That's maybe true for privacy enthusiasts. You severely underestimate the need for these cutesy features when targeting mass market though. I claim stickers are much more important for that than data exporting.
Personally, I don't care much for features supporting cyber-grooming. What's the point of using cutesy features to attract users who don't care about security, just so someone else can _securely_ cyber-groom them?
Stickers aren't targeting young audiences in any sense. It's very weird to draw such conclusions just if you're not using them yourself (if that's the case).
So user-controlled portability doesn't seems fatal to the "point" of having a secure chat app, there.
My workaround, last time I upgraded my iOS device, was to screenshot all the old conversations I wanted to retain. Pictures come over just fine! Did Signal forcing me to do that make me more secure?
I think they just hate iCloud. (Perhaps while they trust Intel, they distrust Apple? It'd be great to know why.)
Well, I don't trust iCloud with my device backups, either. There are other things, in other apps on my phone, more sensitive than my Signal logs.
But it seems Signal is holding my chat histories hostage because they don't trust me. And it seems their ultimate plan for this will require me to use some Signal-run, Intel-SGX-mediated 'trustable cloud' for my contacts & messages. No, thanks!
Sorry but I don't understand this sentence. Why?
Like, I get that it's challenging from a technical standpoint, but I absolutely don't see why it would be pointless?
Riot/Matrix does it: it's far from mature/polished—plenty of room for improvement—but it uses double-ratchet, and it functions.
Secure messages shouldn’t persist and if they do they aren’t secure. Being able to export, upload, and restore an entire conversation history is the opposite of secure.
There is no point in using a secure messaging system if your entire conversation history can be downloaded the minute a single person in your group loses physical security on their device. Just use FB Messenger.
This is not likely to be the case.
This is a nice, but ultimately utopic, non-sensical, impossible security requirement. I take your point that anything persistent is insecure, but anything received is potentially persistent.
There's no such thing as perfect security, there are only levels. Even a system with some hypothetical form of perfect plausible deniability designed into the receiving end could be compromised via transit metadata.
Saying persistence makes secure messaging pointless is pure hyperbole. Encryption protects against a broad range of threat vectors, some simple, others extremely challenging. There's value in every measure.
Sure, but that could be up to every sender to decide whether they want their messages to be view once/view for 24hrs/store forever.