it.

You also get encryption while your traffic looks just the same as everybody else’s. You don’t stand out like when you’re using Tor.

> You also get encryption while your traffic looks just the same as everybody else’s. You don’t stand out like when you’re using Tor.

Detecting WhatsApp usage is trivial. With Tor you can use pluggable transports to obfuscate your traffic.

But everyone and their cousin is a WhatsApp user, so using Whatsapp isn't suspicious.

So the solution is to grow Tor usage, or use bridges with pluggable transports.

No, using Whatsapp is a more efficient solution.