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Would you mind elaborating on why Signal was sub-par? I use it as my main messenger and find it to be fine. There have been issues where older clients couldn’t receive messages and needed to upgrade their phones to fix. And migrating to a new phone is fragile, but everyday messaging seems ok to me.

Edit: honestly the challenge is getting other people to install it

Can't speak for the poster you are responding to, but as someone who also uses Signal for a portion of my social circle, here's my big one: Signal is tied to a phone number, so I can't use it from multiple devices/platforms (unless I want to show up as a different entity from each of them).

This alone is the reason why I personally would not freely choose Signal, and only use it because some of my friends insist :-\

I have Signal installed on my laptop, and it works perfectly. Do you mean multiple mobile devices? I guess that's probably true, and I'm sorry to hear that that's a limitation for you. That said - isn't that limitation also true of every other major messaging application. I only know of SMS and WhatsApp - what alternative do you prefer?

Signal on paired devices works really poorly if you are a heavy Signal user (eg: 5+ daily active groups that are media heavy, over 5GB database size).

The Signal servers rate limit you severely, causing it to take tens of minutes (or sometimes half an hour) to catch up to where your friends are at. Brief losses of connectivity are near-unrecoverable without closing the app on either my laptop or Pinebook, and worst yet the read/unread status of reactions to your messages is not synced across to your phone.

Signal also just killed custom emojis for reactions to messages, by refusing to display them. Now my message history shows I have reactions on a message I sent, but I can't even see the darn reaction.

Large rooms (50+ members) in Signal will get your client rate limited quickly, preventing you from interacting with anyone on Signal in a timely fashion.

Element/Matrix comparatively just works across my laptops, desktop, tablet (somewhere Signal refuses to work) and phone. It uses a nearly identical tech stack for the client (Electron with SQLite) but it never seems to need to sync messages from the server, lag behind, fail to connect to the server or fail to send messages. This is with me being in a ton of active rooms on Mozilla's Matrix, bridged rooms with IRC and Discord, and my friends shitposting at incredible rates.

The chat ecosystem is moving, Signal seems to have veered off course :C

Good to know, thanks! I have a mental disconnect between "1-1/small group chat clients" (for which Signal works perfectly for me) and "group chat clients" (for which Slack works well for work. Discord is some of the buggiest and least-usable software I've ever used, but I appear to be in the minority there). To be clear, I'm not trying to shift the goalposts here - it's very reasonable to expect Signal to be good at both, I've just never done so (which is why I didn't know about those issues, and why I only listed SMS and WhatsApp as competitors).

I definitely see that those issues would be irritating! I've never heard of Matrix, I'll give it a look - thanks!

You can use it on the desktop and it syncs fine. Have you looked into it recently?

I have. It doesn't sync message history. I have the desktop client on one computer, and if I set up the desktop client on my other computer (the one I'm on right now) it won't bring over all the past messages - it'll be like I'm starting fresh.

Yes. Because your desktop has a new private key and can’t access the other messages. This is the same if you log into a new device with iMessage.

Matrix / Element should have a comparable feature set to signal for almost all use cases and supports traditional username/password.

Unfortunately Matrix still has the issue of key sharing between clients. If you want to read previously sent messages when you log into a new client for the first time you have to do the key sharing dance with one of your existing clients.

For me it's a little annoying, but I find it an acceptable tradeoff. However I could easily see how for many people this would be a dealbreaker.

Key backup makes this a lot easier, assuming you've saved the recovery key in your password manager. But it's still one of those frustrating points where it defeats the purpose of the exercise for the provider to be able to recover an account (or at least the content and trust within an account) for someone who's locked out.

It's been a while. I should probably re-install it and give it a fresh chance. My recollection is that the UI was sluggish and that the app was poorly integrated with iOS (e.g. I don't think it had a sharing extension).

Signal iOS is still underwhelming, on Android it has some really nice features that make it a good SMS client and SMS replacement, but alas no one (outside Apple) is permitted to do that on iOS.

Element/Matrix might be of more interest, it syncs history instantly, has good room support (unlike Signal), bridges in Discord and IRC quite well, and has a ton of interesting native rooms from Mozilla Matrix, Pine64, Gitter and such

Wow i wanted to switch to iPhone later this year, but i did not know this. I exclusively use signal as my messaging app and this means i will not buy an iPhone i guess! Thanks for preventing a costly mistake :)

We're an iPhone family, but damn is that lame. How about: make the best product. Don't coerce people into buying an iPhone.

But iMessage isn't the product, it's a feature of the product. They think by not letting those features be available on other platforms they are creating the best product. You can't make the best product while simultaneously commoditizing your differentiators.

They are repeating RIM's mistakes. It fascinates me they haven't actually jumped on the services train, they just started charging a monthly fee for the walled garden while still focusing on selling product and called it a services play.

So far RIM consumer business went bankrupt and Apple keeps growing quarter after quarter. I would doubt that this strategy, which they have held for a decade on iOS is anything like RIM mistakes.

Apple's services includes AppleTV+, Apple Music, Apple Fitness+, Apple News+, Apple Podcasts+, iCloud Storage.

And it represents 20% of Apple's revenue so pretty sure this "they haven't actually jumped on the services train" comment is just a little off.

I've got a free year of Apple TV with a new Mac.

Nobody in our household is watching it; it has no app for Android TV.

Ted Lasso is worth watching. Other than that, I didn’t use my year trial either.

I registered only because I'm curious how they will do Asimov's Foundation (once it happens). Otherwise I would not bother.

I totally agree with this. iMessage as a stand alone business would be super valuable. WhatsApp is valuable because so many people use it. Chase the network effect or it will crush you.

Worst cast make people pay for some apple services to get iMessage if you really want to. They really are repeating RIM's mistake here.

iMessage would be trusted, largely spam free, etc.

My wife is now on Google Duo because it IS cross platform. WhatsApp and Telegram as well. These messaging networks are natural monopolies. So now I am on Duo etc. I just wish her parents could have installed iMessage on their phones - then apple could have charged us all $5/month for some type of family (10 person) plan.

I think engendering network effects intentionally is pretty monopolistic. You can't just say, "Hey, but we're not making money from it directly" and get away with that.

> They think by not letting those features be available on other platforms they are creating the best product.

No, they don't think that. Their refusal to extend iMessage to Android, to not even provide an iMessage API that would allow Google or third-parties to extend iMessage to other platforms has nothing to do with creating the best product. It's coercion, just as I quoted Federighi writing.

Just above that line he wrote "to get users to switch social networks we’d need more than a marginally better app."

Well then, make it insanely better. I happen to disagree with him though. I think he sold Apple short. I think even a marginally better messaging app would be sufficient.

Ultimately what I would like of Apple is for them to provide the best experience on their own devices, but also to provide interoperability with their services for third parties to extend to non-Apple devices.

BTW, it's interesting to see that they are extending to non-Apple hardware with AppleTV+. They've even paid Roku recently to get an AppleTV+ button on the Roku remote.

I still have this problem where my mom's iMac will occasionally send a SMS (sent via macOS Messages and delivered via her iphone) to the email address in my contact, rather than my phone number. Somehow it thinks that xxxx@yyy.com is a phone number, but +1xxxxxxxxxx isn't. Tmobile then takes the SMS and forwards it to xxxx@yyy.com, as happened to you. So frustrating at how hard this is for Apple to get right. I don't even have iMessage, but I guess that's the point -- interoperability, where it exists with Apple products, will be usable enough to get started but just buggy enough to be infuriating.

Cost of iMessage is built into the price of the iPhone and other apple products. Why would they pay to develop and maintain it for other devices? Apple doesn’t monetize their data like other messaging services/social networks. If apple charged $3/m for iMessage on Android would you pay it?

Yes. I prefer Android phones, but I don't want my choice of phone to impact the communication between my friends and family.

The only reason I consider getting an iPhone is for iMessage. I would gladly pay a monthly fee so I could use the phone I want AND communicate freely with the people in my social circles.

You're in luck:

https://www.beeper.com/

$10/month and you get your iMessage on Android.

someone needs to make a website hasbeeperbeenshutdownbyappleyet.com

> Beeper has two ways of enabling Android, Windows and Linux users to use iMessage: we send each user a Jailbroken iPhone with the Beeper app installed which bridges to iMessage

How do they make money doing this?

Thanks for the link. It looks interesting.

I would be willing to pay $10 if the solution wasn't so hacky... Maintaining a system solely to run unsupported software (in a way that I would have to imagine is against ToS somewhere) is just too risky to handle a critical piece of my communication. I can't drop a message - especially if my excuse for dropping messages is "the laptop in the corner of my closet had to install a security update and restarted on me"

You just described what that bloody pile of crap called iMessages is doing all the time and is somehow extremely popular in US.

It still baffles me why US has always had the different default IM compared to rest of the world. When the world moved from ICQ to MSN, they are still with AIM. When the world went with WhatsApp, no one in US knew WhatsApp until Facebook announced their $16B acquisition.

And what's worst is Apple didn't even care to improve iMessage.

> make the best product. Don't coerce people into buying an iPhone.

I think this is what we all wish for but business is warfare and corporations will do whatever it takes to "capture" the market.

Telegram is one potential answer. I find it to be the fastest messaging platform , and super reliable. Not to mention their desktop apps are not bloated, and message history, drafts, etc sync really well. (note - there is also a secret mode that works like signal, that also doesn't sync message content, which is parity with signal)

> but only a single phone #

I believe you can have multiple phone numbers associated with your iCloud account if they are a physical number. This is assuming you have a phone that's capable of dual-sim or if you have a second iPhone linked to your iCloud account. The latter is what I do when to make myself available when traveling abroad.

I have a dual sim iPhone 11. Everytime I switch off the main sim and use the other on abroad, imessage breaks and I have to use WhatsApp. Never manages to link two phone numbers, less so to use it without the correct sim...

You found Signal very sub-par for everyday messaging when compared to WhatsApp? May I ask how so? Because I found those 2 of the many I use to be very similar if not the same.

Reposting something I posted a few months ago:

The biggest reason is larger user base. But here are two things I do in WhatsApp that I can't do in Signal:

- Share live location. If I need to meet up with somebody, or let someone know how far away I am and when I'm arriving, I use share live location. "Share for 1 hour." In Signal you can share your location at a moment in time but it doesn't update.

- Broadcast messages ("mass text" basically). In WhatsApp I can send a message to a list of people without the people on the list seeing each other (to them it looks like I messaged them 1:1). In Signal I would have to use a group and all the members would see each other.

And now to add:

- Message history across apps. When I install the signal desktop app, it doesn't pull the message history with it.

It's been awhile since I tried Signal. At the time, the UI was sluggish and I don't think it even had a share extension. I'll give it a fresh try.

I agree with everything you said. WhatsApp is the best right now and that makes me very sad.

I use all messengers and don’t care. But tbh telegram is my favorite one. Slickest, cleanest, fast with tons of features and good UX

Simply due to the numbers of users. Getting to 2 billion users is an insurmountable obstacle no matter how good your app is.