[HN Gopher] Removing SMS support from Signal Android (soon)
___________________________________________________________________
Removing SMS support from Signal Android (soon)
Author : Aissen
Score : 452 points
Date : 2022-10-12 16:08 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (signal.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (signal.org)
| inktype wrote:
| bragr wrote:
| Personally I never used Signal to send SMS and the possibility to
| fat finger the mode and send SMS instead was always a downside to
| me.
| Melatonic wrote:
| same
| endorphine wrote:
| Same here. I would not like for SMS to be mixed with my secure
| messages. I see this as a feature.
| Haemm0r wrote:
| The feature is the reason why it is easy to convert older people
| to use signal: You can keep your SMS workflow and have only one
| messaging app...
| CraftThatBlock wrote:
| This was one of the core features of using Signal for me. I wish
| they had implemented RCS and more features for SMS instead of
| removing it. I'm very disappointed with this feature.
|
| As a side note, I'm on the beta, and recently got "Signal
| Stories". This immensely annoyed me, and had to dig through to
| remove it (since it wasn't obvious). After the whole crypto thing
| and these decisions, it might be time to find another secure
| messaging app.
| gophin wrote:
| Are there any Android apps that support RCS other than Google
| Messages?
|
| I'm not sure exactly what is exposed in the framework API
| regarding RCS, and how it compares to the relative ease of
| receiving SMS and MMS messages.
| [deleted]
| pitaj wrote:
| They can't implement RCS, because there's no Android API for
| it.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| > We have now reached the point where SMS support no longer makes
| sense.
|
| What a laughable, out of touch suggestion. Did anyone at Signal
| actually ask the community what they thought about removing SMS
| support?
|
| Seriously, this decision is going to kill Signal app. It will
| halt the majority of growth as evangelists such as myself can no
| longer recommend it with a straight face. Signal is supposed to
| enhance the messaging experience, not replace it.
|
| I think Signal thinks they can take on the WhatsApp market,
| completely misunderstanding why that market didn't choose Signal
| in the first place. The products serve two completely different
| user needs, and are highly geographically segregated.
|
| What the heck is going on over at Signal Foundation?
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| Maybe their target market us not US that hasn't moved away from
| sms. I don't know the numbers but this could be an argument for
| themselves.
| mfuzzey wrote:
| Do people still use SMS?
|
| I haven't for many years, for sending (except for one time I
| wanted to test a modem driver SMS function).
|
| I regularly use Signal, Telegram and Google chat and used to use
| whatsapp until it was banned by my employer but the only time I
| ever use SMS is to receive automatic authorisation SMSs
| toastedwedge wrote:
| My workplace uses SMS. There are also many people in the US who
| do not carry smartphones, either. So at least here it is still
| very much in use.
| PenguinCoder wrote:
| > supports plain SMS/MMS to function as a unified messenger
|
| So this is now a lie. This decision absolutely goes against how
| users actually use the software. Tone deaf and insulting. More
| cases of Signal saying "we know better than you. You're using it
| wrong. Do what we say.
| mdaniel wrote:
| It was a lie before, too, as their MMS support is a raging
| dumpster fire and when their code pukes, it just silently eats
| the error message, leaving one to wonder why the message wasn't
| sent (or received!)
|
| This announcement totally squares with my experience trying
| multiple times to fix their MMS implementation. It was at that
| point that I stopped using Signal for SMS, since I knew it
| wasn't important to them
| codethief wrote:
| Many people have commented on why this is devastating news
| regarding future adoption of Signal. But there is a second part
| to the announcement that hasn't received a lot of attention yet:
|
| > If you want to keep them, you'll also need to export your SMS
| messages from Signal into that new app.
|
| So that means my text messages will be removed from my Signal
| chat history? Put differently, considering how many of my
| contacts over the years switched between using Signal, not using
| Signal, and using Signal again, this means that parts of my
| conversations will suddenly be gone and conversations might
| suddenly be incoherent?
|
| I have trouble expressing just _how_ angry I am about this
| change.
| xingped wrote:
| It's already bad enough that I would never be able to convince
| family today to switch to Signal due to the removal of SMS
| history importing and now you want to remove the ability to
| send/receive SMS via Signal too? Good job guaranteeing you just
| cratered any additional growth of your userbase.
|
| I've always wondered how companies become so blind to what their
| userbase actually wants and needs (looking at the majority of the
| rest of the comments here that seem to echo my sentiment as well)
| that we end up in situations like this. I guess "you die a hero
| or live long enough to become the villain" applies to apps too.
| chrisfosterelli wrote:
| One bright side of this is that Android's (Google's) Messages app
| has been pushing hard on RCS (the intended successor to SMS) and
| by default now does auto-upgrade to end-to-end encryption with
| any other messages users. If you're using signal, you don't get
| that auto-upgrade, so for conversations with anyone using a
| "default" google phone setup you were actually getting less net
| security on your comms compared to using the default SMS app.
|
| I noticed this when I got a new phone and hadn't yet enabled
| signal to handle SMS and opted to stay with it because of how
| many conversations I had that were auto-E2E, where before they'd
| just been text messages. I still prefer signal for the people I
| know use it though. In short you can still use the signal
| (protocol at least) on messages, so I can understand why signal
| would do this.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Does AOSP Messaging do RCS? I am assuming not.
| h4waii wrote:
| No, AOSP Messages does not support RCS.
|
| It seems Google is going to let it die to move people to
| Google Messages.
| seneca wrote:
| Given that it's Google, are you sure they do true end to end
| encryption. I would be shocked if they don't have access to the
| contents of your messages.
| londons_explore wrote:
| They do the same as Whatsapp. Ie. it is proper end to end
| encryption. Encryption keys can be verified manually. But
| there is no way to know the app doesn't secretly send the key
| to the server (although a disassembly of the app could catch
| them red handed if this were the case).
|
| The big loophole is:
|
| * The messages can be forced to be sent unencrypted if one or
| other end of the connection doesn't have data connectivity.
|
| * The conversation backups are cleartext, so if either you or
| the other party has backups enabled, the e2e encryption is
| kinda pointless.
| andwaal wrote:
| If anyone want a privacy focused all in one app I cannot
| recommend Beeper enough. I have been using it as my main app for
| SMS, messenger, WhatsApp and LinkedIn for half a year now and
| have only positiv experiences. Some bugs still, but amazing
| support and continuous fixes.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25848278
| anigbrowl wrote:
| This decision is asinine and should be reversed.
|
| I have been using Signal for years. The ability to make it your
| default SMS client is one of the major drivers of adoption; if
| someone agrees that privacy matters, and you can point out that
| the transition to Signal is frictionless and offers all the same
| features as their existing SMS app, then installing, trying, and
| liking it become easy. I've brought hundreds of people onto
| Signal, and being able to give a simple 'yes' to questions about
| whether it handles SMS is almost always what 'seals the deal.'
|
| Signal is saying that mixing non-secure and secure messages in
| the same app might cause confusion and security fails, even
| though the difference is very clearly signalled.
|
| Their argument is bullshit. If users go back to separate
| messaging apps, chances are those apps will look much the same as
| Signal (which itself copies the look and feel of the iOS
| messaging app quite closely). There's a much bigger security risk
| from users forgetting that they are not in Signal and carelessly
| pasting & sending information that was supposed to be private or
| disappear.
|
| Additionally, it creates a bunch of new security risks, allowing
| third parties who gain possession of a phone to distinguish
| between conversations that happen over SMS and conversations that
| happen over Signal, drawing inferences that there is something
| untoward about the latter.
|
| I cannot understand the constantly changing, er, signals coming
| from Signal. One month they want to be just like every other
| messaging app and they're pushing features that hardly anyone has
| asked for, like sticker packs or crypto payments. Other times
| they say users are too paranoid for not wanting to expose their
| phone number/pop up messages about who in the user's address book
| has installed Signal. Today they're saying that wanting to use
| Signal for all your messaging needs is somehow anti-privacy.
|
| I find myself wishing it cost money or a small annual
| subscription so I could vote with my $, because the Signal
| foundation seems to spend more effort on telling its users that
| they're wrong than on listening to them.
| velosol wrote:
| The blog post is... lacking but they have some half-decent
| technical reasons at [1] if you're interested.
|
| [1]: https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-blog-removing-
| sms...
| rvz wrote:
| Great for security on Android.
|
| > The most important reason for us to remove SMS support from
| Android is that plaintext SMS messages are inherently insecure.
| They leak sensitive metadata and place your data in the hands of
| telecommunications companies. With privacy and security at the
| heart of what we do, letting a deeply insecure messaging protocol
| have a place in the Signal interface is inconsistent with our
| values and with what people expect when they open Signal.
|
| They do have a point though. SMS is insecure, unencrypted and
| leaks highly sensitive metadata anyway and it needed to go from
| Signal. You already have the system SMS app for this to use.
| _emacsomancer_ wrote:
| The Molly[1] fork of Signal already removed SMS support.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/mollyim/mollyim-android
| S0und wrote:
| Why do I have the feeling that every person who complains about
| this as something of a deal breaker are from the US? This is so
| weird, the rest of the world moved on SMS 10-15 years ago.
| Flimm wrote:
| But aren't iPhones popular in the US? Signal on iOS never
| supported SMS to begin with.
| nilespotter wrote:
| To what? Facebook owned WhatsApp?
| throw10920 wrote:
| > The most important reason for us to remove SMS support from
| Android is that plaintext SMS messages are inherently insecure.
|
| This is an _incredibly_ bad reason to remove SMS support. Sure,
| the fact "plaintext SMS messages are inherently insecure" is
| true, but the implication is _not_ "remove SMS support".
|
| Most people are motivated strongly by convenience. Signal is
| convenient because of its use as a drop-in replacement for your
| existing SMS client, so people use it, which increases their
| personal privacy and security. Removing SMS support will
| _directly and substantially_ reduce Signal usage, and therefore
| both of those things.
|
| The solution to "SMS is insecure" is pretty obviously "make a
| warning message telling users that", _which also solves their
| second problem_ :
|
| > This brings us to our second reason: we've heard repeatedly
| from people who've been hit with high messaging fees after
| assuming that the SMS messages they were sending were Signal
| messages, only to find out that they were using SMS, and being
| charged by their telecom provider.
|
| ...and the third problem:
|
| > Third, there are serious UX and design implications to inviting
| SMS messages to live beside Signal messages in the Signal
| interface.
|
| This is _ridiculous_. You 're not making a paid product where if
| your app doesn't look perfect people won't use it - you're making
| a messaging app, and slightly ugly workarounds are perfectly OK.
|
| > It's important that people don't mistake SMS messages sent or
| received via the Signal interface as secure and private when in
| fact they are not.
|
| THEN DESIGN THE APP THAT WAY. IT'S NOT THAT HARD.
|
| This post is a travesty, and the reasoning contained inside is
| _completely insane_.
|
| Wikipedia says that Moxie is still on the Signal Board of
| Directors, but I find it hard to believe that he would let
| something this crazy go through.
| justinpombrio wrote:
| They already tried putting a small light grey "unlocked" icon
| on messages. If that doesn't scream "SMS", nothing does. All
| available options exhausted. Time to throw in the towel.
| codethief wrote:
| > Wikipedia says that Moxie is still on the Signal Board of
| Directors, but I find it hard to believe that he would let
| something this crazy go through.
|
| IIRC I read (some years ago) that Moxie wasn't really convinced
| that SMS support should stay in Signal-Android, either.
| velosol wrote:
| He was definitely against the encryption-over-SMS feature of
| TextSecure as Android and smartphones more broadly grew in
| marketshare. He also wrote the blog post on how it doesn't
| matter if you have multiple messaging apps (or federation
| between them) because the notification area of your phone is
| the modern federation engine. I may be paraphrasing a bit
| heavily but the post is at [1].
|
| I agree I can see him being at least OK with removing SMS but
| it seems at odds with what I felt was his overall view of
| "get the most people the most security we can" and by
| extension increasing the number of people using secure
| messaging services to normalize it so simply using encryption
| isn't seen as an outlier. The latter part is closer to moot
| now more than ever before with WhatsApp being E2E by default
| and Apple having huge marketshare in some markets with
| iMessage.
|
| [1]: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
| miduil wrote:
| > We have now reached the point where SMS support no longer makes
| sense
|
| That is hard to swallow, being able to quickly send a message
| through SMS to the same receiver in emergency situations* was
| quite handy.
|
| *like when you're at a protest and the tower is overloaded, or
| you're on a remote location and you see that the Signal message
| doesn't get through because of lack of 3G/LTE connectivity.
| thesis wrote:
| Just a guess, but this likely has something to do with 10DLC
| and/or Toll Free Verification and all of the complexities that
| are being pushed by the carriers for users to register their
| numbers and even pay to use if you want to use 10DLC.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I believe "SMS support" just means Signal can act as your SMS
| client using your existing modem & SIM card (something
| possible on Android), so from the carrier and phone network
| perspective there is no difference between this and using the
| stock SMS app.
| pluc wrote:
| The integration is Abysmal with a capital A.
|
| If I get a SMS in Signal and I reply with Signal, it sends a
| Signal message - not a SMS.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Cue the "actually we didn't mean that" follow-up to this.
| teuobk wrote:
| Thing is, now they've shown a willingness to make this change,
| so from here on out people will be worried about them trying it
| again at some point.
|
| The only way they have a hope of putting this genie back in the
| bottle is to provide a loud, strong, clear mea culpa, stating
| that they were categorically wrong to propose dropping SMS
| support, plus a strong promise that they will continue
| supporting SMS for the life of the product. Maybe something
| along the lines of, "if we ever propose dropping SMS
| integration again, you can consider that a warrant-canary type
| of alert".
| johnchristopher wrote:
| > "if we ever propose dropping SMS integration again, you can
| consider that a warrant-canary type of alert".
|
| Dropping an insecure messaging system is far from being a
| warrant-canary type of alert, though.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| I use a default SMS application for SMS anyway, it changes
| nothing for me.
|
| Now, if signal could get rid of the phone number requirement...
| lettergram wrote:
| First, I detest this. As an iOS user it's annoying to have
| another messaging app and I'm sure many android users will stop
| using signal. One day I converted my whole extended family to
| signal by just installing signal on their android phones. Done,
| no change for them in their user flow.
|
| That said, I also want to use signal without my phone. Things
| like usernames would be great.
|
| That said, part of me thinks that's an engineering problem, not a
| UX problem. Why are engineering problems being pushed into the UX
| requirements?
| plsbenice34 wrote:
| Terrible, made my stomach sink. I got non-technical people to use
| Signal. They were happy for years but now they are going to be
| very upset by this and the problems will flow down to me.
| tasubotadas wrote:
| Who even use sms these days?
| aidenn0 wrote:
| My teenage daughters exclusively use iMessage which uses SMS
| for anyone without an iPhone.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| In the US? Old people (so, probably some members of your
| family), spammers, and ~100% of businesses that communicate via
| any kind of IM service instead of or in addition to phone and
| email.
| dodgerdan wrote:
| SMS and security are simply incompatible. And either you fall
| into one of two groups 1. You know sms is insecure and this is a
| insecure method of communication 2. You think sms sent via signal
| is secure because it's a "secure messenger". It's clear that HN
| users will fall into group 1, but the vast majority of people
| would fall into group 2. So for me this is an overall security
| win.
| lucideer wrote:
| Most of those in group 2 are not using Signal.
|
| Beyond that, the minority in group 2 that use Signal are most
| likely to be using default settings. SMS handling is a non-
| default option. So you're left with a very tiny minority.
|
| Group 1 makes up the vast vast majority of the userbase (and
| most likely 100% of the evangelising userbase)
|
| (Also: if things are unclear for non-technical users, that's a
| UX challenge, not an absolute)
| monetus wrote:
| The network effect of signal not being a hub for SMS and e2ee
| will mean less people using e2ee, IMO.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Yeah, I think this is more likely to be the case. People who
| don't understand encryption but used Signal as their SMS
| messenger were at least getting opportunistic encryption with
| any of their contacts who were using Signal. Now they'll
| probably just uninstall it (like every iOS Signal user I've
| ever known).
| dodgerdan wrote:
| A few years ago I would have agreed, but right now Signal is
| doing just fine taking users from WhatsApp (FB TOS changes +
| ads + social group analysis)and Telegram (sketchy non-e2ee,
| Russian owned, based in the middle east).
| monetus wrote:
| Weird, I am in the southeast U.S. and telegram is eating
| signal's lunch in the social networks here.
| dodgerdan wrote:
| It's a big pie, they're also fairly different. And to be
| honest it's only a matter of time before Telegram has a
| (public) security incident that drives much more people
| to E2EE messaging.
| monetus wrote:
| I'm curious how long it will be before that public
| incident - they rolled their own cryptography right? With
| that, I would imagine that if it hasn't been pwned yet,
| then there would be a disproportionate amount of people
| trying to break it.
| stirfish wrote:
| What people are concerned enough about a Terms of Service
| change to leave Whatsapp, but struggle with the unlocked
| icon next to "Insecure SMS" in Signal?
|
| What people know that Telegram isn't end-to-end encrypted,
| but think SMS is?
| arise wrote:
| Signal has clear UI cues and redundant messaging telling you
| what actions are insecure.
| dodgerdan wrote:
| Google did a security research around ssl and a crazy
| percentage of people think the lock icon is actually a
| handbag icon. The rest of the research highlighted how most
| users aren't able to make informed choices, most people lack
| the technical basis to make those choices.
| Xelynega wrote:
| So what's the overlap of "people who care enough about e2ee
| for it to matter whether a message they're sending is
| encrypted or not" and "people who think the lock icon next
| to the send button in the encrypted messenging app they
| downloaded is a handbag"
|
| I'm willing to wager it's not as big as you're trying to
| imply.
| KerryJones wrote:
| ... and there's the reason I will likely stop using Signal?
|
| Signal was always one of those "win-win" apps, get more security
| when it's available and I don't have to worry about adding to the
| giant bucket of messaging apps.
|
| They were a paragon of putting the user first and I was a strong
| supporter... but now... Why not Telegram? Or anything else?
|
| I don't _need_ the security, it was nice-to-have. Having to
| switch between Signal and other apps is a heavy amount of
| friction.
| kelvie wrote:
| "why not anything else" is mostly (for me) because they are a
| non-profit, and unlikely to be bought by or turn into a
| megacorp, similar to how wikipedia runs, although they're
| certainly a mega-something at this point, it still feels a lot
| less evil than a facebook or a google.
| jacooper wrote:
| Correction, you dont need the privacy*
|
| Telegram is absolutely the worst when it comes to privacy, it
| has access to everything you do and say.
|
| If you want a master app, have a lot at matrix.org with
| bridges.
| zaik wrote:
| Bridges break end to end encryption.
| jacooper wrote:
| Correct. But in the case of matrix you can host them in
| your home if you want, or maybe on your phone(they are
| still checking if this is possible or not)
| zaik wrote:
| Maybe I am capable to do so (although I already host an
| XMPP server, so Matrix is rather redudant) but expecting
| everyone to self-host is obviously not realistic.
|
| Currently Matrix is operating in a way that larger
| instances aggregate private messages from bridges in
| plain text. Those messages would have stayed encrypted
| and secure if people didn't use Matrix.
| NayamAmarshe wrote:
| > Telegram is absolutely the worst when it comes to privacy
|
| Really? Telegram never said that they don't store your
| messages on cloud, they said that they do not sell your data
| or share it with third parties for profit.
|
| Telegram has received a very good score on PrivacySpy
| (https://privacyspy.org), in fact better than any other
| messaging app. Telegram is good from a regular privacy
| perspective unless your threat model involves fearing cloud
| convenience.
|
| Even FBI's leaked documents confirmed that Telegram does not
| ever share user data easily.
| [Source](https://www.securitynewspaper.com/2021/11/30/leaked-
| fbi-docu...)
|
| If you're someone who requires spy-level opsec, you should be
| using Threema, Session or Speek. Maybe even a self-hosted
| XMPP instance.
|
| Telegram is good at what it does and it states it very
| clearly. It does not lie about the things it does and it is
| open source. All while not selling user data, not
| manipulating user behavior through algorithms or censoring
| media by calculating hashes and providing what's arguably the
| most feature rich messaging app on the planet for free with a
| verifiable source code.
|
| Also, be careful with what you're suggesting. Not only have
| Matrix servers been hacked twice but matrix also leaks
| metadata. If you're seriously suggesting true anonymity (not
| consenting privacy) then Matrix is not a good option.
| kitkat_new wrote:
| > Really?
|
| Yes, really. You don't even argue against it.
|
| > pp. Telegram is good from a regular privacy perspective
| unless your threat model involves fearing cloud
| convenience.
|
| Telegram stores almost everything online without E2EE.
|
| > Not only have Matrix servers been hacked twice but matrix
| also leaks metadata.
|
| Even Signal leaks meta data.
|
| > If you're seriously suggesting true anonymity (not
| consenting privacy) then Matrix is not a good option.
|
| Out of Matrix, Telegram and Signal, Matrix is the best
| option. It is the only one not making you share your phone
| number giving you anonymity up to your IP address.
| NayamAmarshe wrote:
| > Yes, really. You don't even argue against
|
| and yet I just did. Can we please stop confusing privacy
| and anonymity?
|
| Your claims about Telegram being bad for privacy are
| baseless. Your concerns about messages is valid but it in
| no way compromises privacy because:
|
| 1. No telegram employee can read any messages. They use
| distributed key generation to encrypt data on servers
| which means no single server has access to decryption
| keys and all the servers are in different jurisdictions.
|
| 2. They do not sell message content data. If you can
| prove it, you can go ahead with a lawsuit and win a hefty
| sum.
|
| 3. They do not compromise security. They do not use E2EE
| by default. Their threat model and vision for a messaging
| platform is different than yours.
|
| 4. Telegram has never given message content for a court
| order. As mentioned in the privacy policy, they give out
| only the phone number and IP Address only in case of
| terrorism or child abuse and only when there's a court
| order from a country of a higher democratic index.
|
| 5. If you truly believe Telegram is bad for privacy even
| after all the evidence from FBI itself and PrivacySpy
| giving it a higher score than Signal, then please go
| ahead and sue them because surely they can't have a good
| privacy policy and bad privacy at the same time.
| jhasse wrote:
| That's false: Telegram doesn't have access to secret chats.
| jacooper wrote:
| Which no body uses and are extremely limited on purpose.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Don't they store the decryption keys?
| orangepurple wrote:
| Server does not store the keys for secret chats
| barbazoo wrote:
| I see, that's the 1 on 1 chats that are explicitly
| configured as secret. So by default for 1 on 1 chats and
| for all group chats the keys are stored on the server.
| ComodoHacker wrote:
| It's end-to-end, clients store the keys.
| kitkat_new wrote:
| it's not false
|
| In reality almost no one bothers with secret chats (no
| syncing between devices, no backup and no group chat
| possible). Instead everything is stored online without E2E
| encryption, i.e. perfectly readable for the service
| provider.
| nilespotter wrote:
| > ... and there's the reason I will likely stop using Signal?
|
| > Signal was always one of those "win-win" apps, get more
| security when it's available and I don't have to worry about
| adding to the giant bucket of messaging apps.
|
| Same here. I see no reason to continue using Signal if they do
| this.
| Thorentis wrote:
| Which E2E encrypted app that matches Signals security will
| you be switching to instead?
| Snitch-Thursday wrote:
| I agree. I picked signal over deltachat to replace group MMS
| threads because it was less startup friction than getting
| everyone to login to their email accounts on a mobile account
| since they got SMSes for free.
|
| Now? Delta chat is looking plenty fine for doing private group
| chats.
|
| My threat model is not nation states watching my metadata, I
| have horrible opsec for that. My threat model is discord and
| whatsapp etc. tossing me and my chat groups off a cliff at
| their sole discretion.
|
| Signal gave me control over chat groups, and integrated with
| SMS as a bonus. Now? If I'm gonna have to deal with a separate
| SMS app anyways, I might as well use delta chat where I know my
| messages are automatically backed up in my email account.
| h4waii wrote:
| It was obvious this was going to happen when they refused to
| implement RCS.
|
| So instead of working on RCS, we got mobilecoin, stickers, gif
| search, and now yank out legacy SMS support so more "features"
| can be developed?
|
| As an early adopter of TextSecure, through CyanogenMod
| integration, to Signal and everything in between, I have the
| t-shirts and all -- I am done with Signal.
| greysonp wrote:
| There is no public RCS API on Android. Only OEMs can create RCS
| clients.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| They didn't refuse to implement RCS; Android _doesn 't provide
| APIs for RCS_.
| DavidVoid wrote:
| Well that's probably going to suck for everyone who convinced
| their non-technical parents to switch to Signal.
|
| _" My bad, this easy SMS client I got you to switch to is going
| to stop supporting SMS, and we're going to have to export all
| your old texts or they'll be gone forever."_
| mcamaj wrote:
| I started using Signal in 2013, I am afraid that I will be forced
| to stop using it in 2023. Please change your direction!!! No one
| wants to use yet another messaging app. Just adding my voice in
| case some at Signal is reading these.
| ea550ff70a wrote:
| This sucks. I get the decision from a development pov but from a
| user pov it's awful. Having 2 apps for texting is not great and
| ultimately only creates friction.
| mitchellpkt wrote:
| This seems to be a "bug or feature" situation where the answer
| depends on the user profile. The ability for messages to leave
| the Signal app in plaintext SMS is a "feature" for users whose
| top needs include a single-app UX, and a "bug" for users whose
| top needs include an app that is foolproof E2EE (so users don't
| have to consciously pay attention to which conversations are
| Signal-native vs SMS). Maybe SMS support could be an opt-in
| feature, to accommodate both groups?
|
| From my perspective (and I am NOT speaking for anybody else) this
| is an improvement. I already have multiple messaging apps
| installed, and when I click send on a Signal message I expect it
| to go end-to-end encrypted or not go at all. But I am not the
| only user profile.
| brenns10 wrote:
| I agree with your perspective - for me Signal is yet another
| (more secure) internet messaging app on my phone, and I'm happy
| that way. I wouldn't want it to have anything to do with SMS,
| no more than I want FB messenger to start handling my SMS
| (which it does offer at installation time). Plus, having used
| Signal since the TextSecure days, I saw the SMS feature the
| same way the announcement seems to characterize it: as old tech
| debt waiting to get dropped. After all, I don't think Signal
| for iOS ever had SMS ability.
|
| And to your main point, I hadn't even considered before seeing
| this comment thread that anybody felt differently, let alone so
| strongly. Really illustrates how differently people think about
| the same app.
| tomcam wrote:
| None of the naysayers has addressed your point (and those of
| TFA) rationally, as you have.
| Xelynega wrote:
| UX elements already exist to tell the user whether they're
| encrypted or not, removing the ability to send unencrypted
| shrinks their userbase while ensuring the apps adoption
| plummets.
|
| There, points addressed. Can we move on?
| tomcam wrote:
| No, and thank you for asking. No one addressed what to me
| is the main point, which is that Signal is handling
| complaints from people who were being charged for SMS and
| didn't know that would happen. People these days are often
| not at all civil when dealing with support issues like
| this, and for that reason alone I could imagine I'd drop
| SMS.
| chungy wrote:
| > Maybe SMS support could be an opt-in feature, to accommodate
| both groups?
|
| It already is opt-in.
| leni536 wrote:
| Never used signal, so I don't know it's UI language. Couldn't
| they just put a red unlocked padlock symbol next to the send
| button, if the sent message is going to be over an insecure
| channel (SMS in this case)? Maybe they already had something
| like this, so sorry for my ignorance.
| monetus wrote:
| The SMS symbol was a dull grey circle with a paper plane and
| an open lock, while the encrypted message was a big blue
| circle with a lock in the center. You had to choose
| purposefully with a long press on that button to use SMS if
| that is what you wanted, and the recipient was using signal.
| [deleted]
| Mystery-Machine wrote:
| Terrible decision. They have a nice blue branding. What they
| could've done instead is to show SMS messages as green bubbles
| and then we'd have: green bubbles / blue bubbles, just like with
| iMessage, except this time it works both on iOS _and_ Android.
| This might win them over more and more users.
|
| If they manage to make the UI and feature set as complete as
| iMessage, it would convince people to switch to Signal much much
| faster than Google's pity RCS bashing of Apple.
| captainmuon wrote:
| I get their reasoning that SMS is insecure and you don't want to
| accidentially send an SMS. I use Signal mostly for "confidential"
| things, but every now and then for the occasional person who
| contacts me there. So Signal is my "secure" app, Whatsapp my
| "family" app, and so on. It's really weird if a family member
| shows up in my secure activism chat app.
|
| It would make more sense if there was one codebase that supported
| all apps. And then I could make a "silo" for each use case. I
| would make one icon for activism, one for work, one for friends.
| The first one must use E2EE, the second one must use my company's
| Rocketchat, etc..
|
| It's a pity Signal doesn't allow third party clients. I really
| hope somebody makes a rouge multi protocoll app, like Pidgin used
| to be. I bet a dedicated small team could make it in a year.
| h4waii wrote:
| Beeper is working on it. We'll see how it turns out.
|
| Matrix Bridges might also be a good option.
| callahad wrote:
| Those are kind of the same thing, though (Beeper is all
| Matrix + open source bridges under the hood)
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| > _The most important reason for us to remove SMS support from
| Android is that plaintext SMS messages are inherently insecure.
| They leak sensitive metadata and place your data in the hands of
| telecommunications companies._
|
| Ok I get that on Android the situation is such that, as a message
| provider, you don't give away "metadata" ie who is texting whom,
| keeping that data either for yourself or the highest bidder.
| WhatsApp, too, fuss about e2e encryption while conveniently not
| talking about the value of "metadata" for ad targeting and even
| want to aggressively grab and upload your contacts at every turn
| (despite it being illegal in EU to share PII without explicit and
| documented and revocable consent of all individual phone number
| holders stored in your phone book). But why does this change come
| only on Android? Would it be suicidal for signal to drop SMS/MMS
| when the default messaging app (iMessage) _does_ fall back to SMS
| /MMS on iOS as is well known?
| prettyStandard wrote:
| I am disappointed in this. I was hoping to onboard more people
| onto signal, and this is a barrier to that.
| seneca wrote:
| This is going to seriously harm their user base. I've used signal
| for years, but will have to drop it with change. People aren't
| interested in maintaining several different messaging apps.
| dodgerdan wrote:
| I'll bet that user's sending plaintext sms's thinking they were
| secure end to end encrypted messages did much more harm.
| wakeupcall wrote:
| Combining signal and sms to have a single messaging app is a big
| reason as of why I keep using it.
|
| But like many recent developments, I'm just left dumbfounded by
| their high-level decision making. I've stopped recommending
| signal to tech persons for a while. I don't want yet another
| messaging app either. Matrix is serving me well.
| errantmind wrote:
| I know it is harsh to say, but whoever approved this should
| probably be sacked. This is really obviously a poor decision with
| respect to preserving/growing the userbase and will actually
| decrease privacy overall when fewer people are using Signal.
| akudlacek wrote:
| I cast my vote by dropping my measly $3 a month donation.
| neogodless wrote:
| Cannot tell if it was previously linked here, but this seems of
| interest.
|
| https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-blog-removing-sms...
|
| No doubt they are in a tough spot. Some users will not accept
| this feature omission. But if what they claim is accurate, the
| insecure nature of SMS, along with Google's hoarding of their
| internal RCS APIs makes it tough to be a messaging provider on
| Android.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| What an awful move. Make a different app if you want to remove
| SMS access.
| robotbikes wrote:
| This is a frustrating change being proposed and I don't like how
| powerless I feel to stop it. I even started donating to Signal
| because I support what they have done but it will dramatically
| limit the usability of the app. Many people sign up for Signal
| and then never check it and so it was convenient to be able to
| send a insecure SMS message to them instead.
|
| The only possible benefit to this would be to break their
| dependence on using phone numbers as the way to sign up for
| accounts and possibly provide a reasonable way to export message
| data.
|
| Otherwise it just feels like the wrong decision and a reminder
| that Signal is not a community driven project but subject to
| arbitrary changes and provides no way to fork or disagree with
| the project lead as can be done with most free and open source
| software.
| dheera wrote:
| I support this decision, I don't use SMS and I'm in support of
| everything that kills SMS.
|
| Next step: Please stop using phone numbers as a user ID. I have
| lots of throwaway phone numbers, but many people don't want to
| leak their phone number to every single person they want to have
| an encrypted conversation with.
| garciansmith wrote:
| Yeah, I'll just tell the gas company, electric company,
| internet provider, my bank, my elderly neighbor who can barely
| use a phone and I taught how to text, every restaurant I order
| online from, the plumber I just texted literally an hour ago
| due to a pipe leaking to just... not use SMS. I'm sure they'll
| listen.
|
| I assume you live in a place where SMS isn't necessary? In the
| U.S. it is.
| bobmaxup wrote:
| I think the parent was stating that it doesn't have to be
| that way, and that things could be better without SMS and
| 10DLC.
| dheera wrote:
| > gas company, electric company,
|
| Mine don't need SMS
|
| > internet provider,
|
| Also doesn't need SMS for me
|
| > my bank,
|
| F them, I use a throwaway Twilio number for this
|
| > my elderly neighbor who can barely use a phone and I taught
| how to text,
|
| I tell them to either e-mail me or stick a handwritten note
| on my door. E-mail is WAY easier to use for elderly people in
| my experience. You get nice big keyboards, big fonts, big
| screens, and it works on any device you own, not just one.
| But if they disagree they can still handwrite a note to me
|
| > every restaurant I order online from,
|
| I use a fake number for these. They don't need my number any
| more than I need their wait staff's phone numbers. Never been
| a problem. I just go pick up and say my name, no SMS
| bullshit.
|
| > the plumber I just texted literally an hour ago
|
| I don't text plumbers, I e-mail or call them
| garciansmith wrote:
| > gas company, electric company, Especially when there are
| issues that's how mine send updates. To say nothing about
| companies that require 2FA through text!
|
| > bank I can't use VOIP numbers with them, not sure about
| Twilio.
|
| > my elderly neighbor who can barely use a phone and I
| taught how to text You make the assumption that they even
| have a computer: they do not. They do normally just knock
| on my door, but they want to send and receive pictures to
| their family and other people who do not live close by.
|
| > every restaurant I order online from I want to know when
| my order is ready.
|
| > the plumber I just texted literally an hour ago He asked
| for a picture of the leak and to text it to him. He's
| reliable and has done good work before, I'm not going to
| switch just because he doesn't use email.
|
| My point in all of this is that in the U.S. SMS is
| ubiquitous. As much as I would love to leave it behind,
| there are just so many situations where you need SMS.
| dheera wrote:
| > where you need SMS
|
| Honestly not really, in the US. You can usually find ways
| around it if you tell the business that you don't have
| SMS. With governments I don't think they can legally
| require you to have SMS.
|
| When they find out it's incredibly difficult to deal with
| you because of the design choices _they_ made, it helps
| dethrone SMS, one business at a time. Vote with your
| behavior. Make them realize they made a bad choice by
| picking SMS.
| Tajnymag wrote:
| > I support this decision, I don't use SMS
|
| I lost you there
| ewired wrote:
| I hate SMS too, but I think this decision will hurt Signal
| infinitely more than it will hurt SMS. By that I mean it will
| not affect SMS at all and only Signal.
| roer wrote:
| I feel like this change will increase the amount of SMS users
| if anything
| dheera wrote:
| Why?
|
| I tell everyone I don't use SMS. The only ways to message me
| are e-mail, Signal, WeChat, FB, and Instagram.
|
| E-mail is the best "generic" way to reach me that isn't tied
| to a company's platform, and a much, much better UX than SMS
| in almost every way, especially when travelling
| internationally with multiple devices.
| unhammer wrote:
| That sucks. The data fee argument makes no sense - you could just
| have a setting or warning or something for those who live in
| places where you have to pay for sms (I know every setting
| introduces complexity, but I that's got to be nothing compared to
| the level of engineering needed for all those other fancy
| features in Signal).
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| It's completely backwards for me. When I'm out of data for a
| month, SMSs still work. I've had to press and hold the send
| button to revert to SMS on many occasions.
| codethief wrote:
| What's even worse is that for you (and I) removal of SMS
| support will mean that out message history will suddenly be
| inconsistent as existing SMS messages will be removed.
| stirfish wrote:
| I agree with this - I already get a little popup telling me a
| message to a 6-digit number might cost me money. Just reuse
| that pop-up or something.
| godelski wrote:
| I see a lot of pushback against this but even WhatsApp doesn't
| have this feature. Signal is just a small team of hackers (like 2
| dozen employees) fighting against big tech (thousands of
| employees/developers). They aren't going to be able to support
| everything big tech does and what big tech doesn't. It is a pick
| your battle thing.
|
| I do think Signal deserves a lot of criticism but I'm always
| amazed how a forum of programmers and highly tech literate users
| just trashes a small team of hackers fighting against big tech.
| They are open source. We are the ones that can help them. There
| are plenty of custom builds out there (that do access official
| Signal servers) and you can build this feature back in if you
| want. I don't think it is a problem if Signal decides it has more
| important features to support with their tiny team. But if you
| want more features you got to donate either time or money. This
| is "HACKER" news, so get hacking.
| smlavine wrote:
| Very disappointing and upsetting. I use Signal as my primary
| SMS/MMS app on my phone, and use a few Signal chats as well with
| people. This is going to be really annoying. I'm probably going
| to just stop using Signal altogether to be honest.
|
| Most people in my social circle use Snapchat or iMessage for
| "texting", for reference.
| [deleted]
| josteink wrote:
| I remember back when I had Android, how amazed I was that I could
| just make Signal the new default messaging app, and don't worry
| about who were Signal-users and who weren't.
|
| It made it amazingly easy to get started yourself, and also
| convert others.
|
| Why on earth would they decide to give up that advantage?
| monroewalker wrote:
| I set Signal as my default messaging app until I was texted while
| my phone was off and the messages never showed up later. Could
| certainly have been a problem with my mobile service provider
| (Xfinity Mobile), but it's not an issue I've ever had before and
| seemed like an especially unsurprising result of using something
| other than the default messaging app. Curious if anyone else has
| had a similar experience
| Daunk wrote:
| I feel like all these messaging applications eventually mess up
| somehow. The one I keep coming back to is Telegram.
| dodgerdan wrote:
| You do realise Telegram isn't secure (non-e2ee), is Russian
| owned and is based in the Middle East. Enjoy whatever privacy
| that provides.
| Daunk wrote:
| Mmm... You can use end-to-end encryption with Telegram if
| security is your main concern. I don't see how it being
| "Russian owned" is of any concern, but if you feel like
| privacy is an issue then you're free to claim their $300,000
| prize at stake or just take part of their ongoing bug bounty
| programme and be rewarded by spotting flaws.
| PenguinCoder wrote:
| Don't need to rely on a vulnerability or flaw, when you
| own/have the keys to the kingdom as it stands.
| Georgelemental wrote:
| Based in the Middle East instead of Russia, because the
| founders specifically care about avoiding Russian government
| censorship
| dodgerdan wrote:
| And they picked a country known for its poor rule of law,
| constitutional protections and respect for privacy.
| [deleted]
| zppln wrote:
| > There are three big reasons why we're removing SMS support for
| the Android app now: prioritizing security and privacy, ensuring
| people aren't hit with unexpected messaging bills, and creating a
| clear and intelligible user experience for anyone sending
| messages on Signal.
|
| Pretty weak reasoning to me. Just do what Apple does and color
| sms messages some other color or whatever. Problem solved.
|
| This is gonna make me drop Signal. I use it as my default sms app
| and have been very happy with it, but most of my conversations
| (although most actual messages are Signal) are still over sms so
| it'll have to go. I can't be bothered to roll a bunch of
| different apps.
|
| Still, I'm grateful for the work the Signal team has done over
| the years. Sad to see us part ways!
| nstbayless wrote:
| Signal already colours SMS and encrypted messages differently.
| Unecrypted (SMS) messages are grey; encrypted messages are
| blue.
| chungy wrote:
| I completely disagree and am disappointed in this decision. One
| app on my phone to handle all my messages is easier than making a
| context switch per-contact.
|
| I also think it'll hurt the value proposition when getting people
| to join signal. Not overcomplicating the messaging scenario was a
| big winner to do that.
| alerighi wrote:
| > all my messages is easier than making a context switch per-
| contact
|
| A user already has:
|
| - WhatsApp
|
| - Telegram
|
| - Facebook Messanger
|
| - Instagram that has direct messages
|
| - the good old email, or better, many of them
|
| - Microsoft Teams for company communications
|
| - Discord for communications with group of friends
|
| - the old SMS (that I didn't even know that in some parts of
| the world were still used, since I receive them only for 2
| factor codes, notifications about my card transactions, and
| spam)
|
| Adding another app is that a big deal? By the way I don't use
| Signal, but not for the reason of not having another app on the
| phone, just because I don't know anyone that has it and
| actively use it.
| aeturnum wrote:
| You're right that there are many messengers available and
| Signal will, at best, be one of many that people juggle based
| on who they are contacting.
|
| That's why it was a huge advantage that, on Android, Signal
| could replace a SMS client. You weren't adding _yet another_
| messenger to the list, you were replacing the SMS client with
| one that _could_ send secure messages. That made "switching"
| to Signal (which, ofc, was not a switch at all for my friends
| who use SMS) much easier for me. I could continue texting my
| friends and seamlessly switch to secure messaging if they
| ever got signal.
|
| Contrast this with my friends who kept their old SMS client
| who reliably forget to check / use signal and generally tend
| to go back to texting me in a few weeks. Even if you send 0
| signal messages for a long time, by switching you SMS client
| you are already setup to receive them and will habitually
| open an app that supports E2E encryption.
|
| For example - Facebook Messenger also supports sending and
| receiving SMS messages - likely because they've done the
| research and found it drives adoption.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Yes, adding another app is a big deal. It is cognitive load,
| which may be negligible for some, but a lot for others.
|
| Personally, I use only two of those apps you listed for
| messaging, and for all the others, I say, "Sorry, I don't use
| that one."
| chungy wrote:
| Does anyone actually have all those? I certainly don't. I
| have Signal, Element, Telegram and I even think that's
| excessive. I can at least manage it, most RL contacts I know
| would not.
| alerighi wrote:
| Well, not all of them, but usually you expect a young
| person to have all of them. Except Microsoft Teams, the
| company may use other media, and Discord.
|
| Hell, even my aunt that doesn't know nothing about
| technology has WhatsApp and had me install Telegram because
| the church opened a channel on it!
| fyvhbhn wrote:
| You couldn't have one messenger for all contacts before, except
| you forced everyone to either signal or sms
| monetus wrote:
| Signal could SMS anyone in your regular contacts app; the
| fallback option in tfa is what doesn't force people. Now, it
| will.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Absolutely not. Nobody wants to have to use a second app,
| especially after having it this way forever. Where's the
| change.org petetion?
|
| I will be recommending against using Signal for any reason
| whatsoever to unless this decision changes. If it goes through,
| I'll move myself and everyone to something else. The options for
| e2e encryption are many today and I already have to have a bunch
| of these apps, so Signal becomes pointless. If they do this,
| they'll do worse later. Better to get out now at the "first" red
| flag.
| gal_anonym wrote:
| I'm happy with the change, SMS to should be sent through native
| SMS app, while Signal is just another chat client. Never
| understood why they have decided to overtake the default SMS app.
| tmikaeld wrote:
| I've converted a lot of people to Signal and I'm 100% sure that
| they will abandon it, they only want 1 messenger app.
| branon wrote:
| SMS/MMS needs to die at this point. I am glad to see Signal take
| a hard line here even though it will cause some headache for
| users, of which I am one, though I do not use it to send outgoing
| SMS/MMS.
|
| These protocols are insecure, not private, and fundamentally
| incompatible with Signal's mission. Supporting them at all, while
| highly convenient, is a queer oxymoron for an app like Signal. We
| have to rip the bandaid off eventually.
| daedalus_j wrote:
| The theory is good, but when my non-technical schoolteacher
| neighbor wants to use her iPhone to tell me that my package was
| delivered to her house incorrectly she's going to pop open her
| iMessage app and look up my phone number, and that's going to
| come to me as an SMS.
|
| There's no chance I'm going to get her to install Signal, she
| doesn't need it, her circle is almost all blue-bubble iPhone
| users who don't value anything Signal adds over what iMessages
| gives them.
|
| This doesn't kill SMS/MMS. Not even a little tiny bit. All it
| does is make _MY_ life more irritating because I have multiple
| apps that I have to deal with now. The way to kill it is to
| make something better that people WANT to use, that offers the
| extra value to make it worth the effort.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| It needs to die when a federated replacement is available by
| default on all phones.
| stirfish wrote:
| I left some feedback asking them to reconsider.
|
| https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/requests/new
| akamoonknight wrote:
| Thanks, I'm sure Signal devs to some extent look at HN, but was
| looking for a way to concretely let them know about the
| potential damage I see this causing.
| keb_ wrote:
| Unfortunately, at least in the U.S., most inter-OS text-messaging
| is still done via SMS. Signal was godsend in this field because I
| can slowly convince my network to switch to Signal (and this in
| turn had a recursive network effect as then _they_ would do
| similarly). This change will mean Signal will become another
| bucket on my phone (along with WhatsApp) where I can talk to only
| a select few of my contacts.
| oezi wrote:
| Why doesn't anybody fork the Signal clients? There are so many
| bad design decision in the clients (for instance no message
| backup on iOS or no way to save all media to storage
| automatically) that I don't understand why people accept the
| Signal Foundation's stewardship of the client code.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Because while both the server and the client are Open Source,
| the server doesn't federate. If you want to be able to
| communicate with anyone, you have to use the official server
| instance. And the official server instance doesn't allow
| unofficial clients (though some clients seem to get away with
| it for a while).
| Aissen wrote:
| There are forked clients, but usually you can't use Signal's
| server infrastructure, so you need to roll your own, and now it
| brings another set of problems.
| xcdzvyn wrote:
| You're not allowed to:
| https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...
| _emacsomancer_ wrote:
| Molly[1], a fork of Signal, seems to work fine. I've used it
| for a long time and never had any issues with it (and it
| connects to Signal fine). But for security reasons one of their
| changes was dropping SMS, so switching to it won't do you any
| good there.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/mollyim/mollyim-android
| EGreg wrote:
| Wait. Doesn't Signal use SMS to confirm your account?
|
| I think the only one that's totally anonymous is Wickr
| timbit42 wrote:
| Briar runs over Tor.
| ortusdux wrote:
| One Signal feature that I always wanted, and will apparently
| never get, was the ability to send the same message via SMS &
| data, and have the duplicate cancel out on the other end. Service
| is spotty in my region, and I routinely have either cellular or
| data connectivity.
| nstbayless wrote:
| I initially downloaded Signal assuming it had that feature.
| Then they removed encrypted SMS entirely:
| https://signal.org/blog/goodbye-encrypted-sms/ -- I almost
| uninstalled the app then.
| alexmuro wrote:
| This will directly lead to me no longer using signal. What are
| other people switching to for their default sms client on
| android?
| willmacdonald wrote:
| I had frequently ran into problems trying to receive SMS 2FA
| tokens using Signal. Had to switch back to the default app on
| Android.
| agilob wrote:
| >Removing SMS support from Signal Android (soon)
|
| Literally the only reason I recommend others and use Signal
| myself?
|
| Seriously, Signal doesn't have the userbase to drop SMS support.
| All my Signal contacts use WhatsApp or Telegram that I already
| have installed. I use signal mostly as a SMS app, secondly as E2E
| communication. It will be easier to uninstall Signal.
| PenguinCoder wrote:
| Seriously. I don't want to use another locked in messenger app,
| that everyone else must use or I won't get their messages. I
| use signal because it's secure, but also because it's low
| friction and seamless into SMS if the other user doesn't have
| signal. This is another step in the wrong direction for Signal.
| marktl wrote:
| Disappointing
| _jsnk wrote:
| I'm very upset by this decision. I've been using Signal as my SMS
| app for a very long time.
|
| Messages that I would have sent via SMS currently will
| automatically get sent via Signal if the person I'm sending to
| has started using Signal without my knowledge. This has happened
| in several instances where I was pleasantly surprised to see a
| friend had started using Signal. Now that I'm forced into a
| separate SMS app, this will no longer be a possibility. I
| certainly won't be firing up Signal to see if a contact has
| joined before sending them an SMS.
| giskou wrote:
| I have been receiving notifications that a person in my contact
| list is now using Signal for years.
|
| Apart from that, your use case has another possible issue. If a
| person stops using Signal, your messages will go to the void
| until Signal actually removes the user and your client switches
| back to SMS. This has caused a lot of confusion for some of my
| friends when I switched my signal account to a different phone
| number.
|
| I think it's more reliable to use Signal for Signal.
| alerighi wrote:
| Well this is also a problem. As it's said in the article, you
| risk getting charged for an SMS, that in some countries are
| expensive, most mobile plan in my country have 30+Gb for 7
| euros at month, but SMS are 20 cent *EACH*. Practically in my
| country nobody uses SMS, and SMS are used only to receive 2
| factor authentication codes (and spam).
|
| Anyway a normal person already uses multiple messaging
| applications: WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messanger, Instagram
| direct messages, the good old email, SMS (I guess somebody they
| are still used reading the comments), adding Signal it's not
| that big deal.
| roter wrote:
| This. Now you have to remember who is in Signal and who isn't.
| All because apparently the double-check mark for messages
| between Signal users and the unlocked icon for SMS messages is
| too hard to comprehend. SMH.
| bxparks wrote:
| If I understand this, if I use SMS, I can send to everyone. If
| I use Signal, I can send to Signal users only. But I don't
| remember who's on Signal, and who's not. So I guess I will stop
| using Signal.
| usrusr wrote:
| If I want to message someone I open the contact and click on
| one of the messengers that are listed for the phone number.
| Why would I leave the memorizing to my brain?
| fluidcruft wrote:
| Huh. I've never used contacts that way. I suppose it could
| work but that's a new extra step. My Contacts list is
| gigantic and full of bullshit I don't care about because
| it's sync'd from work and flooded with people I don't know.
| Usually I just find the conversation from the chronological
| list (which is more of how I remember things). Maybe
| there's some way to sort contacts by recent use? It just
| seems like that's leaking metadata to push all of that
| context into Contacts. Anyway that seems maybe plausible if
| it can index or springboard to convos in other apps.
| jcul wrote:
| Off topic slightly, but it amazes me how much SMS is used in
| outside my country (maybe just US?). I literally never SMS any
| personal contacts, usually WhatsApp. Even business stuff,
| sometimes initial contact may be SMS and then could often move
| to WhatsApp. I use signal with a small circle of friends, but
| no one I know uses SMS anymore.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| Exactly. Dumbest idea ever. Apparently Signal thinks they can
| recruit all of us as their sales force.
| stirfish wrote:
| I feel like I somehow caused this mess by becoming a monthly
| donor.
|
| It feels like I just got my friends to put letters in envelopes
| instead of only using postcards. Now we all have to drive to two
| different post offices - one for letters and one for cards -
| because the original office will stop delivering cards. Everyone
| is just going to go back to using postcards.
|
| >Dropping support for SMS messaging also frees up our capacity to
| build new features (yes, like usernames) that will ensure Signal
| is fresh and relevant into the future
|
| I don't buy this.
| bjt2n3904 wrote:
| Oof. As an Android user, this sucks. Though I have my
| frustrations with Signal (cellphone number, address book hashing,
| centralization, the cryptocurrency stuff, removing storage
| encryption) -- it's still the only app I trust. Even more than
| the stock Samsung messaging app. I don't want to trust another,
| and I don't want to have to bifurcate my messaging flow.
|
| All of my family use iOS though, so this is already their use
| case. I understand less code is more secure, and a unified
| codebase between devices is good -- heck. This might even lead to
| no more phone number requirement.
|
| But this still stinks for my use case.
|
| FWIW though, I was more upset about the cryptocurrency thing.
| martsa1 wrote:
| Feels like an odd move but whatever.
|
| Does anyone here have a good suggestion for an SMS app for
| Android?
| aeturnum wrote:
| Just to add to the frustrating elements of this shockingly bad
| decision:
|
| In my friend circle, at least, it's common for people to go in
| and out of using Signal. They might have had it on an old phone
| and forget to install it on the new phone. Whatever - life
| happens.
|
| Signal can't know if someone who used to have their number
| registered with Signal has stopped using it. Signal will still
| display them as a user and accept messages. It's been invaluable
| for me to be able, if I message a friend after a break in
| communication, to send a signal message...and then, if I don't
| get a response, a SMS message. If they respond to the SMS I can
| see in our history that they had signal and switched at some
| point. This change takes that away and will make it must more
| difficult to deal with inconsistent adopters.
| jessfyi wrote:
| The idea that they can't improve the UI/UX to better inform to
| the people who repeatedly, accidentally send insecure
| messages/sms (ignoring the existing words "Unsecured SMS" in the
| chat field, the unlocked lock near messages, the unlocked lock
| next to the phone, or the giant banner that occasionally drops
| down that tells you the % of secure messages you can be sending
| if you pester a contact into grabbing signal) as one of the
| reasons for this change is frankly bullshit.
|
| Changing the Send button's icon to "SMS" or a color/border change
| ala iMessage are ideas off the top of my head and I'm sure
| they've got designers significantly more talented than I am that
| can think of better ones. We've seen very little iteration there
| that's indicated the significance of that problem...and frankly
| if they highlighted this as a tactic vs endless spam texts more
| people would be receptive to this news. As it stands I think this
| is going to significantly reduce their number of casual users. In
| fact I'm willing to bet that the cohort of users who are used as
| justification are the _least_ likely to convince their contacts
| to switch to Signal.
|
| Don't get me wrong, their real desire to increase the amount of
| people sending _secure_ messages via Signal alone + resource mgmt
| in the face of a recession are valid. But acting as a unified
| messenger (with better link unfurling, threaded replies, and
| reactions after Google killed Allo vs the default messenger that
| spent _years_ getting them) was the trojan horse onto many of my
| friends ' and colleagues' phones. Now that there's parity I can
| see more people just opting into the default messenger/FB
| Messenger + Whatsapp combo because more people exist there and
| we're all just _lazy_.
| Pr0ject217 wrote:
| > "Letting a deeply insecure messaging protocol have a place in
| the Signal interface is inconsistent with our values and with
| what people expect when they open Signal"
|
| > "We've heard repeatedly from people who've been hit with high
| messaging fees after assuming that the SMS messages they were
| sending were Signal messages"
|
| > "We can only do so much on the design side to prevent such
| misunderstandings"
|
| It sounds like they are trying to protect users from themselves.
| roter wrote:
| Indeed. Double-check icon indicates Signal messages. Unlocked
| icon indicates non-Signal. My 85-year-old mother understands
| this.
| mancerayder wrote:
| In the long list of SMS alternatives below, can someone tell me
| what's wrong with the default Android SMS? I use Signal and
| regular SMS, why would I install a second SMS option for non-
| Signal ?
| jacooper wrote:
| I think this will only affect US users, because nobody uses SMS
| outside the US. And switching between apps is the expected thing
| to do when trying to push people to another platform,
|
| I have telegram, signal, whatsapp and Element on my phone, this
| is why the new digital markets act is going to be revolutionary,
| especially with bridge friendly platforms like matrix.org.
| plsbenice34 wrote:
| I have never been to the US but lived in multiple countries and
| they all used SMS. May I ask where you live that doesnt use
| SMS?
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I hear this a lot but this is way too caricatural.
|
| For one, commercial services will go through SMS to contact
| you. Delivery people asking if my mailbox can fit parcels won't
| be through Whatsapp or Messenger.
|
| Then you'll also want to compartmentalize and limit how some
| people can reach you. That means if you're already giving them
| your phone number, you don't want them on the other messaging
| services as well.
|
| Life is complicated, and there will be endless use cases for
| the baseline, default messaging platform.
| jiripospisil wrote:
| > I think this will only affect US users, because nobody uses
| SMS outside the US
|
| This is not true at all, at least for Czechia. The number is
| going down but it's still in billions (for a country with
| population of ~10.5M). Quoting from the official annual report:
|
| > In the number of SMS messages sent from mobile networks in
| 2018, CTU estimates - in the context of the increasing
| popularity of OTT messengers (e.g., WhatsApp, Facebook
| Messenger, Viber, etc.) - a slight decrease relative to 2017,
| approximately by 2% to 8.21 billion SMS messages.
|
| https://www.ctu.eu/sites/default/files/obsah/stranky/284221/...
| fluidcruft wrote:
| How do you know if your contacts use Signal and know to use that
| app instead of SMS/Messages or whatever?
|
| With the SMS integration it was pretty easy because it would just
| switch over if the other person had Signal or if/when they signed
| up in the future.
|
| What's the workflow now? Manually ask them on SMS if they use
| Signal? Just try it and see if it works?
|
| This sounds like one of those "Don't Worry! Rejoice! We're
| breaking your things!" announcements that hasn't even thought
| about how people use Signal IRL.
|
| I'm going to stop my monthly subscription to Signal Foundation.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| Edit: after reading the explanation in the community forum
| linked here
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33181636
|
| I have instead come around to support this move 200% and have
| instead doubled my monthly subscription. The explanation at the
| blog post is an abomination, however.
|
| Leave SMS and all its shitty successors for Apple and Google
| and carriers to kill/maintain.
| velosol wrote:
| Holy crap you weren't kidding!
|
| The blog post needs to be shelved and redone as every listed
| reason feels post hoc while the reasons listed at that link
| ([1] for anyone who dislikes friction) are grounded in
| reality and show Signal being proactive.
|
| [1]: https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-blog-
| removing-sms...
| 7steps2much wrote:
| Till now I kep't signal around despite the fact that I wasn't
| really getting that many messages on the app.
|
| Now I am faced with a decision: * Do I keep signal around, for
| that one to two messages a month I receive? * Or do I get rid of
| it, forcing my contacts back on Whatsapp/regular SMS?
|
| To be perfectly honest, I am thinking about just gettting rid of
| it. No need to keep yet another communication channel around when
| I can't get rid of the other ones anyways. :(
| jeremysalwen wrote:
| In addition to what everyone else here is saying (this is the
| most mind-bogglingly stupid idea you could imagine, which will
| instantly kill the adoption of Signal in the US) I want to point
| out that the purported reasons for removing this feature would be
| _completely_ solved by hiding SMS behind a setting. If you want
| to be EVEN MORE paranoid you could periodically warn users if
| this setting is enabled, just like they periodically bug you
| about your pin. The only explanation I can have for this decision
| is that the real reasons for it have nothing to do with those
| given.
| fortylove wrote:
| Signal consistently has been a poor UX for me. Sure it's super
| secure and that's nice. But I don't really care about the
| security of the convo with my aging parents. I care that they can
| easily respond to me.
|
| I'm happy we have an available secure chat for people that
| need/want it, but I'm more than happy to keep it relegated to
| niche uses until it gets more user friendly.
| paulv wrote:
| I pretty much only use the signal protocol to chat with my
| husband, who I convinced to install the app because I could help
| with any problems that arose. I'm not going to use one app to
| communicate with just him and another to communicate with
| everyone else, nor is he.
|
| The result of this change is that we will stop using signal all
| together. They've accomplished the exact thing they said they
| want to avoid.
| Jayschwa wrote:
| I am unhappy with this change, but I can cope with it. I'm more
| concerned with my tech-challenged family members who don't
| understand the distinction between different messaging services
| or have any understanding of security. Until now, Signal has been
| good for them because they only need to deal with one application
| and they get some added security among our group. After this
| change, I fear they'll just use the SMS app exclusively (out of
| inertia) and Signal will collect dust.
| geewee wrote:
| This feels like a slap in the face. I get the privacy
| ramifications, but one of the really strong aspects of Signal to
| me was to go all-in on privacy when needed, and default to
| something sensible when it wasn't. I'll definitely need to
| reconsider whether or not to continue my monthly donation, and I
| don't like that at all.
| [deleted]
| spcebar wrote:
| You can send feedback to support@signal.org. I don't know if it
| will do any good, but I sent them my respectful two cents.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| > If you do use Signal as your default SMS app on Android, you
| will need to select a new default SMS app on your phone. If you
| want to keep them, you'll also need to export your SMS messages
| from Signal into that new app.
|
| This messaging seems a little tone-deaf, given that _there is no
| way to export SMS messages from Signal_. Apparently it 's
| possible, using a third-party piece of software, to decrypt your
| backups and extract the messages, but that's not exactly a
| reasonable thing to expect people to do.
|
| One of the reasons I liked Signal was because it was easy to get
| normal people to start using it, because they could just set it
| up as their SMS app, and continue life as normal, just getting
| the benefits of encryption for any of their contacts that were
| also using Signal. Now there's not notably any reason to use
| Signal as opposed to, say, Matrix.
| fyvhbhn wrote:
| One more reason: signal still allows for easier discovery of
| other users, because it forces phone number sharing
| fitblipper wrote:
| They are enabling the ability to export SMS from signal now:
| https://community.signalusers.org/t/beta-feedback-for-the-up...
| roter wrote:
| Confirmed. Turned on the beta program and exported ~1000 text
| messages over to Google Messages. Settings->Chats->SMS and
| MMS->Export. Involves changing the default app for SMS
| between Signal and Google Messages.
| saghm wrote:
| The phrase "one step forward, two steps back" comes to mind
| 0xbadc0de5 wrote:
| Terrible decision. You don't improve the average person's
| security posture by increasing the barrier-to-entry of encrypted
| messaging - and removing SMS support is doing exactly that.
| Signal -is- was great BECAUSE it made the transition from SMS to
| Signal so seamless.
|
| Aside: Funny how quickly the wheels fall off as soon as Moxie
| leaves. (https://signal.org/blog/new-year-new-ceo/)
| Melcupa wrote:
| Wow :-(
|
| Just a week ago I replaced the sms app with signal for two
| people.
|
| This was the main reason why I just installed signal and still
| use it vs telegram because of this exact feature :-(
|
| Come on signal what ya doing stop!
| fuddle wrote:
| To be honest I never knew this feature existed.
| deeesstoronto wrote:
| I've only found only one good option to unify messaging on
| android. Blackberry Hub will bring together SMS, WhatsApp,
| Signal, multiple emails, Instagram, etc.
| krylon wrote:
| I am not so much upset about the decision to remove SMS support,
| but about the reasons they give. It smells like a really lame
| excuse.
|
| But whatever. I only send and receive SMS very rarely these days,
| so I installed Silence on my phone. It's still annoying, though.
| Having one app for SMS and encrypted messaging was very
| convenient.
| Melatonic wrote:
| I never used SMS through Signal and I will not miss this in the
| slightest.
| jbb67 wrote:
| I use signal as my SMS program and a few people who have signal.
| if I can't use it as my SMS program I'm not going to keep using
| it for the handful of people who have signal and will likely just
| go back to SMS for everyone.
|
| oh well
| fuddle wrote:
| To be honest, I never knew this feature existed.
| resfirestar wrote:
| How is it a serious UX/design problem? iMessage just makes SMS
| messages green and it's so effective at conveying the difference
| that people claim it creates social stigma against Android users.
| technoooooost wrote:
| Well there you have it, these crooks probably accepted a few
| million$ by the feds to kill the app.
| annadane wrote:
| Is this Moxie's decision?
| glogla wrote:
| Very likely. Moxie was always horrible.
| vabmit wrote:
| Someone will fork or clone Signal and distribute an app that
| continues to support SMS and MMS.
|
| I would drop Signal for that app, even if I had to pay for it.
| throw7 wrote:
| Bad move. They should be expanding support to include RCS (which
| can support e2ee, although I don't know if it's at the provider
| level or at client level).
| nelblu wrote:
| I understand SMS is not relevant outside of US/Canada. But since
| signal chose to remove this feature they just lost a regular
| donor.
| mgbmtl wrote:
| I for one welcome the change, because my phone does not have an
| SMS plan (data only) and the "send by SMS" is a bit confusing.
|
| A messaging app should have one clear behavior per interface.
| This was "maybe secure, maybe not". I have an SMS app for that
| (well, VoIP-sms, because I'm weird).
| 3836293648 wrote:
| How does your phone even work if you cannot at least receive
| SMS?
| dopa42365 wrote:
| Receiving SMS is free in [nearly everywhere].
|
| Not that anyone really uses SMS anymore in [nearly
| everywhere].
| stirfish wrote:
| > "send by SMS" is a bit confusing
|
| Can you say more about what's confusing about this for you?
| mgbmtl wrote:
| I don't like explaining to people that "yes it can do sms,
| and signal is sort of sms but not really" etc.
|
| and the workflow when adding someone is different (waiting
| for approval or not).
| Xelynega wrote:
| You sound misguided if you're trying to explain the details
| of signal to get them to use it. All they need to
| understand to use the app is "its sms", any e2ee they
| benefit from as a result are completely in the background.
| johntrain wrote:
| Can anyone recommend a good SMS Android app?
| mehlmao wrote:
| I've used ChompSMS (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?
| id=com.p1.chompsm...) for the past 10 years or so, side-by-side
| with Signal. I prefer keeping secure messaging and insecure
| messaging separate.
| johntrain wrote:
| Thanks!
| Melatonic wrote:
| None will do RCS so you basically have to use Googles
| neogodless wrote:
| Personally like TextraSMS. Has a free ad-supported version, but
| I paid to remove ads when it was on sale several years ago
| (maybe $1).
|
| 4.4 stars. I believe it's $3 or $5 to remove ads now.
|
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.textra
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Further -- can anyone recommend a good Open Source SMS Android
| app? The only ones I can find are AOSP Messaging and Simple SMS
| Messenger, both of which are "Okay".
| m4lvin wrote:
| QKSMS is so good I almost forgot that I am using it.
|
| https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.moez.QKSMS/
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Ah, nice, thanks. I didn't see it in my initial F-Droid
| search.
| [deleted]
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| I like the default messages app.
| _dhruva wrote:
| Apple does not seem to think this is a problem. Their default
| Message app supporting both SMS/text and iMessage. They have an
| opt-in to send via SMS if iMessage fails and this gives it more
| reliability too.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| It would actually be pretty funny if Apple enabled/defaulted
| end-to-end encryption in iMessage used that to bash Google's
| green vs blue messages whining.
| mderazon wrote:
| Outside I think mostly the US, SMS is basically only used for
| spam and 2fa messages. I can't remember the last time I
| communicated with someone via SMS to be honest.
|
| To hear that people use it in group chats is mind boggling to me.
| guerrilla wrote:
| No. It's uniquitous in Europe.
| Kiro wrote:
| Where do you live?
| mderazon wrote:
| Europe (Portugal)
| Krasnol wrote:
| I'm with you. Totally confused about the outcry and use cases.
| Sounds like the 90s over here.
| endorphine wrote:
| Same here. I'm pretty sure by now this is a local thing.
| dzikimarian wrote:
| US is iPhone-land. iPhone users default to iMessage and
| "don't want another app", so SMS is still going strong, as
| it's only bridge between ecosystems.
|
| Rest of the world is more diverse, so iPhone users don't get
| to force their default on everyone (as it's crappy if you
| don't have an iPhone). Also Google constantly fails to build
| vaiable, cross platform alternative. Therefore everyone is
| used to having a few apps.
|
| Basically situation in US is what you get if you allow entire
| nation to be put in walled garden.
|
| Also it's absurd, that instant messaging, that had zero
| meaningful innovation over last 20 years, still isn't over
| open protocol and we tolerate that's used by corporations to
| pressure customers into their ecosystems.
| aabajian wrote:
| Alright, it's fine for a company to remove features, if they are
| honest about _why_ they are doing so. It 's obvious none of the
| reasons given are due to user complaints. The truth is, they are
| removing SMS because they don't own the SMS platform (e.g. it's
| not a walled-garden like WhatsApp). Would it kill them to just be
| honest? Yes, it's less secure, but no end-user is saying, "Please
| remove SMS as it's not secure."
| cptroot wrote:
| I don't think that's true? There are clearly users who are
| annoyed at being able to send insecure and possibly expensive
| SMS messages in their secure messaging app.
| Xelynega wrote:
| Then don't enable the default-off setting to allow the app to
| send SMS?
| yolovoe wrote:
| I'm sad. I actually donate to signal every month, but now that
| will likely stop and I'll have look for alternatives.
|
| Rip. This is definitely going to make it harder to get signal
| adoption. My partner will surely stop using it too now and I'll
| have to convince my friends to migrate to yet another platform.
| eatwater123 wrote:
| This is an awful decision. I've converted some friends and family
| to Signal over the past years (it took a while) and it is now
| their default messaging app on their phones. This is going to
| confuse them and is going to make it difficult for me to keep
| convincing them that Signal is the route to use. ("Why do I need
| 3 apps (Android Messages, Signal, Whatsapp) to talk to people?")
| Fiahil wrote:
| chasil wrote:
| Hug of death it is.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| Is the snark and reducing of the parent comment to a "bla bla
| bla" really necessary? We're all adults here, we can make a
| point while treating the other person with respect.
| zuck9 wrote:
| Sounds like more messaging app proliferation will lead to
| services like Texts.com / Matrix get even more popular.
| dymk wrote:
| I dunno, all my friends use at least a handful of messaging
| apps (iMessage, FB messenger, Discord, Telegram, SMS). Sure
| people grumble about a new messaging app but the younger
| generation seems to not have an issue adopting new things.
| TheNewsIsHere wrote:
| I wouldn't frame it as an issue around adopting new things.
| Some don't care, some go with the flow, and some prefer to
| make active choices about these kinds of things.
|
| I am very intentional and active when it comes to what has
| push notification privileges. I factor that into my app use
| consideration. I have multiple email accounts in two
| different email apps, each that send me notifications. I have
| Signal, Discord, iMessages and SMS. I have a few Google chat
| apps. I used to have WhatsApp and Wickr and Telegram. I have
| Skype, Teams, and two Mattermost servers.
|
| It's exhausting to constantly switch between these, so over
| the course of a few years I've been very clear in where
| people can expect to reach me reliably. If you need or want
| to chat with me on Discord, Skype, or Google whatever you
| need to send me an iMessage, SMS, Mattermost, or Signal
| message. Sending me a message anywhere else will get you a
| response only the next time I open that app. That only
| happens when someone specifically asks.
|
| I'm OK with having 63847394038 chat and video calling apps,
| but I'm not OK with being instantaneously notified by an
| infinity such apps. I can't be that available.
| usrusr wrote:
| And while older generations might be less willing to use a
| high number of apps side by side, having one kind of message
| in one app and the other kind of message in the other app is
| still much less confusing to them than dealing with the
| subtleties of multiprotocol if everything is forced through
| the single one-size-fits-all interface of a messenger that
| tries to do SMS on the side.
| eatwater123 wrote:
| Yeah, I can understand that; but I've brought over various
| older family members, and non-tech friends (as in people that
| wouldn't have ever heard the words Discord or Telegram before
| in their lives) to Signal. That's who this will impact most.
| theLastOfCats wrote:
| Why three tho? Use one - Telegram.
| rodgerd wrote:
| I, too, enjoy sharing my message history with the various
| Russian intelligence services.
| zingplex wrote:
| I don't think Telegram should really be seen as an
| alternative to Signal. It doesn't use E2E encryption by
| default.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Isn't Telegram partially closed source?
| _-david-_ wrote:
| There is an unofficial FOSS version. I'm not sure if it is
| feature complete, secure, etc.
|
| https://github.com/Telegram-FOSS-Team/Telegram-FOSS
| chasil wrote:
| I use Silence. It hasn't been updated in a while, but I like
| the way it looks.
|
| I don't know anybody else who uses Silence so I could exchange
| encrypted messages with them.
|
| Oh well. Maybe somebody here could resurrect this?
|
| https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.smssecure.smssecure/
|
| https://git.silence.dev/Silence/Silence-Android/
| Melatonic wrote:
| Yea this is super cool
| hgomersall wrote:
| Oh, I initially thought you were make a post-modern geeky
| witicism or something, but no, it really is a thing.
| pavon wrote:
| I absolutely agree. Personally, I've managed to convert around
| 3 times as many Android users as iOS users, because of this
| feature. And the few people who stopped using Signal after
| starting using it did so because of limitations in the SMS/MMS
| features (fewer number of users allowed in group text, etc). I
| fully expect to loose 2/3 of my Signal contacts as a result of
| this decision, and may drop it myself if the number remaining
| is too small to be worth running a separate app, as most of the
| ones left will probably be on Matrix as well.
|
| It also puts a spot-light on the "your phone number is your
| username" policy. This made perfect sense when you are using
| Signal for opportunistic encryption of texting. It is much less
| justifiable when using it as a Silo'd app. I really hope they
| change that and give people who were waiting for that change
| time to join before killing SMS support.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Signal encrypts your regular texts? I thought it specifically
| did not do that?
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| They say "opportunistic" as in similar to how iMessage
| works. If you're both on the platform, it's encrypted but
| you still can communicate with everyone else from one app.
|
| That's a _major_ boost for those that might not
| particularly care about encryption to look for specific
| messaging apps, while still helping by building out the
| network slowly over time.
| tadfisher wrote:
| The downside is that they will opportunistically send
| your messages via Signal. If the recipient chooses to not
| have SIgnal installed any longer, then your messages go
| into a black hole.
|
| This became much more of a problem for me after they
| rolled out their shitcoin; suddenly my techie friends
| were just not responding to messages, and Signal as my
| main SMS app was not falling back to SMS for these folks.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| Apple has the same problem, and an article and entire
| process for disabling it out of band, plus a heartbeat so
| it's done automatically after a while if you don't reset
| your phone. It's a major problem.
|
| I've only done the switch from iOS to Android once and I
| remember it was a pain for a few days until everything
| realized I didn't have iMessage anymore.
| technothrasher wrote:
| Even without an iPhone I sometimes miss texts from people
| using iMessage because my only occasionally used MacBook
| seems to randomly like to turn messages back on, and so
| anything from an Apple user ends up there instead of on
| my phone. It stays that way until I figure out I'm
| missing texts and go find them on the MacBook and have to
| manually turn off messages to it again.
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > If the recipient chooses to not have SIgnal installed
| any longer, then your messages go into a black hole.
|
| For two weeks, messages will be shown as sent but not
| delivered, and after two weeks Signal will not let you
| send messages to that number until it reconnects to the
| Signal servers.
|
| For comparison, Apple automatically sends all SMS
| messages via iMessage opportunistically, and if the user
| then switches to another phone, all SMS messages from iOS
| users will be _silently discarded in perpetuity_. This is
| a big problem because the recipient has no idea that they
| 're missing messages, and also if they no longer have
| access to an iPhone, there's no way for them to
| deregister their phone number from iMessage.
| zwily wrote:
| That hasn't been true for awhile:
|
| https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage/
|
| They will also deregister you automatically after some
| period of time. What you described is the situation
| several years ago, but it's much better now.
| chimeracoder wrote:
| That's a link to deregister a phone number from iMessage
| without an iPhone, which is good, but I don't see any
| text on that page that confirms that they'll deregister
| you automatically, or if there's any user-visible
| indication of the issue. If that's the case, then I'm
| glad they finally addressed it, because it was definitely
| a problem for far too long.
|
| In that case, Signal's current behavior would be
| comparable to Apple's, if Apple also deregisters you
| after a period of inactivity.
| [deleted]
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > The downside is that they will opportunistically send
| your messages via Signal. If the recipient chooses to not
| have SIgnal installed any longer, then your messages go
| into a black hole.
|
| The user cannot just log out of Signal and have the app
| on other people's devices automatically fall back on SMS
| the way it works with iMessage?
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| A lot of people will just delete an app and think there
| were no side-effects. There was an article here a few
| weeks ago about people not cancelling in-app
| subscriptions after deleting an app. Apple will remind
| you after it deletes it, Google does not.
|
| Logging out might not even be enough, depending on the
| logic on Signal's side. Do they use active devices, or
| just that an account exists?
| godelski wrote:
| > It also puts a spot-light on the "your phone number is your
| username" policy.
|
| I'm willing to bet that this decision is just jumping the gun
| by a month or two since usernames are around the corner (code
| exists, just not enabled. Can be used if built from source).
|
| Though I haven't had a hard time converting (Android) users
| by using another app. Especially people that already use WA.
| The "other app" just comes off as normal. Apple is a
| different ball game because the walled garden, but that's
| also the weakness because you can't send photos/videos in
| group chats with mixed devices (but Signal can).
| matsemann wrote:
| Is this outcry US specific? Don't think I've sent a single SMS
| the last decade here in EU.
| ascorbic wrote:
| The US seems to be the only place where everyone uses
| iMessage, so Android users have to use SMS and suffer the
| bizarre shaming of the green bubble. In most countries
| outside the US, WhatsApp seems to be the default. SMS is just
| legacy 2FA messages, and various other transactional messages
| like parcel delivery notifications.
| Macha wrote:
| Do you use Signal in the EU? Seems to be either WhatsApp or
| Telegram depending on how west or east you are.
| garciansmith wrote:
| Yes, exactly. The ability to send SMS from the Signal app has
| meant I've been pretty successful in getting Android users to
| switch to Signal. Every iOS user I know always just goes back
| to using iMessage. Now many of those Android users won't bother
| either.
| Kirby64 wrote:
| +1 to this. If Signal drops Android SMS support, I suspect
| it'll create friction within my friend group that uses it. I do
| not want yet another app for just text messages. No thank you.
| andrepd wrote:
| Honestly I'm pretty critical of the Signal app design: from the
| crypto nonsense, to the removal of chat bubble colors (used to
| be each person had a color, pretty useful in group chats), to
| the copious amounts of whitespace that have been linearly
| increasing for years, to the fact that the design has to change
| and break familiarity every 6 months or the devs have a stroke.
|
| But I actually like this decision. It makes things less
| confusing and accidental use of unsecure SMS impossible. The
| downside is if you still use SMS you have to keep 2 apps, back
| them up separately, etc.
|
| > "Why do I need 3 apps (Android Messages, Signal, Whatsapp)"
|
| "You need Signal to talk to people on Signal, WhatsApp to talk
| to people on WhatsApp, and Messages to talk to people on SMS."
| Seems more straightforward than "use WhatsApp to talk to people
| on WhatsApp and Signal to talk to people on Signal _or_ SMS;
| just pay attention to the color of the send button ".
| stevemk14ebr wrote:
| This issue for myself and many others is it makes something
| that used to be transparent, entirely unsupported. The UX is
| unambiguously worse. I could trust signal to upgrade my texts
| for me when possible, or not when my contacts were SMS. I
| don't care about always being encrypted 100% of the time.
| Signal was that perfect tradeoff between privacy, and ease of
| use, which is exceptionally rare. Providing this tradeoff is
| what made them popular, them going against it is
| counterproductive and will hurt them badly. I know this
| because now I'm considering leaving myself.
| fyvhbhn wrote:
| > Why do I need 3 apps (Android Messages, Signal, Whatsapp) to
| talk to people?
|
| Because Whatsapp and Signal are walled gardens. (Everyone knows
| why IM>sms)
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > Whatsapp and Signal are walled gardens.
|
| Until next year?
|
| https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-
| room/20220701IP...
| pmlnr wrote:
| No. Secrecy will have backdoor keys, but that is not what
| walled garden means: it means more like people have no
| power over the decisions made in the garden.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| I also deplore this.
|
| I hope it's communicated well to users who aren't readers of
| Signal's blog. I have relatives who use Signal, and they rely
| on its fallback-to-SMS feature, possibly without fully
| understanding it. I'll make sure they understand and are aware
| of this change, but others may be in the same position.
| xcdzvyn wrote:
| I fear Signal will follow their recent trend of ignoring
| unanimous user-base complaints a la Mobilecoin, fdroid, and
| third-party clients.
| fyvhbhn wrote:
| ... phone number use, lack of interoperability, keeping
| server source closed when it fits
| autoexec wrote:
| That ship sailed a long time ago. Signal's userbase
| overwhelmingly objected to having their sensitive
| information permanently stored in the cloud too, but signal
| ignored them.
|
| https://community.signalusers.org/t/dont-want-pin-dont-
| want-...
|
| Even when security concerns were brought up:
|
| https://community.signalusers.org/t/proper-secure-value-
| secu...
| pmlnr wrote:
| Signal seem to have adopted the "Decisions, not Options"[^1]
| route way too well, so don't act surprised.
|
| This is why we need at least open source clients that can be
| forked when these decisions are made.
|
| [^1]: https://wordpress.org/about/philosophy/
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| I have never understood why decisions and options have to be
| mutually exclusive. Yes, you want to have a rock-solid,
| thoughtfully-design default install for new and casual users.
| You can still have an advanced control panel with everything
| a power user could want.
| hgomersall wrote:
| Requisite XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1172/
| pmlnr wrote:
| It's not mutually exclusive at all, see KDE, but it takes
| more time, and people will have the option to mess it all
| up.
|
| Taking that factor away - allowing people to mess it up -
| makes it easier for developers.
| daedalus_j wrote:
| KDE is such a great example of how to do it right that I
| didn't even think of it. It just works so well and so
| transparently that I forget how great it is sometimes.
|
| Rock solid and both works and looks great right out of
| the box. So customizable that using literally anything
| else feels like using a Fisher-Price computer for
| toddlers.
| javajosh wrote:
| That review of KDE is so over-the-top it almost reads
| like satire. Is KDE really that great? (Using Gnome under
| Ubuntu - no complaints here. But I also am not sure what
| KDE is giving you. Control over look-and-feel of the
| windowing environment? Default utility applications?
| Perhaps a desktop API thick-client programmers can write
| against?
| numpad0 wrote:
| Should offering both service and its client app be regulated?
| causi wrote:
| _This is an awful decision. I 've converted some friends and
| family to Signal over the past years (it took a while) and it
| is now their default messaging app on their phones. This is
| going to confuse them and is going to make it difficult for me
| to keep convincing them that Signal is the route to use._
|
| I learned to stop trying to improve the technical lives of
| other people after Dropbox's decision to restrict free accounts
| to three devices resulted in a shitstorm of angry and confused
| messages from half the people I know.
| autoexec wrote:
| I'm happy to share the best information I have with others
| and most of them are glad that I do.
|
| I had recommended signal to others, but thankfully I've
| already warned those same people against continuing to use
| Signal years ago. Nobody was mad at me for Signal's actions
| and changing your default SMS app isn't hard anyway.
|
| I don't think you have to stop recommending things to people
| just because situations change. Hasn't everybody had some
| service or software they depended on go from great to shitty?
| It's just the nature of using someone else's stuff. At some
| point they get greedy or busy or decide to pivot into
| something different from what you want and you have to find
| something new. Isn't everyone used to that? Why would they
| blame you?
| TheNewsIsHere wrote:
| You know, I haven't really thought of it like this. Those for
| whom I take an interest in their technical lives typically
| get a spiel from me about whatever solution I'm offering.
| That spiel often includes something about how "they'll
| probably change this eventually in ways no one wants, but the
| most we can do is speak up. We probably won't get options."
|
| But I have to admit your perspective calls to me. I can
| imagine it would feel quite freeing.
|
| I'm in a minor mess of a situation with my dad's phone and
| computer because I've tried to be helpful. Now he resists
| help and that makes both of us frustrated.
| daedalus_j wrote:
| I've been using Signal for a long time. I have _repeatedly_ been
| unable to convince iOS users to use Signal because "I don't want
| another app". Android users have been much more willing to give
| it a shot.
|
| As an android user myself, I much prefer having SMS built in
| because I use the search feature often to look back through all
| my SMS/Signal chats. I also regularly forward an SMS message to a
| Signal user, or vice versa. I'm already starting to feel like
| those iOS users who told me "I don't want another app"...
|
| Signal seems to be trying to move further and further from "my
| preferred way to chat with people" and closer to the chat
| equivalent of "that protonmail account I only log in to when I
| need secrecy".
|
| I obviously love having security on messages in transit, but I
| also like being able to keep my message history around and search
| my conversations for something that happened a year ago. It seems
| like Signal is on a trajectory to turn everything into
| disappearing messages. Are they the "safe for activists"
| communication app, or the "let's try to make as many as possible
| safer by default" app? Feels like they don't know.
|
| And on top of it all the messaging is just frustrating. "we've
| taken away an incredibly useful and heavily used feature so we
| have development resource to better implement shitcoins and such"
| is such an irritating defense of the decision that I disabled my
| monthly donation.
| the_other wrote:
| > I have repeatedly been unable to convince iOS users to use
| Signal
|
| We don't seem to have this problem so bad in the UK/Europe.
| Most people I know have WhatsApp and/or Telegram, and FB
| messenger, and Signal (in my friend circles); all alongside
| SMS. I have very few iMessage groups, and use it mostly for
| 1to1 SMS with people I don't know well.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Every friend using iOS that I've convinced to use Signal has
| uninstalled it. They stay registered, though, so I have to
| notice that my messages aren't reaching them, and re-send as
| SMS.
| grammers wrote:
| This. I've switched to iOS recently and I hate that I need two
| apps now. Already longing to go back to Android.
| MikeKusold wrote:
| Just use iMessage. It's not as secure as Signal since the
| server has the keys, but it's the easiest way to ensure that
| the majority of text messages you send are encrypted.
|
| There was just an article that said that 88% of teens have an
| iPhone. That means that almost all of their communication is
| encrypted.
| Sirened wrote:
| fwiw, iMessage is actually E2E encrypted (without Apple
| storing the key) if you either don't have iCloud backup
| enabled OR don't enable "Message in the Cloud".
| Melcupa wrote:
| So when the server has the key, how can you say it's
| encrypted?
|
| I mean in context of signal we don't just talk about some
| form of transport encryption but e2e
| MikeKusold wrote:
| It's various levels of encryption that are acceptable
| depending on your risk level.
|
| I'm mainly concerned about SMS spoofing and mass
| surveillance. iMessage protects against that. The only
| way the government can read your messages is by serving
| Apple with a warrant to obtain your iCloud backup.
|
| If I had a lower risk tolerance, I would disable iCloud
| backups to improve my security.
| chaxor wrote:
| I don't think people are only concerned about the
| government, but rather the corporations that own your
| data (via storing the encryption key to use whenever they
| want, to look through whatever they want)
| Melcupa wrote:
| I mean you followed Snowden right?
|
| I would argue that if you are relevant enough apple and
| sms are both equally easy to get for them.
|
| If we talk here about signal, I don't think the
| alternative should be iMessage but telegram etc.
| MikeKusold wrote:
| Anecdotal evidence, but I've never had someone ask me to
| join Telegram.
|
| In terms of encrypted messaging, the popularity in my
| friend group is:
|
| 1. iMessage
|
| 2. Signal
|
| 3. WhatsApp (only for talking to non-US people)
|
| 4. Matrix
| aendruk wrote:
| When I switched from Android to iOS this was the number one
| technical regression, and for years my go-to example of nice
| things Apple keeps from us. It's unbelievable how Signal is
| sabotaging itself here.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| You need WhatsApp anyway, you'll have several apps whatever
| you do.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >You need WhatsApp anyway, you'll have several apps
| whatever you do.
|
| Do I? Not being snarky here, I just really don't understand
| why I _need_ WhatsApp.
|
| No one I know uses WhatsApp to communicate with me. No
| business I deal with uses WhatsApp to communicate with me.
|
| In fact, I'm not sure what value WhatsApp provides as I've
| _never_ used it.
|
| I'd appreciate it if you'd elucidate on your point. Mostly
| because if you're correct, I'm obviously missing something
| extremely important.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| I suppose it depends where you are. I'm in Europe.
|
| Almost everyone I message with defaults to WhatsApp, or
| even insists on it. A few also have Signal or Facebook
| Messenger or iMessage.
|
| SMS is only for notifications and such. Even some
| businesses default to WhatsApp.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| My understanding is that in many places outside the US
| it's near-universal. I've never used it myself either.
| nicholasjarnold wrote:
| I agree completely here. This is terrible news from my
| perspective too. I use Signal for _all messaging_ (e2e secure
| or not) for the reasons that you mention.
|
| I've onboarded friends and family, too, ensuring them it should
| be set as their default messaging app and that it _just works_.
| Unfortunately, people in the general population seem to have
| pretty much zero tolerance for any friction whatsoever. If they
| have to use 2 apps, they'll just end up communicating with me
| in the clear using their "default SMS" app on their phone.
| That's what this is going to result it...a reduction in overall
| message security due to people defaulting to what's
| easier...which is to _not_ have to remember which app to use
| for which "send a message" purpose. Fuck.
|
| I understand the argument about people in markets where SMS is
| expensive getting screwed sometimes when they don't realize
| they're sending a message over SMS. However could that not be
| fairly trivially solved for with some UI notification or app
| setting that warns you about this and allows the warning to be
| perm-disabled if the user doesn't care!?
|
| I think the real reason here is this desire to transition the
| service into supporting usernames, which is a topic that's been
| discussed before (and is explicitly mentioned in the post).
| Right now the service is tied to your phone number. After this
| change I suspect it will not be or not need to be.
|
| This is very, very unfortunate for those of us who've convinced
| a ton of non-technical friends and family to use
| TextSecure->Signal over the years...
| nextos wrote:
| I don't like some of the decisions taken by Signal.
|
| However, if "dropping support for SMS messaging also frees up
| our capacity to build new features (yes, like usernames)", I
| think it is something I would not miss.
|
| Besides, I agree with them on the point that SMS leak
| metadata.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| But that's just a bullshit promise (in the sense of not
| being anchored to any commitment), no different from a
| politician saying some policy initiative will create jobs
| because that's how the economy works.
|
| SMS does leak metadata but guess what, that leakage is
| going to continue because people aren't going to just cut
| off their SMS-only-using friends and relatives. Now they'll
| be leaking Metadata from an even less secure app, so the
| user is in no way better off.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| This "I don't want another app" thing is senseless to me. Why?
| What does it hurt having more than one communication channel?
| In my experience people that say this generally have no space
| on their phone, usually because of an unfettered willingness to
| install the taco bell app and the Starbucks app and whatever
| else.
|
| Their underlying reasoning is correct. SMS sucks, really really
| bad. They're a secure communications channel. People see signal
| and think they're secure. Signal has no business supporting
| SMS. The on boarding has reached critical mass, the neyworke
| effect is here. If you're smart you'll abandon SMS altogether
| forever and just tell people to reach you some other way, not
| ditch the actual, over the internet encrypted channel.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| There's another reason for iOS users to avoid Signal: It eats
| up Gigabytes of storage space, refuses to ever clear it, and
| the devs are rather resistant to accepting that it's even a
| problem at all: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-
| iOS/issues/4916
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| Weird. Signal is my primary messaging app (on iOS) and I'm
| sitting at 196MB storage used.
| adfm wrote:
| Since there's no server storing media, consider saving the
| stuff you want and dumping all the old photos and video you
| don't. It's a more secure communication tool, not an archive.
| Y-bar wrote:
| Yeah, that would be nice. But an export-import. Or any
| backup function whatsoever is sorely missing on iOS.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| How do I dump all the old photos and videos?
|
| Because the in-app option to clear them all does not free
| the space.
| xeromal wrote:
| People usually want both and that's what causes most people
| to ignore good tools.
| godelski wrote:
| Signal is in a weird place where they can do no right by
| users. It's a team of like 25 developers building
| extremely complex software criticized by people that
| don't understand security and trivialize everything.
| Reddit has a lot of evangelists that can't even program.
| Their community forums are a dumpster fire where users
| act like "my way or the world is going to end" (see the
| current username discussion. Most people are fair but you
| see[0]). Anything they say on Twitter gets spammed with
| questions about usernames by people that can't be
| bothered to see that it is in alpha testing and available
| for custom builds. And on HN everyone criticizes Signal
| and compares it to Matrix which is always better for
| every single purpose.
|
| I do like Signal and I think they have done a lot of
| good. I do think they have a lot of valid criticism
| against them but also I think a lot of people aren't
| providing useful criticism (it is a shame that's
| happening here, on a forum that should be filled with
| tech experts). People also aren't realistic. A 25 person
| team working at a non-profit aren't going to have the
| same development capacity as a 250 person team.
|
| [0] (maybe go to the bottom)
| https://community.signalusers.org/t/usernames-in-
| signal/9157
| chaxor wrote:
| What do you "Matrix is always better for every single
| purpose"? Are you saying that you really believe that, or
| characterizing others as saying that wrongly? I don't
| know much about either, but I thought both had somewhat
| new (less-tested) encryption algos (one is 'double-
| ratchet' or something? that recently has shown security
| vulnerabilities?)
| godelski wrote:
| I'm saying that people put Matrix/Element in competition
| with Signal. These used to be dominating voices here. I
| do think the Matrix == Slack and Signal == Text
| philosophy has become more prominent now (the philosophy
| I prescribe to). But there are also major discussions
| about decentralization and users would suggest Matrix was
| more secure because of that even though at the time group
| chats were not encrypted (they are now) and E2EE was not
| enabled by default.
|
| These are purely my observations of the discourse around
| Signal and should not be taken as a universal truth. Only
| my subjective reality.
|
| I'm not aware of any major vulnerabilities in Matrix (but
| I'm not following) closely. I'm also not aware of any in
| Signal, which I know is frequently audited. There is an
| SGX attack, but it is often blown out of proportion
| (highly technical attack that requires an unlocked phone
| to be in the physical hands of the attacker).
| cassonmars wrote:
| Doing so comes at a cost to privacy -- by signal having a
| hosting server, even if the contents are E2EE, retrieving
| and storing these contents creates a metadata trail. I
| actually go over these drawbacks and tradeoffs in a
| recent blog post:
| https://cassieheart.substack.com/p/notes-on-e2ee
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Who said anything about a hosting server? Why isn't there
| a simple option to export a conversation to _local
| storage_ , encrypted or unencrypted, along with a warning
| that 'your conversation is now leaving the secure Signal
| zone.'
| cassonmars wrote:
| For starters, signal retains a conversation for the
| length of time you grant. That can be indefinite. The way
| it is retained is in a local storage database. It is
| intentionally guarded against export (although this is
| somewhat unavoidable with backup features on phones), so
| as to avoid companies like Cellebrite making it easy for
| LE to overstep their bounds and pull the message database
| when they take your phone. If you want some kind of
| export interface, your best option is a screenshot --
| signal does not take any action that threatens the mutual
| security between parties as explicitly agreed.
| chopin wrote:
| It's not only your conversation but the one of others
| too. I like that it's hard to move it elsewhere.
| daedalus_j wrote:
| If you don't trust the other end then disappearing
| messages should be used, simple.
|
| This is one of the problems with Signal having a bit of
| confusion about what exactly it's use-case is. There are
| plenty of cases where locking down the ability to
| save/view/export messages are valuable, and Signal
| provides tools to be able to do that. Making that the
| mandatory case though means that it's harder to adopt as
| a general-purpose communication platform.
|
| The need to decide if the goal is still to get as many
| people off of SMS/facebook-messenger as possible, or if
| the goal is to provide extreme security to dissidents and
| protestors, or if they're going to spend the effort to be
| able to do both effectively and let you choose which
| conversations or messages get which level of protection.
| dangus wrote:
| How? I'm looking for a "delete all messages over X days
| old" option.
|
| Not "delete all my chats/delete an entire thread."
| jay3ss wrote:
| On Android:
|
| Settings > Data and storage > Manage storage > Keep
| messages
|
| then choose from the listed options
| dangus wrote:
| Unfortunately, the option isn't available on iOS, unless
| it's hiding somewhere else.
| daedalus_j wrote:
| I'd take a decent "export my chats" option. I have chat
| history that goes back years that it's often convenient to
| be able to search. I'd love to be able to move it off the
| device, but instead the Signal backup just keeps getting
| larger and larger.
|
| To be clear, Signal allows you to backup and restore back
| into Signal on android, which is great. What I meant is
| that it would be helpful to be able to export that content
| out of signal and keep an accessible searchable archive off
| of the device.
| godelski wrote:
| > I have chat history that goes back years that it's
| often convenient to be able to search.
|
| > but instead the Signal backup just keeps getting larger
| and larger...
|
| One begets the other.
|
| > I'd love to be able to move it off the device
|
| If you don't want infinite history, set a conversation
| length limit. It is in the storage settings.
|
| If you want to backup messages on iOS go complain
| here[0]. For Android, you already have this ability.
|
| [0]https://community.signalusers.org/t/ios-backup-
| keeping-messa...
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Being rude to people by dismissing feature requests as
| invalid isn't helpful.
| godelski wrote:
| Sorry, I'm not trying to be rude. But I am confused at
| what they want. We have continued the discussion and the
| picture is clearer to me. Though I'm not sure exactly how
| Signal can help with it. It still appears to me that the
| user wants both reduced storage but to maintain search
| history, which are at odds with one another. Unless they
| expect Signal to store their history, which those
| expectations should be shot down because that is against
| their core philosophy. I did suggest a hack that might
| fit their needs (full history on desktop but not phone).
| anigbrowl wrote:
| How can you be confused?
|
| 'I'd take a decent "export my chats" option' is a very
| simple statement. There is no way within Signal to just
| export a whole conversation to a file.
| godelski wrote:
| > There is no way within Signal to just export a whole
| conversation to a file.
|
| You can on Android and Desktop. On Mac see
| ~/Library/Application\ Support/Signal for your data. The
| only issue is with iOS which I agree is an issue, but
| does not seem to be the parent's issue.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| GP also said they want to be able to search their chat,
| however, which I believe is the source of the confusion.
| daedalus_j wrote:
| If I set a conversation length limit though it prevents
| my ability to search back through my history, which is
| the feature I'd like to preserve. I value that history,
| it's useful to me.
|
| My ideal solution would be to export any message older
| than a month to an archive on my NAS, ideally in a format
| that the app could search on request. Keep my history,
| keep the on-device space nice and small.
|
| I take advantage of the Android backup feature, and the
| backup syncs over to my NAS via SyncThing automatically,
| but that's only useful for restoring a brand new phone up
| to the latest state.
| godelski wrote:
| > My ideal solution would be to export any message older
| than a month to an archive on my NAS
|
| I'm confused at what is stopping you from doing this?
|
| > ideally in a format that the app could search on
| request.
|
| Are you not able to import these backups into the desktop
| client? IIRC it is just reading from a file structure. I
| don't see why a small script couldn't resolve this.
| Obviously you wouldn't be able to search on your phone,
| but you said you didn't want that data on your phone
| anyways. If you did want to search on your phone from
| your computer's storage, I think you're asking way too
| much of them (and in danger of asking them to store data
| for you, which they never will do). But this is hacker
| news, and I don't see why you can't hack together that
| tool in a weekend. Probably just a few beers on a Friday
| is enough for it tbh.
| [deleted]
| daedalus_j wrote:
| > I'm confused at what is stopping you from doing this?
|
| As far as I know the backup is encrypted.
|
| > Are you not able to import these backups into the
| desktop client?
|
| No, the desktop client is not standalone, and ONLY syncs
| with the a phone to get content. Moreover, if you don't
| use the client for a period (2-3 weeks in my experience?)
| it de-syncs that desktop client. Re-connecting that
| desktop to your phone will only sync messages starting
| as-of the connection, so there's no way to get the
| desktop app to pull your whole history. (This is another
| gripe I have about their sacrifice of actual usability
| for security that only helps a few very specific use-
| cases.)
|
| You're probably rigth about hacking something together.
| Someone has created a library [0] allegedly for decoding
| the backup files. Friday night is D&D night though, so I
| haven't had the chance. :-)
|
| [0] https://github.com/pajowu/signal-backup-decode
| andrepd wrote:
| Precisely! So just give me an option to export my stuff to
| a password-protected archive. Make me check a "yes I'm
| fully aware that this means I am now responsible for the
| security of this information" if you want. But Signal
| doesn't let me do this.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Except that they make it a pain in the ass to save the
| stuff you want, because there isn't an easy 'export
| conversation' function. You can archive conversations so
| that old ones don't clutter up your chat list, but the only
| thing you can do with an archived conversation is...un-
| archive it. It has literally zero utility.
|
| Your only way of saving things is to either manually save
| every picture and video, or manually highlight and copy the
| text in your conversations. The latter defeats any security
| arguments (other than of inconvenience) but also throws
| away useful information like timestamps of messages.
|
| My Signal database takes up many GB on my phone, and it's
| constantly complaining about running out of space. Much of
| this is the years-long record of conversations with my
| wife. I'd like to back these up, but I can't. Are you gonna
| tell me that I shouldn't be using a secure messaging app to
| communicate with my own family members?
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| The biggest issue I can see with using two separate apps is
| checking who's on Signal and who isn't. That means opening up
| Signal to see if they're on there and then switching to SMS if
| they aren't. I much prefer having both types of contacts in the
| same UI and it's been obvious to me which messages are secure.
| Also, when someone then joins Signal, subsequent messages to
| them automatically get upgraded to being secure with no effort
| on my part.
| CommitSyn wrote:
| Yes... Unless it's able to somehow alert you that you're
| texting someone with Signal, it seems like Signal will be
| phased out because everyone will default to SMS, unless they
| have a reason to use Signal for a conversation, which hurts
| the entire privacy ecosystem.
| Krasnol wrote:
| ...and there I am here in Germany where nobody seems to use SMS
| anymore.
|
| I couldn't care less about this.
| codethief wrote:
| > in Germany where nobody seems to use SMS anymore.
|
| That's not true at all. I assume that besides Signal you use
| WhatsApp, though?
| Krasnol wrote:
| I haven't met a single person using SMS for so long that I
| can't even remember the phone I had last time I used it. I
| do work with a lot different contractors.
|
| And yes, WhatsApp is prevalent here.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| You're saying this as if it were preferable to give all
| your contacts and metadata to WhatsApp/Facebook.
| groestl wrote:
| Didn't even realize there was SMS built into Signal (apart
| from the "Invite via SMS" screen once in a while).
| jhoechtl wrote:
| Austrians don't care too.
|
| I can't understand who and why anyone cares about SMS these
| day, besides receiving government emergency notifications.
| maratc wrote:
| Phone-based 2FA hasn't got to Austria yet?
| dopa42365 wrote:
| Most sites and platforms use HOTP/TOTP (RFC 4226/RFC
| 6238) for 2FA, use an authenticator app of your choice.
|
| Regardless of that, you can still always receive SMS for
| the 3 outdated services that still use it.
| Krasnol wrote:
| Phone-based 2FA isn't really the problem here no?
|
| I don't even open the SMS program if I get a code. I type
| it from the notification area. I certainly don't have to
| answer to it.
| berndinox wrote:
| Not via SMS, anymore
| godelski wrote:
| > I have repeatedly been unable to convince iOS users to use
| Signal because "I don't want another app".
|
| Here's how I've convinced my iPhone friends. I tell them if
| they actually want to send pictures and videos to me that
| aren't potato quality they can either switch to an Android,
| email me, or use Signal. At this point Signal is more like a
| cross platform iMessage. This tends to move people over because
| Apple's walled garden makes group chats infeasible with mixed
| devices.
| fsflover wrote:
| Signal is another walled garden, where you have no say in
| their decisions and simply must obey or leave. Consider
| Matrix if you want to have the freedom.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| The only reason this isn't a dealbreaker for me is because
| their sms implementation was so buggy and feature-poor that I
| would never have used it.
|
| (The only reason I use signal is to talk to my girlfriend. The
| only reason we use it is early in our relationship I was going
| through a phase where I adopted annoying privacy tools. I
| wanted to abandon it, but after years of using it she's
| developed positive emotional associations between our
| relationship and signal, so for non-technical reasons she likes
| to keep using it just to talk to me)
| CommitSyn wrote:
| Yes, this is an idiotic decision that makes me question the
| decisions being made as a whole by Signal.
|
| Does anyone have recommendations for a good default SMS app on
| Android?
| rtcoms wrote:
| SMS Organizer by Microsoft
|
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft..
| ..
| whoibrar wrote:
| Been using this for years, I really like the Updates and
| finances tab.
|
| https://i.imgur.com/hUABKGr.jpg
| DesiLurker wrote:
| _shudder_
| Markoff wrote:
| Pulse SMS is really good, but I blacklisted updates since
| they were bought in 2020
|
| https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/10/29/it-looks-like-
| pulse...
|
| QKsms is open source but abandoned more than a year, so I
| guess Simple SMS at Fdroid should be ok, it's from the guy
| behind Simple Gallery
| wslack wrote:
| The provide a fairly clear rationale beyond the ideological
| concern: users don't know/see who is on SMS and who isn't,
| and are being hit with high fees, and they are concerned that
| users may believe they have privacy when they do not.
|
| These are reasonable issues and concerns, so I don't follow
| why you would question all of the other decisions they make.
| rodgerd wrote:
| If only there were a company that had, at some point,
| demonstrated that you can use indicators such as colour to
| indicate to users whether their messages were being
| transported via SMS or an E2E secure transport layer.
|
| I guess that's just a pipe dream though.
| roer wrote:
| There are surely ways around this that don't limit the
| functionality of the application
| dylan604 wrote:
| As if Signal couldn't change the color of the text
| bubbles to some shade of, let's just say, green, to
| indicate when a user is chatting via SMS instead of a
| Signal secured message.
| maratc wrote:
| And then everybody and their dog would accuse them of
| green-shaming or whatever.
| dylan604 wrote:
| No such thing as bad PR, unless you're removing features.
| Having people green-shame just means there are other
| people that are rolling their eyes and still getting
| their name out there.
| busymom0 wrote:
| Couldn't they just do something like have the sms messages
| in a different color than the rest? Similar to how iOS used
| blue for iMessage and green for texts? Signal could use an
| annoying red color for sms to make it even more clear.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Not sure if this is a joke given that Signal uses Blue
| for sms and Red for encrypted...
| busymom0 wrote:
| I am on iOS and have never seen red. Only see blue. Color
| can be customized though.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I didn't specifically sate "on Android" since on iOS all
| messages are through Signal.
| nh2 wrote:
| > users don't know/see who is on SMS and who isn't
|
| They could just show the literal word "SMS" in the send
| button.
|
| I think that would be more obvious than wha they do now
| (button being grey instead of blue with a minimally changed
| lock symbol [1]).
|
| [1]: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-
| us/articles/360007318911#an...
| Markoff wrote:
| so put SMS in different tab and let users turn on/off this
| feature in settings, done, problem solved, but I understand
| giving users options nowadays ain't trendy
| autoexec wrote:
| Silence is like a less polished version of Signal. The only
| important feature I really think it's lacking is a search
| function. You can export your texts to an XML file though, so
| to find something from a long time ago I just export to a
| file and use grep to search through that.
| evandale wrote:
| I've been using Chomp SMS a long time and it's still being
| updated.
| cannam wrote:
| Yeah, I like Chomp. As I recall, I first installed it
| because it had an optional emoji pack with the old blob
| emojis in it, which I was miffed to have had taken away
| from me in an Android update.
| neogodless wrote:
| Posted elsewhere in this thread but...
|
| Personally like TextraSMS. Has a free ad-supported version,
| but I paid to remove ads when it was on sale several years
| ago (maybe $1).
|
| 4.4 stars. I believe it's $3 or $5 to remove ads now.
|
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.textra
|
| Also surprised me the other day when a friend used an iOS
| reaction, and it applied it correctly on my end.
|
| > Added support for Reactions (also known as Tapbacks)
| received from iOS Apple devices.
| davchana wrote:
| I am also using it on both devices, and I also paid for it
| using Google Opinion Credits :) Textra is an amazing SMS
| app.
| genpfault wrote:
| https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.simplemobiletools.smsmes.
| .. ?
| Stamp01 wrote:
| This is what I'm switching to. I would have suggested
| Textra, but when I downloaded it just now, TrackerControl
| told me there are a bunch of tracking libraries in it.
| Simple SMS Messenger, on the other hand, not only doesn't
| have any tracking libraries, but doesn't ask for internet
| access!
|
| I've used other tools in the Simple suite and I love them.
|
| Although I like using F-Droid, this app is also available
| on the regular Play Store as well.
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| I've been using QKSMS on Android 12 and haven't had any
| problems in about a year of use. I think its on Google Play
| as well.
|
| https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=com.moez.QKSMS
| _-david-_ wrote:
| Last commit was a year ago. Do you know if it is still
| being developed?
| daedalus_j wrote:
| Doesn't look good...
| https://github.com/moezbhatti/qksms/issues/1881
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| I'm not sure, but I haven't had any issues or want any
| more features than it already has so it's not an problem
| for me, but might be for some.
| jmcphers wrote:
| The Google Messages app is pretty good. It's a little thing,
| but it's the only app that supports tapbacks from iOS -- so
| on the (many) group threads I'm on that have iPhone users, I
| can see loves/like reactions instead of a flood of texts that
| say "Jane Doe loved an image".
| LtWorf wrote:
| It's terrible. Every once in a while they decide to
| convince me that I really don't want to be sending an SMS
| but I want to use google's messenger of the month, that
| will inevitably be gone next month.
| gs17 wrote:
| Huh, it's never done that to me. How often does it
| happen?
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Every time it updates it asks me if I want to enable
| "messaging features" the next time it opens.
| LtWorf wrote:
| Used to happen to push duo. I installed an sms app from
| fdroid after that.
| metamet wrote:
| I also use the "messages for web" sync that Google Messages
| offer: https://messages.google.com/web/
|
| Really convenient to be able to respond to texts without
| having to take out my phone.
| MAGZine wrote:
| +1 google messages.
|
| rcs support works well, the emoji reactions are good. the
| web ui for it is pretty alright. I use the quick responses
| and scheduled send from time to time. and it cleans up my
| 2fa codes automatically.
|
| Also, it now sends emoji reactions over sms which is a nice
| little graceful degredation from sms.
| S201 wrote:
| This is an idiotic decision. There are real issues around
| improving the UX for making it more clear when a message was sent
| as SMS instead of being encrypted and dealing with the problem of
| undelivered messages because the recipient uninstalled the app,
| but to drop SMS support entirely instead of improving those pain
| points? Terrible, terrible decision.
| ecuaflo wrote:
| im surprised by all the tech readers here saying this is bad. do
| y'all not care about privacy? the main reason is sms compromises
| that
| omgmajk wrote:
| This is sooo bad. It doesn't matter what reason they give, this
| is the only reason I can get some people to use Signal and it's
| the main reason I found it interesting in the first place.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| This is the type of occurrence which leads me to refer to most
| user-service relationships as non-consensual.
|
| The user enters the relationship consensually, but the choices
| about the service's operations are done without the user's
| consent.
|
| In this case, the user's only choices are to either abandon the
| service, or to put up with the changes they did not consent to.
|
| In the future, with data portability being common and table
| stakes for most services, I think there will be a third option:
| seamless transition to a different service, preserving all data,
| metadata, relationships, and user accounts.
|
| This is already possible with existing, established technology:
| private keys, hashing, and text files.
|
| We have a bright future to look forward to, where this type of
| change will be perceived as old-fashioned and barbaric as surgery
| without anesthetic.
| Ninjinka wrote:
| This is beyond stupid. This is the only way I was able to
| convince friends to use Signal. Heck, it's one of the only
| reasons I used it myself. Didn't have to juggle two apps.
| dark_glass wrote:
| This change will have fewer people use Signal. One reason I was
| able to convince friends and family to start using it is because
| it is so seamless. I fear that with this change, Signal for most
| users will simply become unused, resulting in less e2e encrypted
| messaging overall.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Why oh why do you want to drive me away? Signal was and is the
| only messenger I use (one exception: WA with my mom).
|
| First this wallet thing, now no SMS? Why not try to figure out a
| way to use encrypted SMS?
| crimsoneer wrote:
| This seems very silly, and will probably lead to me dropping
| signal?
| joemazerino wrote:
| I do not like this decision. Using Signal as a main SMS provider
| makes it easier for me to collect all of my messages in one
| place. Now I have to, YET AGAIN, download an SMS app for use
| while keeping Signal active.
|
| I'm glad privacy is becoming mainstream but dislike lowering the
| bar for adoption to where it profoundly affects users.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| It makes me yearn for the days with Pidgin where I had IRC,
| Google Chat (XMPP back then), AOL and whatever else chat
| protocols all running through the same client.
|
| That's what is nice about signals implementation is it stands.
| It supports acting as the SMS default app on android and
| defaults to signal when it can.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| One thing I liked about those multi-protocol clients is that
| some of them supported the OTR libraries for E2EE encrypted
| messages regardless of platform used. A couple of the
| implementations would automatically handshake with others to
| see if they supported OTR.
| lapinot wrote:
| > That's what is nice about signals implementation is it
| stands.
|
| Sure they handle SMS, but the real problem here is that
| Signal is just another walled garden: they have an overtly
| negative stance towards alternative clients, while also
| having very bad support for anything besides android/ios:
| they have a bad desktop client and they don't have a nice
| library. Altogether this means that Signal is overtly and
| willingly against things like Pidgin / multi-protocol clients
| or overlay, which is _what the users want_ (ie not caring
| about protocols).
|
| Signal doesn't want to deal with SMS anymore, which from an
| engineering and high-stakes security pov is a completely
| valid decision. Yet if it had clean and open local API or a
| simple and portable client library, or had a stable server
| API, then someone else could provide multi-protocol clients,
| tailored to each platform in a secure and stable way.
| erohead wrote:
| This is why we are building https://www.beeper.com
| codethief wrote:
| FYI Part of your website is broken on Firefox for Android.
| (Broken layout, content not shown etc.)
|
| Now to my actual question: How is Beeper compatible with
| the ToS of platforms like Instagram and Facebook that, to
| my knowledge, don't allow their users to use 3rd-party
| apps? Case in point: I recently wanted to use a FOSS 3rd-
| party messaging app for Instagram and my account got
| promptly banned.
|
| Question 2: Do you support full message backups in a well-
| documented format?
| fyvhbhn wrote:
| I doubt your phone doesn't have a default sms app.
|
| Anyways e2ee and sms doesn't mix well
| throwawayben wrote:
| The comments here are so bizarre to me. I think this must be a
| USA thing.
|
| I had no idea signal even supported SMS, nor do I know anybody
| who uses SMS
| endorphine wrote:
| Same here. I also considered this being a US-only thing. I
| couldn't care less about SMS.
|
| In fact, I hope getting rid of SMS support adds some capacity
| to the team for features/fixes I care the most about.
| Symbiote wrote:
| I don't send many SMSs, but I receive them: package delivery
| notifications, automatic appointment reminders, a message to
| say my car has been repaired, 2FA codes.
|
| I found it useful to have all these messages in a single place,
| although this change probably won't inconvenience me too much.
| However, I don't see any benefit.
| guerrilla wrote:
| SMS is used heavily by companies in Sweden too, for pretty much
| all notifications and often chat too. This is going to be a
| pain in the ass.
| Kiro wrote:
| Where do you live where people do not use SMS? In most
| countries I've been to and lived in in Europe SMS was very much
| used.
| keb_ wrote:
| It is a US thing. The majority of folks in the US still use SMS
| for text chat. The alternative is buying into a proprietary
| platform like WhatsApp, but not _everyone_ you talk to is going
| to be on WhatsApp /FB Messenger/iMessage, etc, so you end up
| having 5 different chat apps installed on your phone at any
| time. SMS has been the only real ubiquitous one despite all its
| flaws.
| roer wrote:
| I don't live in the US, and SMS support has been essential in
| convincing people from my parents' generation to give signal a
| try. I personally also like not ever having to open my phone's
| stock message app when I once in a while _do_ get an SMS
| subarctic wrote:
| mercacona wrote:
| Signal developer giving some extra context to the news:
|
| https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-blog-removing-sms...
|
| > So I guess the TL;DR is: SMS is on it's way out in general, and
| in a world where Signal supports SMS, all of SMS's shortcomings
| are often attributed to Signal itself, all while confusing people
| into thinking their SMS's are secure.
| lucideer wrote:
| This is bizarre.
|
| If this were an in-depth announcement with a long and well-
| structured technical justification attached, I could understand.
| Though I suspect I'd likely disagree with the decision, I could
| probably accept it as a simple different of opinion if the
| arguments were evidently well-thought-through and considered.
|
| This blog-post is so lightweight. There's no technical analysis.
| There's barely any justification. Yes we know SMS is insecure and
| yes - it seems plainly obvious that having them in the same UI
| could pose UX challenges & user confusion issues. So improve the
| UX and clarify the distinction. Did anyone in Signal consider the
| userbase or the advantages of this feature at all?
|
| Definitely the end of my Signal usage anyway. It's my main SMS
| app: my primary motivator is SMS UX, the ability to securely
| message a tiny subset of my friends is a very nice but ultimately
| non-vital bonus. Having a separate app for those people isn't
| worth my while (they're on other platforms I use more).
|
| The migration off it will be an unwelcome pain...
| rlpb wrote:
| > Definitely the end of my Signal usage anyway. It's my main
| SMS app: my primary motivator is SMS UX, the ability to
| securely message a tiny subset of my friends is a very nice but
| ultimately non-vital bonus.
|
| I think this is the crux of it. Your primary motivator may be
| for a better SMS UX. But Signal's primary motivator is to
| provide universal secure messaging, but your typical use of
| Signal doesn't do that. So it's no surprise that their plans
| mismatch your expectations.
| lucideer wrote:
| > _your typical use of Signal doesn 't do that_
|
| All centralised & protocol-locked messaging apps are subject
| to network effect. People moving away from Signal doesn't
| help the goal of universal secure messaging, regardless of
| whether those people are you or I.
|
| That said, it seems they're between a rock & a hard place
| here since Google are defacto deprecating support for 3rd-
| party SMS apps.
| [deleted]
| dodgerdan wrote:
| Improving UI/UX around to clarify the SMS function is insecure
| is almost impossible. Google did research around SSL cert
| warnings a few years back, their conclusion was that people
| don't read and just dismiss warnings, no mater what UI was. A
| frightening percentage of people also think the security
| padlock icon is actually a handbag.
|
| Most people simply lack the technical basis to understand the
| security implications of sms. And for Signal to be a secure
| messaging system by default SMS needs to be removed.
| lucideer wrote:
| The only similarity between these two UX scenarios is that
| they involve encrypted network protocols. From a user
| standpoint there's no similarities.
|
| Firstly, the messaging decision is presented to the user
| before an action (send SMS/Signal). It's capable of blocking
| and takes place as part of an active use flow where the user
| is trying to complete a task. With browsers, the
| differentiation in UI is displayed after a user action. It
| doesn't block and the user doesn't require interaction to
| achieve any goal. Why on earth should they pay any attention
| to it?
|
| Secondly, the UX for messaging is an equivalent paths binary
| decision: you're asking people to choose A or B. There isn't
| an inherent default so a user doesn't start out with a bias
| toward one or the other. They can easily be required to read
| to proceed.
|
| With browsers it's a yes/no binary decision: the default
| (yes) is insecure (for an insecure website). It requires no
| action from the user. The secure option (no, leave) asks the
| user to do something. It's a choice between inaction
| (insecure) or action (secure). That's heavily stacked.
|
| Lastly, even the context surrounding the apps themselves is
| incomparably different. One is a security upgrade of an
| application everyone's been using for decades (often
| unknowingly; "the icon for the internet"). The other is an
| app people consciously download and install explicitly for
| security reasons (regardless of whether they understand those
| security reasons it's at least the motivating factor).
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| That's assuming a lot of context. Your talking about a tiny
| icon next to the address bar in a browser. Of course people
| didn't always know what that was!
|
| Signal's primary feature is encrypted messaging. You don't
| get it without at least seeing the word "encrypted"
| somewhere.
| dodgerdan wrote:
| Counter point most people think Telegram is e2ee secure
| messaging, but Telegram never said they were.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| And that doesn't get clarified by UI that distinguishes
| between encrypted messages and SMS, because Telegram
| doesn't have such a thing to distinguish between.
|
| My point is that all of this is orthogonal to whether
| _Signal_ can successfully make UI show users when they
| are sending encrypted messages vs unencrypted SMS.
|
| Most of the confusion you are citing is about whether an
| app does encryption or not, and that is a totally
| distinct problem domain.
| dodgerdan wrote:
| You've failed to make a distinction between e2e
| encryption and TLS encryption, how do you explain that in
| UI?
| krater23 wrote:
| The people you talk about see no sense to use signal at all.
| So why should they install it when they have SMS? And when
| Signal is installed, why should the change the app and use
| signal instead of SMS?
| neogodless wrote:
| Here's a (partially?) non-technical justification they shared
| on the Community forums.
|
| https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-blog-removing-sms...
| 1MachineElf wrote:
| Thanks. This link should really be higher up in the comments.
| The community forums discussion is much more interesting than
| the blog post.
| lucideer wrote:
| That post is an excellent justification. Makes perfect sense
| and it's hard to find fault with it.
|
| Wonder why the blog post omitted all of that and focused on
| nonsense instead?
| fluidcruft wrote:
| Yeah, I 100% agree with you about that and the more I've
| been digesting that explanation, the more I see why this is
| the correct thing to do.
|
| Hopefully this even frees them to do things we've wanted
| for a long time... like not being tied to a phone number
| and offering better features than RCS/iMessage. Maybe even
| having multiple independent profiles/pseudonyms for
| compartmentalization.
|
| That's how Signal could be growing the base and interop
| with SMS/MMS/RCS cruft on one platform will always lack the
| killer feature and be irrelevant to the other platforms. If
| Signal were better than SMS/RCS/iMessage people will just
| use it for those reasons in addition to the security and
| privacy.
|
| And having just installed the beta and used the SMS export
| and allowed it to purge all of SMS content from Signal into
| Google Messages it actually sort of is nice that the app is
| now ONLY the "Signal" context. I'm... actually pretty okay
| with SMS belonging to the "Stuff that Creepy Companies Like
| Google Know" context.
|
| Basically this just does what Signal already does in iOS:
| it must compete with the native messaging client. Google is
| already playing RCS as SMS upgrade and Signal is making the
| correct strategic decision to not make a play for RCS. SMS
| support is just going to lead to whining about lack of RCS.
| The bottom line is both Apple and Google are out to kill
| SMS. With SMS gone, Signal can just move on to feature
| parity with iMessage and beyond while leapfrogging whatever
| messaging clusterfuck Google keeps producing. Google can
| have SMS for all I care. We can't have iMessage on Android,
| but we can have Signal on both Android and iOS.
| g_sch wrote:
| What kind of technical analysis would you be looking for?
| Reading the post, it seems like their analysis came down to (1)
| fundamental values, i.e. not including insecure communications
| within an app when they've built their brand around being
| secure, and (2) UX confusion resulting in additional SMS costs
| and/or inadvertent data leakage. The former is a
| straightforward question of product strategy. Are you looking
| for e.g. some numbers from their UX research? This doesn't seem
| to ultimately be a decision about underlying technology.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| I guess to be fair it lets them design and support a single UX
| since iOS doesn't allow them to have SMS in the UX. That could
| have been a good argument.
|
| Of course, they didn't bother make that argument.
|
| And in the SMS domain Google Messages really does get annoying
| with the whole Google Messages vs iMessage and how nothing
| Google is doing with RCS benefits anyone except Google. As
| Google continues its war on SMS and force migration of everyone
| to RCS, Signal users on Android end up being the red-headed
| step child. That also is a good technical/strategic argument
| for ditching SMS.
|
| But, again, not one that they even bothered make.
|
| And there's always been the "tied to a phone number" issue
| that's been the #1 complaint about Signal. And once untethered
| from SMS who cares about phone numbers anymore.
|
| Once again, not even a case they bothered to make.
| agloeregrets wrote:
| The answer is this: They dont want to add RCS support or spend
| the time to do it. It's all bullshit top to bottom.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Google also restricts their specific flavor of RCS (or at
| least they did awhile ago). I wanted to keep using Textra SMS
| but they never let Textra into RCS land.
| lucideer wrote:
| If they said that up top I think many more people would be
| accepting of it.
| greysonp wrote:
| There are no public RCS API's. No one (besides an OEM) can
| make an RCS app.
| ajvs wrote:
| Google doesn't _allow_ 3rd-party apps to access the RCS API.
| rsync wrote:
| "The answer is this: They dont want to add RCS support or
| spend the time to do it."
|
| ... confirmed by Signal in their discussion thread:
|
| "... and Signal can't add RCS support because there's no RCS
| API on Android. Honestly, the days of any third-party SMS app
| are numbered."
|
| I guess I misunderstood RCS. I thought _the whole point_ of
| RCS was to be used on Android and to allow disparate third
| parties to use it as an open standard.
|
| Where is the RCS API if not on Android ? Who is supposed to
| use RCS ?
| veeti wrote:
| The API is private to system apps from the device
| manufacturer. Most phones ship Google's Messages app for
| SMS & RCS.
| brewdad wrote:
| SMS support is literally how I got my family to switch to Signal
| in the first place. None of the non-techies want to switch apps
| or have to send the same message out multiple times in order to
| reach their friends and family. Having an app that provides
| privacy when able and still works for those not yet onboard was a
| godsend.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| Oh no!
|
| I can see how this is a hassle to maintain though; just for
| example, my Huawei consistently resets the default sms app to the
| crappy stock one every time I use their "ultra battery saver
| mode" (which I otherwise like a lot) even though I explicitly
| included signal in the list of apps that are allowed to run in
| that mode.
|
| So I can see how the ecosystem makes this an annoying feature...
| londons_explore wrote:
| I think the real rationale for this change is signal believes
| this will push user adoption.
|
| If User A (who uses the signal app) regularly communicates with
| User B (who doesn't), then this change might encourage User A to
| ask User B to join signal. It makes a stronger network effect,
| and will increase viral growth.
|
| However, I think the Signal team is misguided, and in fact they
| will just lose users who don't want one more app to manage.
| richbell wrote:
| > If User A (who uses the signal app) regularly communicates
| with User B (who doesn't), then this change might encourage
| User A to ask User B to join signal. It makes a stronger
| network effect, and will increase viral growth.
|
| Conversely, the inconvenience of having multiple messaging apps
| could cause User A to stop using Signal. Look at what happened
| with Hangouts when they dropped SMS support.
| nilespotter wrote:
| Hi, I'm User A!
| somehnacct3757 wrote:
| I switched years ago figuring it's just like my SMS app but
| sometimes I'll have more secure convos with other adopters.
| There was no buy-in cost.
|
| Now that it's just some random chat app with its own protocol I
| could not be more allergic to their brand.
|
| Hopefully they didn't need my user type for their flywheel.
| gerty wrote:
| I've been a user for nearly 10 years and still only a few people
| in my circles uses Signal. If they go through with this, Signal
| is as good as dead.
| dodgerdan wrote:
| Well for what it's worth it sounds like you weren't really
| using Signal for secure messaging anyway... so not much of a
| loss.
| roer wrote:
| Well, isn't the point that more people using signal
| strengthens the privacy/security of everyone? I would be sad
| if I wanted to send a message to gerty, and I find out he
| stopped using signal because of this.
|
| It's not like I wouldn't still want to message him, right?
|
| Convenience is extremely powerful in getting the layman to
| adopt this kind of tech, and I feel like it should be
| prioritized.
| Xelynega wrote:
| This kind of thinking is exactly what's killing signal. Why
| would you want to gatekeep the security of others instead of
| making t as accessible as possible?
|
| To me this feels like signal not understanding that their
| intended userbase and their actual userbase are very
| different, as I can't imagine the number of people that use
| signal solely for it's e2ee is comparable to the number of
| people that use it as their sms app.
| dodgerdan wrote:
| "Killing Signal"? They don't publish their user numbers,
| but they were having outages due to massive user growth a
| few years ago.
| guerrilla wrote:
| That was when hundreds of thousabds of peopld abandoned
| WhatsApp, shi h us what will happen to Signal if they do
| this.
| DGAP wrote:
| OK, then I'm going to stop using Signal after 6 years of use.
| alvarezbjm-hn wrote:
| Privacy being the primary goal of the app, they should remove the
| phone as username tenet. This is almost as bad as it can get for
| privacy, e2ee or not.
|
| "We have now reached the point where SMS support no longer makes
| sense."
|
| They should have let the users decide that
| neilv wrote:
| It'll be interesting to see how their user numbers change.
|
| (How many current users will it drive away? Or cause to use
| Signal less than before?)
|
| (How many new users will Signal acquire, because adoption network
| effects weren't working as well as possible, when messaging with
| non-Signal friends was too convenient, but now Signal users are
| more motivated to prod their non-Signal friends towards Signal?)
|
| And who's going to pick up the users that Signal loses?
| roer wrote:
| How can I best send my feedback to the signal team about this?
|
| Is it feasible to fork the app?
| alexnewman wrote:
| Amazing decision signal. I always hated this combination as it
| confused me constantly. I've been coding for 30 years and I'm a
| published author in security... and it still confused me.
| dig1 wrote:
| > We have now reached the point where SMS support no longer makes
| sense
|
| > ...
|
| > Now, data plans are cheaper and far more ubiquitous than they
| were nearly a decade ago
|
| I'm curious, are these guys lives in a bubble or what? I think
| they should try to travel around the world a bit.
|
| > we've heard repeatedly from people who've been hit with high
| messaging fees after assuming that the SMS messages they were
| sending were Signal messages, only to find out that they were
| using SMS, and being charged by their telecom provider.
|
| So in essence, they fuc*d up UI/UX and now the simplest approach
| to fix would be just to remove it. Sounds like a brilliant idea
| from an MBA guy or whatever-evangelist-title-is.
| Markoff wrote:
| hahaha, that was literally the only reason why at least consider
| signal over other IM, now they lost it they have literally zero
| benefit over Element or Telegram since you will need dedicated
| SMS app in phone anyway
|
| personally I jumped the boat when they made app unusable with PIN
| code nag screen, which they backpedaled from after uproar but it
| was already too late for me and my extended family where I pushed
| Signal, there were message delivery issues, horrible downtime in
| Europe because US admin was taking sleep, but the unavoidable nag
| screen was the last drop, the later news about shady crypto and
| other stuff just convinced me this app ain't worth a dime, which
| this SMS announcement just confirmed
|
| if you wanna alternative IM app use Element (Matrix), unlike
| Signal it doesn't require phone number, it use decentralized
| network and you can choose from whatever app you like, never
| understood why IT skilled people pushed Signal after Element
| became already quite user friendly
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I like the Signal app for my SMS messages. Almost nobody I
| regularly talk to uses Signal so I mostly use it for this
| purpose. I might as well remove it and get rid of yet another app
| listening for cloud notifications and draining my battery.
|
| Maybe I'll grab the source code, rip out all the Signal parts,
| and just use that.
| alrs wrote:
| What dicks. I'm not looking forward to playing tech support for
| all the non-technical people I convinced to use Signal. Thanks
| for confirming everyone's suspicions about my weird-nerd chat
| client.
| plsbenice34 wrote:
| Exactly my reaction, made me feel sick
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| This is extremely frustrating and lowers the chances of me ever
| adopting a similar non-default texting app again. This will hurt
| Signal and as well as poison the well for future developers.
| progman32 wrote:
| Glad I was immediately suspicious of the sms feature and decided
| to not use it. Seems to be an unpopular opinion, but I'm a big
| fan of compartmentalization when it comes to closed ecosystems.
| This change won't affect me or my sms chat history.
| red_trumpet wrote:
| > [W]e [...] grew from a small project to the most widely used
| private messaging service on the planet.
|
| Really? More used than WhatsApp, Telegram or iMessage?
| 0xJRS wrote:
| RIP Signal
| alexb_ wrote:
| I hope that the signal devs are looking at this thread and
| seriously considering reversing this horrendous decision. Just
| announcing this was a horrible idea, but you can at least salvage
| it by formally retracting it. Getting rid of SMS support would
| immediately and swiftly kill the app. I use Signal for the sole
| reason of having a secure messaging app _that works with SMS_. If
| you get rid of SMS support, you immediately kill the app. This is
| quite possibly the worst decision you could possibly make.
| newfonewhodis wrote:
| This is terrible. Most of my social network is not yet on Signal,
| but using a single app for all my communication makes my life so
| much easier. Signal was always promised as the one-app that
| everyone could use even if their network was not using Signal.
|
| Is anyone NOT inside Signal happy about this decision? Please
| comment if so, and why.
| scatters wrote:
| The people in my network who aren't using Signal are on
| WhatsApp or Telegram, and Signal can't handle those. But then,
| I live in Europe.
| yazboo wrote:
| This is really going to mess with some highly stressed out, low
| digital literacy people in my life. I guess I'll need to help
| them move to something else - is there any other basic SMS app on
| Android that a) looks like it's from a legitimate developer, and
| b) doesn't skim your message content for ad personalization?
| hypeatei wrote:
| Wow, I use this feature so I only have one messaging app to worry
| about.
|
| It was seamless and I didn't see much of an issue with it.
|
| I guess Signal is going to become that app that is only opened
| once a month or so. No more donations from me.
| ghastmaster wrote:
| > After much discussion, we determined that we can no longer
| continue to invest in accommodating SMS in the Android app while
| also dedicating the resources we need to make Signal the best
| messenger out there.
|
| I did not need emoji's, groups, gifs and all the other neat stuff
| that signal has introduced throughout the years(to varying
| degrees of success). I had been using it, while none of my
| friends were. What I did need was a single messenger to handle
| sms/mms with the default being secure when security was
| available. I have multiple friends now using it and sadly will
| revert back to a 100% insecure messenger for my phone for 99% of
| my messages. The new one will do everything better than signal
| does except security, so it will have some benefits.
|
| I will be on the lookout for a replacement. I hope signal
| continues to bring security for entities that need it through the
| future. I have not looked at tox in a while. I'll check that out
| again.
| Kapura wrote:
| this is effectively going to remove signal as my messaging app of
| choice. i understand that messages that are not signal messages
| are not secure, but it is not going to be possible to convince
| anybody i know to download a special app if they want to talk to
| me. they will just send SMS, and I will have to respond via SMS,
| and it wont involve the signal app.
|
| i hope they reconsider this decision; i have been using the
| product since textsecure and I would hate to stop doing so
| because they no longer support out-of-network communication.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Am I the only one who likes this change?
|
| I'm tired of explaining to my relatives why they can send their
| picture to one person but not to another, or why it requires wifi
| for some contacts. Mixing two incompatible messaging standards
| communicating via two different channels in one app is confusing
| for many people. Sure, it also has advantages and I think you
| could make it work, but the app actively asking users to make it
| the default SMS app is not a great idea.
| Flimm wrote:
| I read the blog post with delight. I have been waiting for this
| change for a long time. I opened HN comments to join in what I
| thought would be a celebration, and I was surprised to find
| dismay. It never occurred to me to encourage my friends to use
| Signal for its SMS compatibility, (which isn't even supported
| on iOS). The whole advantage of Signal is its security, and I
| hated having to recommend an app that is secure, except when
| it's not.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| I'm surprised at how much backlash there is to this.
|
| I've had Signal since shortly after it renamed itself from
| TextSecure to Signal, and I never bothered using it as the
| default SMS/Messaging app, because back then it was a _bad_ SMS
| app. It felt like it paled in comparison to what the default
| Android Messages app could do. I didn 't want to get the false
| impression, either, that my chats were encrypted when they really
| weren't, just because they shows up in Signal.
|
| So I kept the two separate. I assumed pretty much everyone else
| did the same. And yeah, there's the occasional oddity when
| someone texts me over SMS instead of using Signal when I know for
| a fact that they have both, but most of the people doing it are
| using iPhones, so I have to assume it's the same experience for
| them as well.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Same.
|
| What's weird is that in the numerous Matrix vs Signal comments
| that populate Signal and Matrix submissions you rarely find SMS
| support as an Signal advantage over Element/Matrix.
|
| Most people I know didn't like Signal taking over the SMS when
| they accidentally opted in.
| endorphine wrote:
| Same here. I'm really surprised by the reactions, but I guess
| it's a locality thing.
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