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Comment by kitsunesoba | Hacker News Reader

>Use Signal or WhatsApp instead.

I might if either of those had proper desktop clients (they don't). I spend most of my day sitting in front of a computer, so chat apps that offer only wonky web app "phone bridges" for desktop users don't make much sense for me.

The best part of iMessage and Telegram is that their desktop clients are as capable as their mobile clients, and they're real independent clients. Until WhatsApp and Signal offer that, I have little interest in them. Maybe the majority of the internet connected world conducts their communication primarily through a smartphone, but that's not me.

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Signal has a chrome app that performs as a desktop client.

Yes, it's one of the web app bridges I was referring to.

It's tethered to your phone, ugly, and feels a lot like an afterthought. Last I checked, it also doesn't work with the iOS version of Signal, so if you use an iPhone you don't get any desktop support at all.

In short, it needs a lot of work before it'll be usable for anybody in a similar position to myself.

It's not tethered to your phone. It does work with the iOS version of Signal. It's really easy to set up, too. Everything in your comment is incorrect or out of date.

It's good that's changed, but that wasn't the case the last time I saw any kind of news about Signal (maybe a few months ago). It would serve them well to publicize these changes.

This is a classic example of what I think we should call "The Message Board Apology": "I was wrong about everything but in a way that makes me even righter."

A common occurrence here on HN

The desktop client worked the same way (untethered, after initial setup) a few months ago as well.

The Signal desktop client as far as I know never was tethered to the phone (during operation, signup and getting the desktop one connected still requires a phone). you might be confusing it with Whatsapp's?

Can you finally use the same Signal sign in on more than one device at once now? That was one of the things that drove me nuts about it.

Yes. I continue conversations from my phone -> computer (and vice versa) every day.

This is the main reason I won't leave Telegram. I don't need perfect privacy, I've never seen any reports of Telegram actually being breached, and I use four different devices over the course of my day. Each one has a fully functioning Telegram client.

Signal is not great on multiple devices (it works, but not always seamlessly), but there's a reason for that: Signal is also generating virtually no serverside metadata. There's a real, practical security win for the inconvenience it's generating for people who want multi-device messaging.

Compare that to Wire, which has much more convenient multi-device support, but accomplishes that at the expense of keeping the entire active graph of communicating Wire users in plaintext in their servers on AWS.

Both Wire and WhatsApp (which have comparable security models with some marginal tradeoffs --- WhatsApp metadata is in Facebook's custody, which is not great, but Wire doesn't have Facebook's extremely competent and well-resourced security team) are reasonable choices for secure messengers.

Telegram is not.

Thanks for pointing out the tradeoffs of Wire and Signal so forthrightly. I would not have been able to describe the difference so clearly.

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