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Comment by AnonC | Hacker News Reader

> I seriously don’t understand why people use Telegram instead of Signal. Any reason!

Any reason? I’ll give you some serious ones.

Signal sucks really bad on user experience and features. If you try both for a week or two and learn about the features, you’d be able to conclude the same.

Signal does not care about users and prevents backups on iOS. Lose your device or delete the app due to some issues and reinstall? All your chats are gone!

Signal still has message delivery issues (like long delays)…it’s 2022!!!

Signal keeps pestering me to allow notifications and to allow contacts access. I can only choose “Not Now”, since there is no option that says “No”. When I choose “Not Now”, it will say “we’ll remind you later” and pester me again. I don’t understand why anyone would assume that this app cares about privacy or about users’ time.

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> Signal sucks really bad on user experience and features. If you try both for a week or two and learn about the features, you’d be able to conclude the same.

Hm, for me Signal does all I need: Chat, voice chat, video chat, group chat, sending text, pictures, videos, whatever. All of that of course encrypted and not financed by a Russian millionaire/billionaire.

> Signal still has message delivery issues (like long delays)…it’s 2022!!!

Haven't noticed those. How sure are you, that your contacts are actually looking at Signal messages (two filled cirles checkmarks) or have network to receive the messages (two unfilled circles checkmarks)?

> Signal keeps pestering me to allow notifications and to allow contacts access. I can only choose “Not Now”, since there is no option that says “No”. When I choose “Not Now”, it will say “we’ll remind you later” and pester me again. I don’t understand why anyone would assume that this app cares about privacy or about users’ time.

OK, that's really annoying then. I usually use Signal on my computer, from which it works very nicely and never asks me any of those things.

Signal operates on the idea that anything sent through chat is ephemeral and not worth keeping, which just doesn’t work in practice in my experience.

When you’re knee deep in conversation with someone you’re probably not going to say, “oh hey we should switch to email so we can keep a record of this”. It might not even occur to you that the conversation could ever be of value.

There’s been several occasions when my life has been made much more easy for having been able to dig up some old message in iMessage, Telegram, etc from as far back as multiple years ago sometimes because the way things played out the pertinent info didn’t exist anywhere else simply because nobody involved could’ve ever guessed it had any importance.

> Signal operates on the idea that anything sent through chat is ephemeral and not worth keeping, which just doesn’t work in practice in my experience.

Why do you think that? Did you lose any messages? 'cause I can scroll back months and still see all my messages there. Never noticed any loss.

As mentioned in parent comment:

> Signal does not care about users and prevents backups on iOS. Lose your device or delete the app due to some issues and reinstall? All your chats are gone!

Switching out devices is something that happens often enough for many users that transferring history should not be an ordeal. Even the most careful users will occasionally break their phones, and sometimes people need to switch platforms for whatever reason.

WhatsApp suffers from this issue too, at least when trying to migrate histories between platforms.

just to add, telegram can NOT transfer or back up E2E encrypted chats either. unencrypted chats transfer because they are saved on the telegram server.

i think deltachat is possibly the only one that can transfer encrypted messages because you can copy the encryption keys and the messages are just mails, easy to copy (and usually stored on your mail server too)

i don't know how matrix handles this, but from the way verification works there, i am not confident.

Signal can do that. Both on Android and iOS. What it can't do on iOS is to create regular Backups (which it can on Android).

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Ba...

I think it has something to do that Signal won't trust iCloud as Backup target.

> Signal does not care about users and prevents backups on iOS. Lose your device or delete the app due to some issues and reinstall? All your chats are gone!

My chats being gone from new devices is one reason I use Signal over others.

> Signal still has message delivery issues (like long delays)…it’s 2022!!!

I've sent tens or hundreds of thousands of messages over the course of years and the only time i've had delays is when I had spotty service.

I for one am 100% satisfied with Signals UX, and a big reason for that it precisepy that it does not evolve into a communications platform, but just pushes chats around. The delivery issues are very rare, and not a btother anyways. Chat is not time sensitive nor should it be.

Signal cares about privacy (unlike Telegram) and the evidence is right there in their respective source repositories.

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