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Comment by wtmt | Hacker News Reader

I like Wire and use it with some people. It allows signing up with email and supports up to three accounts on a device. But I do find it to be a bit slow, mainly in sending as well as downloading images where it’s painfully obvious.

Telegram is better on many counts and is a very nice app to use. Usability will usually beat other factors when it comes to mass adoption.

Signal is the last on my list (it’s slow and unreliable, setting up an account is a coin toss because the verification process wouldn’t work, can’t move chats to a new device, etc.).

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I believe you can move chats between devices, they just have to be sourced from Signal and not SMS. SMS/MMS chats are what you may be talking about as immovable from Signal. Those are not shared between your Signal devices for security purposes, I imagine. You can back these up or move them yourself separately. Also, Signal device linking only works between one mobile device and multiple desktop clients. To move between mobile devices it requires a Signal chat backup and restore.

It’s just not possible to move Signal chats from one iOS device to another (on iOS, Signal and SMS are not connected). Signal prohibits backing up of the data to iTunes and to iCloud. So there’s no way to make this work. That’s how it has been, and Signal does this for “security reasons”.

I have used and promoted Signal before, and I also made the mistake of making it my default sms/mms client. I'm on android. Signal does allow you to make a backup file. Then you have to get that file over to a specific directory on the new phone BEFORE you install signal. But the import rarely works. There are tons of issues on the signal repo, and a lot of them closed with won't fix type answers. I myself am stuck with a history of some signal, but mostly sms messages trapped on one phone because the backup the signal app creates fails halfway through importing on other signal apps. Even if it was reliable, it's way too complicated for most people. People change phones every few years and they expect their data to follow them to the new phone.

There's also https://github.com/xeals/signal-back which actually uses the same code as signal to essentially export a backup. If you check their issues page, you can see that most of the issues are problems reading the backup file. Since this tool is using the same code with just a command line wrapper, it gives us more insight into how unreliable the backup and restore functionality of signal is.

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