The file `$HOME/.profile` is used by a number of shells, including bash, sh, dash, and possibly others.

From the bash man page:

> When bash is invoked as an interactive login shell, ... it first reads and executes commands from the file /etc/profile, if that file exists. After reading that file, it looks for ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login, and ~/.profile, in that order, and reads and executes commands from the first one that exists and is readable.

csh and tcsh explicitly don't look at `~/.profile` but those shells are kinda antiquated.