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Comment by widforss | Hacker News Reader

I find it's really easy to get people to use it. I tell them to install it and then use it as my primary communication channel with them. As I do this with more and more of my contacts some of them will have each others numbers and will automatically be able to talk to each other via Signal.

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I have no problem to get people to use it, the problem is to get people to keep using it.

For example some time ago when Signal was still called TextSecure, we converted all our group chats for a friend group of technically minded people to TextSecure. We all agreed that encryption is important and worth some minor discomforts. We switched back to Facebook (which we all dislike) within a month because TextSecure didn't have consistent message ordering in group chats, making some conversations impossible to understand for those unfortunate enough to receive messages in a bad order.

This is mostly fixed as of a few months ago, the desktop client also makes it as convenient as Facebook.

The problem is that they chose to make it a Chrome Apps, which will eventually be dropped from all plateforms but ChromeOS.

True, I assume they'll just ride that till the bitter end and then unhappily move to using nwjs instead of Chrome, and distribute it from their website instead (even though they seem highly opposed to that).

I wouldn't mind if they decided to make an Electron app instead.

I would, I really dislike Electron. Even Chrome Apps are a pain. I would be much happier with a native implementation.

Or a fucking website

You can't really complain about the choice of the best option at the time, just because it's owner subsequently killed it. I think it was madness and internal Google politics (because it competes with Android Dalvik JVM apps ) that killed it, not technical problems.

Yeah, same here. Except then messages arrive out of order, duplicate, for another session, "bad encrypted message", or simply take minutes to deliver. I don't understand why duplicates are even possible.

So while I'm able to get people to try it out or use it for "sensitive" stuff, these issues really hurt usage and I'll just end up reverting to SMS once a day at least.

Edit: I don't want to sound to be complaining too much. I love Signal and try to convert people. Just hard when basics mess up. And it's also frustrating because on the surface some of this stuff doesn't make sense.

I experienced this with TextSecure over a year ago, but since then it has been smooth sailing outside of minor outages (10hrs a month), since the outages are less than the regional outages we've been experiencing on AT&T and T-Mobile for SMS as of late (20 to 30hrs a month). Calling has also improved quite a bit, for Signal enabled contacts I've been using it exclusively for the past 9 months, I can be driving for an hour without call quality issues and maintain a stable call reliably.

Is the codec choice any better? The last time I tried to use it the audio quality was awful.

I use it for calling when abroad, and so far the audio quality has been quite good. I don't know if it was worse in the past, but maybe just give it another try?

Audio quality has been good enough for me, but there's definitely room for improvement as they're still using Speex (if I'm not mistaken).

If they'd use Opus I'd really appreciate it, hell, if I could even get interop, I have hacked together an app to pass the ZRTP codeword to my deskphone when Freeswitch terminates it and reencodes it as SRTP/TLS for it, since no deskphone vendor supports ZRTP.

Would make those that insist on ZRTP in my life a lot more convenient to have extended convos with.

My major problem is when a contact stops using Signal for some reason (new phone etc.).

My messages go into the ether without any indication that they are not being received.

You should just get single-check meaning server received it but not the other user's device.

That's the kind of stuff I was getting on TextSecure and RedPhone. Many people refused to use it after it happened enough. Just the tech types that are hardcore about privacy.

In other words, the Chrome evangelist strategy (or Firefox evangelist strategy prior to that): Let me install this app for you - trust me, it's much better!"

way easier than others...wickr etc

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