Removing SMS support from Signal Android (soon)

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.

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?

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?