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...
Removing SMS support from Signal Android (soon)
441–450 of 649 posts
Re: Removing SMS support from Signal Android (soon)
#442Just 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.
Re: Removing SMS support from Signal Android (soon)
#443I'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…
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.
Re: Removing SMS support from Signal Android (soon)
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't they store the decryption keys?
Server does not store the keys for secret chats
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.
Re: Removing SMS support from Signal Android (soon)
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.'
It's not only your conversation but the one of others too. I like that it's hard to move it elsewhere.
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.
Re: Removing SMS support from Signal Android (soon)
#446This 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?")
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 t…
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.
Re: Removing SMS support from Signal Android (soon)
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
How? I’m looking for a “delete all messages over X days old” option. Not “delete all my chats/delete an entire thread.”
On Android:
Settings > Data and storage > Manage storage > Keep messages
then choose from the listed options
Re: Removing SMS support from Signal Android (soon)
#448Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's a (partially?) non-technical justification they shared on the Community forums. https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-blog-removing-sms...
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?
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.
Re: Removing SMS support from Signal Android (soon)
#449Earlier quoted context omitted.
How? I’m looking for a “delete all messages over X days old” option. Not “delete all my chats/delete an entire thread.”
On Android: Settings > Data and storage > Manage storage > Keep messages then choose from the listed options
Unfortunately, the option isn’t available on iOS, unless it’s hiding somewhere else.
Re: Removing SMS support from Signal Android (soon)
#450Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 y…
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