Hacker News Reader

Comment by asquabventured | Hacker News Reader

When was the last time you moved devices? I was able to wirelessly import my entire years old messaging and contact database when I switched iOS devices ~10 months ago. I don't recall if it used NFC, Bluetooth or having to be connected to the same WiFi network but it worked impressively well at the time.

View on HN

I think the problem is losing access to a phone. For example because it gets dropped or stolen.

The lack of good message backups on iOS makes me hesitant to recommend Signal more.

At least on Signal for Android, you can make all the periodic backups of your Signal messages that you want: just be sure to copy the most recent backup file from your phone to another computer, and keep the encryption key (i.e. the sequence of numbers that Signal generates for you) written down somewhere. Then, if your phone does get dropped or stolen, you will have only lost messages since your last backup.

The Android backups are also to SD card only - you "just" need to manually handle cron jobs to copy off device, "just" make sure you copy of a really long key (you're not allowed to enter yourself) and "just" hope that a year down the road you still find all of those data.

It's a horribly shitty user experience all but most mindful techies.

The issue with Signal is that their developers fundamentally don't value the content of conversations in the way that millions of other people do - people send photos of their loved ones, have meaningful conversations and they fundamentally care about not losing them. Signal developers think that that's all worthless and needs to be destroyed ASAP.

Signal for iOS goes out of its way to prevent this.

The iOS transfer process uses the same technology as AirDrop, what Apple calls Multipeer Connectivity: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/multipeerconnectiv...

The phones create their own ad-hoc Wi-Fi network, similar to Wi-Fi Direct.

one thing i have done recently that definitely didn't work is syncing history from phone->desktop. i haven't gone phone->phone in at least a couple years though--good to hear that that's working better.

They recently improved it on iOS https://signal.org/blog/ios-device-transfer/

on Android you have to do it manually and its by no means easy or intuitive if you are an everyday user. Whatsapp nails this experience on Android with the back up and transfer capability

> Whatsapp nails this experience on Android with the back up and transfer capability

Note that Whatsapp’s backups are in plaintext and sent to a Google property, while Signal’s backups (even if more cumbersome to set up) are encrypted with a key that only you know.

yes good catch, I forgot to mention that. I wanted to highlight that for the average user being able to backup and move messages to a new device easily is a big plus even if its insecure.

I hope in 2021 Signal can improve their new transfer method by allowing transfers between Android devices or even ( albeit far more difficult) android and ios

But WhatsApp backups are stored unencrypted on Google Drive. So either you have backups or you keep your privacy from Google and Facebook.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com