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Comment by blub | Hacker News Reader

Calls are unusable in Signal: they drain a fully charged battery in about half an hour.

I use Signal as my primary SMS, and more and more of my contacts are using it. As such, I'm doing a lot more Signal voice and video calls. On my several year old, cheapy Moto G6, I've never had an issue with the battery draining noticeably faster when using Signal. I've done probably 45-60 minute calls over wifi, after which my battery is... maybe 70% full charge?

On iOS I've seen 10-40% battery percentage loss during relatively short calls (5-15m) on multiple devices.

This app is the worst battery drainer I've ever seen on an iOS device, considering what it does.

I had a successful hour-long video call on Signal recently using my aging iPhone SE (1st gen), which has battery-life issues in general but I made it through without needing to plug in. First time I’d used that feature of the app.

My biggest issue with calls on Signal is that if the app crashes, the call disconnects. This has happened to my on my up-to-date iPhone (10S) if I'm on a long call and get another Signal message, which means I need to unlock the app again.

On the desktop, I really wish that you could resize the contacts sidebar to just show the sender's icon, as you can in iMessage, but the maintainers don't seem to be particularly interested: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/2510

> My biggest issue with calls on Signal is that if the app crashes, the call disconnects.

Of course the app crashing during a call is an issue, but I don't see how the call could stay open with the app closed without security expectations breaking?

Sorry, my point is that I'd prefer if the app didn't crash. I should have said 'when' instead of 'if'.

Second that. I hear back my own voice, it drains the battery and the connection is almost always choppy.

I wanted to be able to use Signal to replace whatsapp, telegram and FB messenger. I've convinced some of my friends to install it, but none of them are happy with it.

On both mobile and desktop sometimes messages take hours to appear and on mobile it reserves ~2GB of storage for no apparent reason.

I trust that people behind Signal are brilliant got the security right, but the UX is simply not there yet.

2 GB on a fresh install? That would be definitely a bug. Did you check the storage usage (settings, storage)? Is it there as well?

Your debug logs would also be welcome for messages taking hours to appear. For mobile it's usually something with battery savings or FCM. For desktop that's the first time I read about that, are you sure that the messages had actually been sent?

I feel that for mobile it is still not as reliable as WhatsApp, but for desktop it's nice to be able to get your messages without mobile connection.

In case the storage is due to numerous messages and media, you have the option to limit the number of messages saved for each conversation, default is no limit I think.

It was indeed mostly media. There doesn't seem to be an option to limit the maximum size for media, or for remote backups.

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