251–260 of 965 posts
This was a nice, detailed read. At some point, Signal would have to move out of cloud providers at least for a few things to manage costs better. I was happy to note this about employee compensation since paying them well is a good thing apart from their personal motivation to work on this (even at a comparatively lower pay than in other companies/projects): > When benefits, HR services, taxes, recruiting, and salari…
Signal had 40 million active users in 2021 [1]. With 14 million in infra cost, that comes to .35 per user/year. Total expenses are about 33 million, so about .825 per user/year. All in all that seems very reasonable. [1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/signal-statistics/
I wonder how many people paid the $5 for WhatsApp back in the day. It gave you nothing but you were able to do it. I think I did.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/18/whatsapp-...
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Yeah, decouple Signal user identity from the phone number.
Phone numbers are the easiest login for people, especially in a world where not everyone has an email address. I know this will invite comments about usernames. I would like usernames a lot too.
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Messages inflexible reliance on SMS for communication to non-Apple devices is definitely an Apple issue, in my opinion. Apple has made it clear that they continue to default to SMS for non-iPhone communication solely because it's unpleasant for everyone involved.
What does the default Android messaging app do?
My preference would be that Apple drop SMS support from Messages all-together and market it as an iOS only communication method. People with iPhones would then have to pick some alternative, perhaps they would use Signal or perhaps something else.
I already have to install a handful of applications to talk to all of my friends and co-workers, at least I wouldn't have to continue to use SMS.
1. Open Signal and click on your user icon in the upper left.
2. Go to "Settings" --> "Donate to Signal".
3. Click "Donate", select your donation options, and pay with Apple Pay.
Signal had 40 million active users in 2021 [1]. With 14 million in infra cost, that comes to .35 per user/year. Total expenses are about 33 million, so about .825 per user/year. All in all that seems very reasonable. [1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/signal-statistics/
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I really wonder why it’s so expensive to run. I always hear things about scaling but I used to run a top 500 alexia website and it was just a php app running on a mutualized offer for $5/month. Lots of manual caching though but still. My wild guess is that either the stack is not really optimal (last I heard it was java) or they do other costly things at scale (sgx?)
You can't send an sms yourself like you can an email. Instead of setting up a server, you have to work with a telco provider (an aggregator specifically). Any SMS service eventually hands off to one of these. Many SaaS SMS providers are just frontends for legacy telco services. They charge insane fees because they can, that is all there is to it. Sending mass email is still difficult. Its probably easier to pay a pro…
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> stubbornly use iMessange. Personally, I prefer it over downloading yet another client, dealing with additional credentials, wondering about who can access my messages, and so on and so forth… And all that just to message the handful of people that I know who use .
If only someone would release a universal protocol that the app's native messaging apps could utilize to eliminate the need for these 3rd party messaging apps. Oh, right, it's called RCS and Apple refuses to support it.
RCS is exactly what it says on the box: A modern successor to SMS. That does not make it a good modern instant messenger.
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It's crazy, 400,000k per person. It would feel like nothing but an unfair waste of my "cheap-country" money to fuel "overpriced-county" with a donation.
But that's not salary, that's the total cost per employee. So if you factor in ~40% cost for healthcare, pension, perks, and various taxes, then the average salary is closer to $240,000 which will still a bit high, is probably less than market for the average engineer working at the company.