Deep down, I hope this has nothing to do with a "marketing decision", and is just a hail-mark "Fuck, look at all the people fleeing WhatsApp since we announced the privacy changes? We have to do _something!_ What're we gonna tell Zuck?".

(Sadly, in spite of the noise in my personal social bubble, I suspect the number of users departing WhatsApp over that is so small it's completely indiscernible from regular churn...)

Judging from what I'm seeing personally, it would be hard to explain the sudden increase in the number of my contacts that installed Signal as regular churn. Though I acknowledge that the choice of my contacts is probably not representative of the whole population.