Having just installed Signal yesterday, in what respect is it worse than Whatsapp (from a UI pov)? The only thing I found so far is the bad integration with contacts.
- Doesn't go in to system tray (unless you fiddle with command line arguments).
- can't search messages
- overall unpolished (e.g. saving a file has no "show in folder" option afterwards)
I use Signal and Telegram both - it's clear to me that Telegram provides the better user experience. I like Signal from the privacy standpoint though.
If you're using Android then I think that Signal is kind of a no-brainer to use because it doubles as your SMS client, so if a contact is a Signal user you get the privacy you want, but if they aren't at least you can still text them.
This was really jarring for me the first time I used Signal Desktop on Windows. I clicked on the close button and then realized that the app had terminated instead of minimizing to the tray (as such apps would be expected by many users to behave).
Thanks, I didn't know about command line arguments for that. I'll check it out.
Than edit the target to add the argument:
C:\Users\[your_username]\AppData\Local\Programs\signal-desktop\Signal.exe --start-in-tray
This is huge to me. I spend a large portion of my day in front of computers, so messaging services that take the desktop seriously are much more likely to catch my attention.
It doesn't always deliver messages, and it more frequently doesn't deliver them in a timely fashion.
In my experience, Signal delays delivery of messages about 5% of the time -- which is actually huge and makes it unusable for reliable chats.
The story which made me never trust Signal again: I was out of town and trying to coordinate with a backup pet sitter, because my original pet sitter became unavailable. I sent them a message via Signal (their preferred chat), heard nothing for a day, and started frantically calling around to everyone I knew who had a key to my place to please take care of a pet.
Several days later, I got a reply from them..."Hey, I just got this. Did you need me to take care of your pet?"
Over the course of several months of regular chatting with my then-significant otter, I also noticed once or twice in every two week period we'd have a half-day delay on messages...just...silence from one of us or the other, followed by, "Where were you? I texted you hours ago." from one or the other of us.
I know not everyone has these problems with Signal, but I've also seen enough other people on here alone complain about this that I know it's not just my hardware or network setup (this was across both Android and IOS devices).
For that alone, I will try to deflect away from Signal for anyone who's got any other chat methods set up.
Telegram, on the other hand, has been absolutely reliable, both in regular and secure chats. Never a lost message, never a delayed message.
Same for Whatsapp.
Signal also has the worst UI of all of them, and it comes down to all the polish that free software almost always lacks. On Signal on Android, you can select different colored themes (I like night mode for everything); on IOS, you're stuck with white. The chat bubbles are very plain on Signal, on Telegram they're a little fancier. You can set a chat background on Telegram; Signal, it's a plain white chat. Telegram? You can add sticker packs and use stickers in chats. No stickers in Signal. Attaching photos is cruder in Signal. Group chats are weirder in Signal.
If the visual flair doesn't matter to you, then fine, I get it, you don't need to tell me it's not important -- it's important to me.
And one more thing that isn't really 100% Signal's fault but absolutely drove me mad when I used it on Android as a replacement to the default SMS app: there's no real way to know when someone sets up Signal and then uninstalls it, and Signal defaults to sending secure messages every time. So, there were a few people I'd text who, I'd send them a text (which Signal sent over its own network), hear nothing for a few hours, then remember that they were one of the people who had uninstalled Signal, and I'd resend the message via non-encrypted SMS and receive an instant reply.
No way to tell Signal, "never send to these people via Signal, only use SMS with these people," which adds a tremendous friction to a chat app that really shouldn't be there. Not 100% Signal's fault (those people arguably should be "deregistering" from Signal) but absolutely within their ability to build a fix for it.
> Same for Whatsapp.
what's disturbing to me (from a relatively naive perspective -- I'm familiar with terms like PSTN and MVNO and the general system, but I havn't worked in telecom): you've described what would be exactly how a nation state would kill a superior and more secure messaging app. Compel telcos to drop/delay GCM of websocket/GCM push notifications for a small minority of device IDs, so that the userbase rotted away...
There've been several state actors that have done this to both Telegram and Signal already -- both of these apps employ different ways of avoiding it but this is already one of the arms races in the world of secure chats.
FWIW, my problems with Signal losing/delaying messages are all US-based, which AFAIK has never been accused of doing any sort of state-level firewalling of secure chat apps.
And besides, if I were a state actor and I wanted to sink a program like Signal through such subversive means, I'd probably have someone start contributing to the project, and then start arguing in favor of bad UX choices; make it harder to use, not just unreliable, in favor of "security". Push it out of the realm of what a normal user could conceivably make use of.
That's the kind of long con I'd play -- play on techies' love of doing things on principle and for theoretical purposes, and general disinterest in UX.
Reliability trumps security for near 100% of usecases.
As a side note: We switched form slack to teams which has features no end but chat is't reliable as well.
Here's Signal:
https://imagebin.ca/v/4aAU1ai9CG8D
And Telegram:
https://imagebin.ca/v/4aAUJhRmj8Jx
Signal is white (and no night mode on IOS), the bubbles are undecorated rounded rectangles, there's no background and no option to set one, no stickers, no option to set disappearing messages on the fly, no indicator of when the person was last online. It looks plain.
Telegram has a night mode, options to set background colors, chat messages. It doesn't look plain.
As I've said, if you don't care whether something looks plain, then that is absolutely great and entirely up to you. Lots of people don't care about lots of things and there's really nothing wrong with that.
I like my apps to look nice (and I can, within broad strokes, define what "looks nice" is) and I know this isn't a unique position I occupy.
In Settings, there's a moon in the top right which toggles light/dark modes. This is v2.37.1.0 but the release notes list dark mode as appearing in v2.30.2 which is about 4 months ago.
And you said it perfectly -- it's easier on the eyes, and I don't think it's one single thing, but several little touches.
I'm using https://silence.im/ - A Signal fork - instead of Signal for this exact reason.
I agree with the SMS replacement for Android and uninstalling causing woes trying to send secure messages, have been bitten by that one on several occasions. Thankfully most people I talk to have multiple apps installed.
Also, apart from what I mentioned above, I've also found out that with Signal it's very hard to transfer your chat history to another phone. (involves manually copying over a backup, entering 30 char key). I can't in good conscience recommend an app like that as a replacement to anyone, so I guess my Signal experiment will be short-lived.