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Comment by YeahSureWhyNot | Hacker News Reader

I tried signal, much more inferior to WhatsApp in terms of functionality and usability

I use signal on the reg, and the short comings are both superficial and unrelated to the security. In my opinion.

What are your specific concerns? I could list things like: lack of bold and italic , poor voice message UI, lack of video conferencing , lack of group names, ...

Note that WhatsApp was wildly popular for over half a decade before it got most of those features.

In other words: I don’t get the point of talking about these cosmetic blemishes. * Signal today feels like WhatsApp at its inception. I.e. a messaging app with the potential to be used by everyone and their dog.

Or is there some fundamental problem you’re encountering that I’m blind / oblivious to?

* edit: let me clarify: “... talking about these cosmetic blemishes as if they’re fundamental blockers to adoption. “

they are not just cosmetic..

* no search (big one for me)

* no web client ( another big one)

* app gets stuck in "retrieving message..." if there is a poor signal like travelling under a tunnel

and there are many cosmetic ones like the ones you pointed out.

Not sure if it's because I run the beta version but I have the search feature in individual conversations and use it often. There is a desktop app and I agree it's not the best. The desktop app is the only place I've had the retrieving messages issue. So really the only gripe I see you having is no decent non-phone client. For me that's not a show stopper at this point in exchange for a secure, easy to use application.

> . So really the only gripe I see you having

you ignored all my complaints saying you don't experience them. wtf.

Text search across full message history has been part of stable production releases (on Android at least) for a decent long while, just fyi. (Desktop client has also gotten better (but is obviously far from perfect); those messages end up retrieved later on, fwiw).

Note that the horse a buggy was wildly popular before the car came along, so as this follows Tesla would be find starting a horse and buggy company. I'm a bit exaggerated in my sarcasm here to really illustrate how arrogant it is to assume that features you don't value are 'cosmetic blemishes' when they really do fundamentally hinder the adoption of the product. While you may value security as a priority that overcomes all others, but most by network effect influence, do not. And if you really care about security, it follows that the 'cosmetics' matter as well.

Yes, although pushing a firmware update to turn a horse carriage into a model Y is, perhaps, slightly less practical than adding Markdown support to a chat client.

The original comment was a blanket "much more inferior in terms of functionality and usability." I hope to elucidate that, in the context of a DARPA grant, it might be worth the effort to look to the future, and differentiate between fundamental problems and fixable issues.

I wouldn't say the same for an XMPP client, for example. But WhatsApp and signal are very, very close.

Perhaps even closer than a horse and a model Y. ;)

A few points that I hope dont come off snarky

1) It's open source, so if you can code and have time, you can help.

2) Some small friction adders seem like a small price to pay to not have a facebook product installed on my phone and suck all my metadata down.

You’re right and I agree with you, but as to point 1, they don’t really act like a proper open source project and it seems more like a “source dump” than anything. It’s hard to compile on your own and they don’t like forks connecting to official servers either.

That, and "just go contribute" is really just a cop out answer. Users can desire features without it requiring that they learn to develop software. And really, does anyone want brand new, fresh developers contributing to a privacy-oriented product? Of course not. We need experienced and skilled developers to do that, because mistakes can be costly.

To be fair he was talking about usability and not encryption/privacy features. I agree mostly though, even capable developers don't have time. Feature requests make software better. If you want people to use your app, you should build for the user. It seems they want people to actually use it and didn't open source just to share knowledge of the code. They probably open sourced it to inspire trust.

"and they don’t like forks connecting to official servers either"

Don't like? Well, nice words for activ blocking.

> It’s hard to compile on your own

It was pretty easy to compile your own desktop version. I had to change some colors because white was hurting my eyes and i was able to do it easily.

Unfortunately, the Android app requires Play Services to compile even if not to run, which means F-Droid can’t include it by their own free software requirements. See the forum thread: https://forum.f-droid.org/t/signal-discussion-about-google-p...

Building it reproducibly and with 100% FOSS is very hard and you can’t fork it, otherwise they’ll stop you from using the official servers.

A 500 billion dollar corporation will always be able to beat nonprofits on usability. The question you should ask yourself is whether the marginal difference in usability makes up for all the negative consequences of being a Facebook user.

Currently the answer is a definite no, but that may change in future.

> A 500 billion dollar corporation will always be able to beat nonprofits on usability.

You'd think. And this is often true, but not always. I am frequently surprised by how bad applications from major companies can be when it comes to usability.

There are real tradeoffs between functionality and usability that any "more secure" chat service would have to deal with.

In this Telegram made many nice choices. It can be end-to-end secure but it is also a viable Whatsapp alternative.

Sticker, channels, bots and supergroups are essential to attract communities.

WhatsApp is default end-to-end secure, and Telegram is not. Recommending Telegram as a more secure alternative to WhatsApp is malpractice.

Yes, because there is an inverse relationship to usability and security. Signal won't add a feature until they can call it entirely vetted and secure.

>inverse relationship to usability and security

Not necessarily. You can easily have all kinds of shitty usability without it having anything to do with security.

An inverse relationship between better security and usability perhaps? More security == less usability. Look at PGP encrypted email as a shining example of security sucking for usability.

How is Signal inferior to WhatsApp "in terms of functionality and usability"?

Just a few things:

- Signal is a lot less "polished" - FB has spent tons more resources on making a slick streamlined easy to use interface. Even though signal looks similar its missing all the little things.

- there is no easy to use backup. Whatsapp can backup to google drive or icloud and restore it on another phone. Signal you have to figure out how to deal with and transfer your backup file[1]. This isn't easy for regular folks, Signal needs to be able to connect to cloud storage (preferably of your choice).

- Whatsapp deals with and displays media better/faster

- calling works better. last time I checked whatsapp has easy group video and audio calls, Signal had neither.

There is actually lots more. I prefer the idea of using Signal over whatsapp, but I found it not close enough yet. Especially for non-techy ppl.

[1]: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Ba...

> Whatsapp can backup to google drive or icloud and restore it on another phone.

As long as it's Android to Android or iPhone to iPhone. Oh, and Windows phone backup transfers never worked, not even to another Windows phone.

Personally, I don't want backups. I don't want to worry whether some joke I made 10 years ago would look bad in a future data dump. If messages could self destruct after three years that would be lovely

I personally will never user a personal messaging app without long term backups. In twenty years there I will have many fond memories of my past conversations. I see it (almost) no different from keeping old letters.

I had issues with lag and dropped packets when I was calling from Europe to South America with Signal about 6 months ago. I was really cheering for Signal (still am) and had suggested we try it, but it failed quite quickly. We moved the call back to WhatsApp within a minute or two, and had no problems whatsoever. So at least in my mind WhatsApp is still much more reliable.

It has almost none of my contacts on them. Pretty useless as a messenger as such.

Invite users and explain why? I went from zero contacts to every single person i need to reach at any frequency is now on Signal.

My main complain is that whenever I start the desktop client after few days, it takes forever to load the old messages. I'm not sure, but I think it tries to download all messages and attachments before showing the UI, which can be potentially made faster by first trying to get the messages from person I'm trying to talk to and downloading attachments after text messages (Not sure about implication to security protocol here).

It feels much worse to use than both Telegram or WhatsApp, both on Android and on OSX. I had installed it on iOS and Android and uninstalled within 10 minutes of trying to use it. That is how bad my user experience was.

Put effort into improving usability of Signal then? I don't understand.

A lot of the issues can't be solved without relying on an authoritative 3rd party (which is what facebook, whatsapp, skype, etc do). For example, because all messages are p2p, you can't view conversation history that isn't stored locally or sent by the other party upon request (which may not include deleted messages, etc).

Well, on that regard, neither can you on Whatsapp itself.

Signal relies on an authoritative third party to exactly the same extent that WhatsApp does as far as I know.

Isn't signal peer to peer? How can there be an authoritative 3rd party, unless they get rid of all the advantages of using p2p?

I don't know anything about signal, I just assumed it was exclusively p2p based on 30 seconds of googling. But assuming it is all p2p, my above statement should be correct.

Its end to end encrypted and ciphertexts aren't stored long term on Signal's servers, but Signal isn't truly p2p. To send a message a user encrypts the message using the keys for the user, sends them to Signal's servers to be queued, Signal delivers the encrypted message to the receiving user, the receiving user decrypts it. Phone calls would probably be the closest thing to p2p, but it still uses Signal's servers as a broker for connecting the two parties instead of some other form of discovery.

Signal also does not allow for third-party clients to connect to their hosted Signal servers. This further makes them an authoritative 3rd party, as you need to run the code approved by Signal to connect to Signal's servers to send messages to Signal users. Not that I am complaining about this structure, just sharing knowledge.

Interesting, but wouldn't this method would still have its own set unsolvable of problems? For example I don't know if it would be possible to search on the server, since all messages are encrypted.

I use it nearly every day since nearly two years and I have had not many problems. The voice calls are actually higher quality than via Skype (when calling the same person at roughly the same time).

I like Keybase.io - it seems better than Signal and is nice to use.

Really? I fail to see _any_ difference between the two in terms of features.

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