Removing SMS support from Signal Android (soon) • Hacker News Board

Re: Removing SMS support from Signal Android (soon)

#391

Post by godelski » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 8:04 PM UTC

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.

Re: Removing SMS support from Signal Android (soon)

#392

Post by anigbrowl » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 8:05 PM UTC

godelski wrote: post #359

daedalus_j wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 conten…

> 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 ha…

Being rude to people by dismissing feature requests as invalid isn't helpful.

Re: Removing SMS support from Signal Android (soon)

#393

Post by rodgerd » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 8:05 PM UTC

theLastOfCats wrote: post #180

eatwater123 wrote: post #10

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?")

Why three tho? Use one – Telegram.

I, too, enjoy sharing my message history with the various Russian intelligence services.

Re: Removing SMS support from Signal Android (soon)

#394

Post by godelski » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 8:08 PM UTC

daedalus_j wrote: post #376

godelski wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ha…

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 A…

> 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.

Re: Removing SMS support from Signal Android (soon)

#395

Post by anigbrowl » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 8:08 PM UTC

cassonmars wrote: post #278

xeromal wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People usually want both and that's what causes most people to ignore good tools.

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

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.'

Re: Removing SMS support from Signal Android (soon)

#396

Post by mderazon » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 8:09 PM UTC

Kiro wrote: post #348

mderazon wrote: post #244

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.

Where do you live?

Europe (Portugal)

Re: Removing SMS support from Signal Android (soon)

#397

Post by black_puppydog » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 8:12 PM UTC

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...

Re: Removing SMS support from Signal Android (soon)

#398

Post by iudqnolq » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 8:14 PM UTC

daedalus_j wrote: post #149

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…

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)

Re: Removing SMS support from Signal Android (soon)

#399

Post by alexb_ » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 8:14 PM UTC

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.

Re: Removing SMS support from Signal Android (soon)

#400

Post by rsync » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 8:16 PM UTC

agloeregrets wrote: post #157

lucideer wrote: post #153

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 justificat…

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.

"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 ?