> but metadata does get turned over in subpoenas.

A subpoena is another form of security, at least as far as a free society is concerned.

The question was: do we have any reason to believe it is more secure than weChat? I say yes.

Yeah I don't disagree, definitely the answer is yes - I was just adding some extra detail.

Fair enough, good points

whatsapp backups on google are not encrypted. anyone wanting to read the messages just has to ask google.

That is if you allow backups, and considering 99.9% of messages are unimportant faff, there's not much reason to.

I changed phones a while ago. Lost hundreds of thousands of messages. Didn't inconvenience me in the least. Anything important is on less ephemeral services like email or backed up manually.