581–590 of 649 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is why we are building https://www.beeper.com
- Setting up phone for relatives
- Replacing Android Messages with Signal
- “So this is the App to send and receive SMS, and you can also send me and many others secure and free messages on there”
My optimism for Signal becoming mainstream just faded...
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…
Here's a (partially?) non-technical justification they shared on the Community forums. https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-blog-removing-sms...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 grow…
And fragment the market even more?
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
People often complain about the alert that you get when one of your contacts joins Signal but this is exactly what that attempts to solve
Those two groups of contacts then got mixed making it much harder to see who's on Signal and who isn't.
Back then I thought that was deliberate. It would be surprising to me, if the desire to avoid that self-inflicted confusion would have contributed to the decision to discontinue SMS support.
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 dreading the day where I lose or break my iPhone and thus lose my Signal chat history. I've been using Signal for years, but this makes me still prefer other messengers when starting new chats, even if Telegram (for example) is not e2e encrypted.
(Unfortunately, I've long overcome the "I don't want another app" thing and just installed all the messaging apps. Although I kind of want to look into setting up Matrix bridges and merging everything into Element.)
How can I best send my feedback to the signal team about this? Is it feasible to fork the app?
I think this is an instance of choosing religion over pragmatism and it will cost Signal a lot of users, possibly all of them.
A huge chunk of Signal users won't have ever used the SMS feature so why would they leave?
> 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 messagi…