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Comment by tomatocracy | Hacker News Reader

There are a few areas which are harder to use like backups.

I suspect one of the most difficult to address is getting it to successfully evade the random vendor-built aggressive battery saving settings in Android. WhatsApp is usually whitelisted from those so "just works". If you don't do similar things for Signal, it will stop picking messages up/notifying you after a day or two of inactivity.

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The backup issue makes Signal infeasible for me to suggest to family/friends as a serious alternative. It's just not up for discussion. People care about preserving their chat histories and I'm not about to put myself in a position where I'm at fault when that stuff goes lost because something or other. There's a lot of sentimental value there that is non-negotiable.

Unfortunately, that leaves me with ... nothing to recommend people switch to.

I have the exact same issue with Signal, which is sad, because it's perfect except for the lack automatic and encrypted cloud backup.

On that note, this feature - https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/issues/1567 - to allow bulk saving of media to iOS photos also hasn’t been addressed.

Whatsapp allows media from specific chats to be auto saved to photos. It is a very important feature, not sure how these aren’t making the priority bar.

Did Signal for Android drop Google Play Services? I thought they still supported push notifications through Google on Android unless you opted out or use a phone without Google Play.

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