Removing SMS support from Signal Android (soon)

Not via SMS, anymore

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

> 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.

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.

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.