Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

At least they tell you about it - there's a banner on the top of the app. Last time WhatsApp was having issues, it didn't give any indication - messages just weren't being delivered (but as a user, there's no way to distinguish between "no messages" and "messages not being delivered").

View on HN

I don't see a banner on the top of my app. I only found out when the desktop client kept timing out with 502 errors and after asking on Twitter, found other people were having issues too.

It's there on https://status.signal.org/ though.

There is a banner in the Android app, not on the desktop.

The desktop app shows a yellow "DISCONNECTED - Check your network connection" warning. They probably should work on better error/status reporting in next version.

Desktop app is still behind the mobile in a few things but they are getting closer these days

Yeah I was very positively surprised to find that the desktop app has a large number of useful keyboard shortcuts: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360036517511-Si...

Thanks! They're listed in the menu of the desktop app as well: Help | Show Keyboard Shortcuts

Yeah, I'm using Android but not seeing a banner in the app.

For me it's the other way around, haven't had any banners or anything on Android, whereas the desktop client has, and messages have been throwing 50x errors, while the mobile messages just seem to take ages to send.

I didn't see the banner in the Android app until I tried to send a message.

I've personally had (many) more signal issues than WhatsApp issues, and not one of the signal issues was accompanied by a banner.

I am not vouching for WhatsApp. I just don't think we should pretend that Signal is more reliable than it is.

Last time WhatsApp was having issues, a “Connecting” banner was shown permanently on the app and all outgoing messages displayed a clock instead of a tick, showing that they weren’t reaching the server.

You on android? No such banner on my ios client.

I see the banner in Android.

fwiw I do not see the banner on android. That being said, things break. Breaking in a way you can notice it's broken is good, but pobody's nerfect.

I did see it on iOS

Not sure if it's only showing on Android but I had to attempt to send a message first before it showed.

I'm not getting a banner on iOS either, however when I try to send a message it fails with a red exclamation mark in a circle saying "Request failed: service unavailable (503)"

Edit: A few minutes after the message failed to send I got a yellow banner stating that the service was experience interruptions.

However the banner disappeared shortly afterward, so it would have been easy to miss.

iOS

No one told me about anything. All I get is an error about checking my internet.

My internet's fine.

I can understand not having 100% uptime, but going on 10 hours now and this is really not leaving me with a good impression.

I can count on SMS; I can't count on this.

[EDIT]Now I'm not even getting that specific error; my messages are simply failing to send (ios, desktop/windows)

heavy user of whatsapp and I can't recall having any issues with whatsapp ever. I'm a heavy user of signal as well and... it's a bit crap honestly. I actually needed to transfer a file to a client today and was strongly relying on signal for that...

There was a CDN issue for media about a year and a half ago. Can't recall about issues with messaging

Reply on news.ycombinator.com