Removing SMS support from Signal Android (soon)

As an android user myself, I much prefer having SMS built in because I use the search feature often to look back through all my SMS/Signal chats. I also regularly forward an SMS message to a Signal user, or vice versa. I'm already starting to feel like those iOS users who told me "I don't want another app"...

Signal seems to be trying to move further and further from "my preferred way to chat with people" and closer to the chat equivalent of "that protonmail account I only log in to when I need secrecy".

I obviously love having security on messages in transit, but I also like being able to keep my message history around and search my conversations for something that happened a year ago. It seems like Signal is on a trajectory to turn everything into disappearing messages. Are they the "safe for activists" communication app, or the "let's try to make as many as possible safer by default" app? Feels like they don't know.

And on top of it all the messaging is just frustrating. "we've taken away an incredibly useful and heavily used feature so we have development resource to better implement shitcoins and such" is such an irritating defense of the decision that I disabled my monthly donation.

Messages that I would have sent via SMS currently will automatically get sent via Signal if the person I'm sending to has started using Signal without my knowledge. This has happened in several instances where I was pleasantly surprised to see a friend had started using Signal. Now that I'm forced into a separate SMS app, this will no longer be a possibility. I certainly won't be firing up Signal to see if a contact has joined before sending them an SMS.

Signal was always one of those "win-win" apps, get more security when it's available and I don't have to worry about adding to the giant bucket of messaging apps.

They were a paragon of putting the user first and I was a strong supporter... but now... Why not Telegram? Or anything else?

I don't need the security, it was nice-to-have. Having to switch between Signal and other apps is a heavy amount of friction.

If this were an in-depth announcement with a long and well-structured technical justification attached, I could understand. Though I suspect I'd likely disagree with the decision, I could probably accept it as a simple different of opinion if the arguments were evidently well-thought-through and considered.

This blog-post is so lightweight. There's no technical analysis. There's barely any justification. Yes we know SMS is insecure and yes - it seems plainly obvious that having them in the same UI could pose UX challenges & user confusion issues. So improve the UX and clarify the distinction. Did anyone in Signal consider the userbase or the advantages of this feature at all?

Definitely the end of my Signal usage anyway. It's my main SMS app: my primary motivator is SMS UX, the ability to securely message a tiny subset of my friends is a very nice but ultimately non-vital bonus. Having a separate app for those people isn't worth my while (they're on other platforms I use more).

The migration off it will be an unwelcome pain...

This is an incredibly bad reason to remove SMS support. Sure, the fact "plaintext SMS messages are inherently insecure" is true, but the implication is not "remove SMS support".

Most people are motivated strongly by convenience. Signal is convenient because of its use as a drop-in replacement for your existing SMS client, so people use it, which increases their personal privacy and security. Removing SMS support will directly and substantially reduce Signal usage, and therefore both of those things.

The solution to "SMS is insecure" is pretty obviously "make a warning message telling users that", which also solves their second problem:

> This brings us to our second reason: we’ve heard repeatedly from people who’ve been hit with high messaging fees after assuming that the SMS messages they were sending were Signal messages, only to find out that they were using SMS, and being charged by their telecom provider.

...and the third problem:

> Third, there are serious UX and design implications to inviting SMS messages to live beside Signal messages in the Signal interface.

This is ridiculous. You're not making a paid product where if your app doesn't look perfect people won't use it - you're making a messaging app, and slightly ugly workarounds are perfectly OK.

> It’s important that people don’t mistake SMS messages sent or received via the Signal interface as secure and private when in fact they are not.

THEN DESIGN THE APP THAT WAY. IT'S NOT THAT HARD.

This post is a travesty, and the reasoning contained inside is completely insane.

Wikipedia says that Moxie is still on the Signal Board of Directors, but I find it hard to believe that he would let something this crazy go through.

As a side note, I'm on the beta, and recently got "Signal Stories". This immensely annoyed me, and had to dig through to remove it (since it wasn't obvious). After the whole crypto thing and these decisions, it might be time to find another secure messaging app.

I've always wondered how companies become so blind to what their userbase actually wants and needs (looking at the majority of the rest of the comments here that seem to echo my sentiment as well) that we end up in situations like this. I guess "you die a hero or live long enough to become the villain" applies to apps too.

Literally the only reason I recommend others and use Signal myself?

Seriously, Signal doesn't have the userbase to drop SMS support. All my Signal contacts use WhatsApp or Telegram that I already have installed. I use signal mostly as a SMS app, secondly as E2E communication. It will be easier to uninstall Signal.

This messaging seems a little tone-deaf, given that there is no way to export SMS messages from Signal. Apparently it's possible, using a third-party piece of software, to decrypt your backups and extract the messages, but that's not exactly a reasonable thing to expect people to do.

One of the reasons I liked Signal was because it was easy to get normal people to start using it, because they could just set it up as their SMS app, and continue life as normal, just getting the benefits of encryption for any of their contacts that were also using Signal. Now there's not notably any reason to use Signal as opposed to, say, Matrix.

I also think it'll hurt the value proposition when getting people to join signal. Not overcomplicating the messaging scenario was a big winner to do that.

I'm glad privacy is becoming mainstream but dislike lowering the bar for adoption to where it profoundly affects users.

From my perspective (and I am NOT speaking for anybody else) this is an improvement. I already have multiple messaging apps installed, and when I click send on a Signal message I expect it to go end-to-end encrypted or not go at all. But I am not the only user profile.

What a laughable, out of touch suggestion. Did anyone at Signal actually ask the community what they thought about removing SMS support?

Seriously, this decision is going to kill Signal app. It will halt the majority of growth as evangelists such as myself can no longer recommend it with a straight face. Signal is supposed to enhance the messaging experience, not replace it.

I think Signal thinks they can take on the WhatsApp market, completely misunderstanding why that market didn't choose Signal in the first place. The products serve two completely different user needs, and are highly geographically segregated.

What the heck is going on over at Signal Foundation?

That is hard to swallow, being able to quickly send a message through SMS to the same receiver in emergency situations* was quite handy.

*like when you're at a protest and the tower is overloaded, or you're on a remote location and you see that the Signal message doesn't get through because of lack of 3G/LTE connectivity.

With the SMS integration it was pretty easy because it would just switch over if the other person had Signal or if/when they signed up in the future.

What's the workflow now? Manually ask them on SMS if they use Signal? Just try it and see if it works?

This sounds like one of those "Don't Worry! Rejoice! We're breaking your things!" announcements that hasn't even thought about how people use Signal IRL.

I'm going to stop my monthly subscription to Signal Foundation.

If User A (who uses the signal app) regularly communicates with User B (who doesn't), then this change might encourage User A to ask User B to join signal. It makes a stronger network effect, and will increase viral growth.

However, I think the Signal team is misguided, and in fact they will just lose users who don't want one more app to manage.

https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-blog-removing-sms...

> So I guess the TL;DR is: SMS is on it’s way out in general, and in a world where Signal supports SMS, all of SMS’s shortcomings are often attributed to Signal itself, all while confusing people into thinking their SMS’s are secure.

Most people in my social circle use Snapchat or iMessage for "texting", for reference.

I noticed this when I got a new phone and hadn't yet enabled signal to handle SMS and opted to stay with it because of how many conversations I had that were auto-E2E, where before they'd just been text messages. I still prefer signal for the people I know use it though. In short you can still use the signal (protocol at least) on messages, so I can understand why signal would do this.

I did not need emoji's, groups, gifs and all the other neat stuff that signal has introduced throughout the years(to varying degrees of success). I had been using it, while none of my friends were. What I did need was a single messenger to handle sms/mms with the default being secure when security was available. I have multiple friends now using it and sadly will revert back to a 100% insecure messenger for my phone for 99% of my messages. The new one will do everything better than signal does except security, so it will have some benefits.

I will be on the lookout for a replacement. I hope signal continues to bring security for entities that need it through the future. I have not looked at tox in a while. I'll check that out again.

Pretty weak reasoning to me. Just do what Apple does and color sms messages some other color or whatever. Problem solved.

This is gonna make me drop Signal. I use it as my default sms app and have been very happy with it, but most of my conversations (although most actual messages are Signal) are still over sms so it'll have to go. I can't be bothered to roll a bunch of different apps.

Still, I'm grateful for the work the Signal team has done over the years. Sad to see us part ways!

Aside: Funny how quickly the wheels fall off as soon as Moxie leaves. (https://signal.org/blog/new-year-new-ceo/)

I had no idea signal even supported SMS, nor do I know anybody who uses SMS

oh well

https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-blog-removing-sms...

No doubt they are in a tough spot. Some users will not accept this feature omission. But if what they claim is accurate, the insecure nature of SMS, along with Google's hoarding of their internal RCS APIs makes it tough to be a messaging provider on Android.

I have been using Signal for years. The ability to make it your default SMS client is one of the major drivers of adoption; if someone agrees that privacy matters, and you can point out that the transition to Signal is frictionless and offers all the same features as their existing SMS app, then installing, trying, and liking it become easy. I've brought hundreds of people onto Signal, and being able to give a simple 'yes' to questions about whether it handles SMS is almost always what 'seals the deal.'

Signal is saying that mixing non-secure and secure messages in the same app might cause confusion and security fails, even though the difference is very clearly signalled.

Their argument is bullshit. If users go back to separate messaging apps, chances are those apps will look much the same as Signal (which itself copies the look and feel of the iOS messaging app quite closely). There's a much bigger security risk from users forgetting that they are not in Signal and carelessly pasting & sending information that was supposed to be private or disappear.

Additionally, it creates a bunch of new security risks, allowing third parties who gain possession of a phone to distinguish between conversations that happen over SMS and conversations that happen over Signal, drawing inferences that there is something untoward about the latter.

I cannot understand the constantly changing, er, signals coming from Signal. One month they want to be just like every other messaging app and they're pushing features that hardly anyone has asked for, like sticker packs or crypto payments. Other times they say users are too paranoid for not wanting to expose their phone number/pop up messages about who in the user's address book has installed Signal. Today they're saying that wanting to use Signal for all your messaging needs is somehow anti-privacy.

I find myself wishing it cost money or a small annual subscription so I could vote with my $, because the Signal foundation seems to spend more effort on telling its users that they're wrong than on listening to them.

It was seamless and I didn't see much of an issue with it.

I guess Signal is going to become that app that is only opened once a month or so. No more donations from me.

That's something a simple UX change could improve and does not justify something so radical. There's probably another reason they are doing this, these are my best guesses:

- Feature parity between Android, iOS and Desktop

- Moving towards Signal accounts tied to usernames instead of phone numbers

- Developer resources (unlikely, since this feature has existed since the beginning and probably requires less maintenance than other features, but I'd pay for a subscription if they kept it)

Whatever the real reason is, make them say so, the reason given is extremely flimsy. If they go through with this it will put lives in danger for people like activists, journalists, and anyone crossing a border who depend on their SMS messages being encrypted at rest (despite SMS not being end-to-end encrypted in transit). Using Signal instead of a different SMS app also prevents other apps from reading your SMS messages. Test this out - switch your default SMS away from Signal and sign into an app requiring SMS verification, and that SMS is probably readable by the app without any interaction on your part.

Cue the Apple-ish response of them saying they're listening while not taking any of their users' valid concerns seriously at all. Very disappointed in them.

So this is now a lie. This decision absolutely goes against how users actually use the software. Tone deaf and insulting. More cases of Signal saying "we know better than you. You're using it wrong. Do what we say.

Changing the Send button's icon to "SMS" or a color/border change ala iMessage are ideas off the top of my head and I'm sure they've got designers significantly more talented than I am that can think of better ones. We've seen very little iteration there that's indicated the significance of that problem...and frankly if they highlighted this as a tactic vs endless spam texts more people would be receptive to this news. As it stands I think this is going to significantly reduce their number of casual users. In fact I'm willing to bet that the cohort of users who are used as justification are the least likely to convince their contacts to switch to Signal.

Don't get me wrong, their real desire to increase the amount of people sending secure messages via Signal alone + resource mgmt in the face of a recession are valid. But acting as a unified messenger (with better link unfurling, threaded replies, and reactions after Google killed Allo vs the default messenger that spent years getting them) was the trojan horse onto many of my friends' and colleagues' phones. Now that there's parity I can see more people just opting into the default messenger/FB Messenger + Whatsapp combo because more people exist there and we're all just lazy.

This decision is idiotic and will cause a mass migration off the platform. Why not take a better approach and work on a better UX to make it clearer when a message thread is secure or not?

Ok I get that on Android the situation is such that, as a message provider, you don't give away "metadata" ie who is texting whom, keeping that data either for yourself or the highest bidder. WhatsApp, too, fuss about e2e encryption while conveniently not talking about the value of "metadata" for ad targeting and even want to aggressively grab and upload your contacts at every turn (despite it being illegal in EU to share PII without explicit and documented and revocable consent of all individual phone number holders stored in your phone book). But why does this change come only on Android? Would it be suicidal for signal to drop SMS/MMS when the default messaging app (iMessage) does fall back to SMS/MMS on iOS as is well known?

A messaging app should have one clear behavior per interface. This was "maybe secure, maybe not". I have an SMS app for that (well, VoIP-sms, because I'm weird).

It made it amazingly easy to get started yourself, and also convert others.

Why on earth would they decide to give up that advantage?

It would make more sense if there was one codebase that supported all apps. And then I could make a "silo" for each use case. I would make one icon for activism, one for work, one for friends. The first one must use E2EE, the second one must use my company's Rocketchat, etc..

It's a pity Signal doesn't allow third party clients. I really hope somebody makes a rouge multi protocoll app, like Pidgin used to be. I bet a dedicated small team could make it in a year.

So instead of working on RCS, we got mobilecoin, stickers, gif search, and now yank out legacy SMS support so more "features" can be developed?

As an early adopter of TextSecure, through CyanogenMod integration, to Signal and everything in between, I have the t-shirts and all -- I am done with Signal.

But like many recent developments, I'm just left dumbfounded by their high-level decision making. I've stopped recommending signal to tech persons for a while. I don't want yet another messaging app either. Matrix is serving me well.

Is anyone NOT inside Signal happy about this decision? Please comment if so, and why.

Dropping the Chrome Extension was a major quality of life dip for me, made Signal far less usable across systems. Their insistence that they didnt feel it was up to their desired quality offered me no comfort; it worked, it was easy, and you tool it away.

Signal refusing to allow scripting, or an API, or any option at all for expanding user agency sucks.

They have voice messages but to my knowledge you cant preview the message at all. I dont even know if you can abort sending it once you start?

This company had such an early lead but they keep doubling dowm on the most detached, conceited ridiculous plans, few of which benefit the user. It's embarassing. It'd be so nice if there were some mandatory protocol in telephony that let people declare other systems they support; add someone's phone number and see their XMPP, email, irc, and mumble contact info. It's absurdly difficult for people to make known their contact info; Signals sms integration was a killer feature that seamlessly put them atop the telecomm heirarchy, but here the stupid fools are, killing that killer feature & what got them this marketshare.

> The most important reason for us to remove SMS support from Android is that plaintext SMS messages are inherently insecure. They leak sensitive metadata and place your data in the hands of telecommunications companies. With privacy and security at the heart of what we do, letting a deeply insecure messaging protocol have a place in the Signal interface is inconsistent with our values and with what people expect when they open Signal.

They do have a point though. SMS is insecure, unencrypted and leaks highly sensitive metadata anyway and it needed to go from Signal. You already have the system SMS app for this to use.

To hear that people use it in group chats is mind boggling to me.

personally I jumped the boat when they made app unusable with PIN code nag screen, which they backpedaled from after uproar but it was already too late for me and my extended family where I pushed Signal, there were message delivery issues, horrible downtime in Europe because US admin was taking sleep, but the unavoidable nag screen was the last drop, the later news about shady crypto and other stuff just convinced me this app ain't worth a dime, which this SMS announcement just confirmed

if you wanna alternative IM app use Element (Matrix), unlike Signal it doesn't require phone number, it use decentralized network and you can choose from whatever app you like, never understood why IT skilled people pushed Signal after Element became already quite user friendly

I have telegram, signal, whatsapp and Element on my phone, this is why the new digital markets act is going to be revolutionary, especially with bridge friendly platforms like matrix.org.

It feels like I just got my friends to put letters in envelopes instead of only using postcards. Now we all have to drive to two different post offices - one for letters and one for cards - because the original office will stop delivering cards. Everyone is just going to go back to using postcards.

>Dropping support for SMS messaging also frees up our capacity to build new features (yes, like usernames) that will ensure Signal is fresh and relevant into the future

I don't buy this.

First this wallet thing, now no SMS? Why not try to figure out a way to use encrypted SMS?

I've had Signal since shortly after it renamed itself from TextSecure to Signal, and I never bothered using it as the default SMS/Messaging app, because back then it was a bad SMS app. It felt like it paled in comparison to what the default Android Messages app could do. I didn't want to get the false impression, either, that my chats were encrypted when they really weren't, just because they shows up in Signal.

So I kept the two separate. I assumed pretty much everyone else did the same. And yeah, there's the occasional oddity when someone texts me over SMS instead of using Signal when I know for a fact that they have both, but most of the people doing it are using iPhones, so I have to assume it's the same experience for them as well.

"My bad, this easy SMS client I got you to switch to is going to stop supporting SMS, and we're going to have to export all your old texts or they'll be gone forever."

i hope they reconsider this decision; i have been using the product since textsecure and I would hate to stop doing so because they no longer support out-of-network communication.

> If you want to keep them, you’ll also need to export your SMS messages from Signal into that new app.

So that means my text messages will be removed from my Signal chat history? Put differently, considering how many of my contacts over the years switched between using Signal, not using Signal, and using Signal again, this means that parts of my conversations will suddenly be gone and conversations might suddenly be incoherent?

I have trouble expressing just how angry I am about this change.

Reason 1 and 2: Users can be confused by whether a message is SMS or Signal and this is bad for security, backed with "there's only so much we can do on the design side"...really? At what point do you sacrifice the convenience of the masses in order to get through to people who don't understand that a message that says "SMS" on it is sent over SMS? Hell, turn SMS bubbles bright red or something, that would be better than removing the feature.

Reason 2: Users can be confused by whether a message is SMS or signal and thus end up incurring charges - I thought about this for 5 seconds and came up with a solution - ask the user whether they ever want to send SMS through the signal app when they first open it and respect that preference. Make it a setting. Boom, if you are using signal you know you're going over data. Or is the response to that that users are too dumb to understand it? I'm positive there is a good solution here.

This decision just doesn't make any sense and it's probably obvious to the people working on signal that it doesn't make sense, I wonder what the decision process looked like here.

This is a terrible decision.

It took significant effort to convert close friends and family to signal and was only palatable due to it becoming the default messaging app on Android.

Not only will I be likely to field a ton of tech support once this occurs, I'll also likely need to recommend a completely different app.

Looks like I might just bite the bullet and buy iPhones for my immediate family (without icloud imessage backup)

I'm tired of explaining to my relatives why they can send their picture to one person but not to another, or why it requires wifi for some contacts. Mixing two incompatible messaging standards communicating via two different channels in one app is confusing for many people. Sure, it also has advantages and I think you could make it work, but the app actively asking users to make it the default SMS app is not a great idea.

> "We’ve heard repeatedly from people who’ve been hit with high messaging fees after assuming that the SMS messages they were sending were Signal messages"

> "We can only do so much on the design side to prevent such misunderstandings"

It sounds like they are trying to protect users from themselves.

Now I am faced with a decision: * Do I keep signal around, for that one to two messages a month I receive? * Or do I get rid of it, forcing my contacts back on Whatsapp/regular SMS?

To be perfectly honest, I am thinking about just gettting rid of it. No need to keep yet another communication channel around when I can't get rid of the other ones anyways. :(

These protocols are insecure, not private, and fundamentally incompatible with Signal's mission. Supporting them at all, while highly convenient, is a queer oxymoron for an app like Signal. We have to rip the bandaid off eventually.

This trend of siloing functions into seperate apps is confusing and frustrating for regular users, especially elderly users like my mother "Just push this button you can text and call me and text any of your friends"

(How many current users will it drive away? Or cause to use Signal less than before?)

(How many new users will Signal acquire, because adoption network effects weren't working as well as possible, when messaging with non-Signal friends was too convenient, but now Signal users are more motivated to prod their non-Signal friends towards Signal?)

And who's going to pick up the users that Signal loses?

The result of this change is that we will stop using signal all together. They've accomplished the exact thing they said they want to avoid.

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/requests/new

Rip. This is definitely going to make it harder to get signal adoption. My partner will surely stop using it too now and I'll have to convince my friends to migrate to yet another platform.

In my friend circle, at least, it's common for people to go in and out of using Signal. They might have had it on an old phone and forget to install it on the new phone. Whatever - life happens.

Signal can't know if someone who used to have their number registered with Signal has stopped using it. Signal will still display them as a user and accept messages. It's been invaluable for me to be able, if I message a friend after a break in communication, to send a signal message...and then, if I don't get a response, a SMS message. If they respond to the SMS I can see in our history that they had signal and switched at some point. This change takes that away and will make it must more difficult to deal with inconsistent adopters.

The only possible benefit to this would be to break their dependence on using phone numbers as the way to sign up for accounts and possibly provide a reasonable way to export message data.

Otherwise it just feels like the wrong decision and a reminder that Signal is not a community driven project but subject to arbitrary changes and provides no way to fork or disagree with the project lead as can be done with most free and open source software.

The user enters the relationship consensually, but the choices about the service's operations are done without the user's consent.

In this case, the user's only choices are to either abandon the service, or to put up with the changes they did not consent to.

In the future, with data portability being common and table stakes for most services, I think there will be a third option: seamless transition to a different service, preserving all data, metadata, relationships, and user accounts.

This is already possible with existing, established technology: private keys, hashing, and text files.

We have a bright future to look forward to, where this type of change will be perceived as old-fashioned and barbaric as surgery without anesthetic.

Really? More used than WhatsApp, Telegram or iMessage?

> ...

> Now, data plans are cheaper and far more ubiquitous than they were nearly a decade ago

I'm curious, are these guys lives in a bubble or what? I think they should try to travel around the world a bit.

> we’ve heard repeatedly from people who’ve been hit with high messaging fees after assuming that the SMS messages they were sending were Signal messages, only to find out that they were using SMS, and being charged by their telecom provider.

So in essence, they fuc*d up UI/UX and now the simplest approach to fix would be just to remove it. Sounds like a brilliant idea from an MBA guy or whatever-evangelist-title-is.

Is it feasible to fork the app?

I will be recommending against using Signal for any reason whatsoever to unless this decision changes. If it goes through, I'll move myself and everyone to something else. The options for e2e encryption are many today and I already have to have a bunch of these apps, so Signal becomes pointless. If they do this, they'll do worse later. Better to get out now at the "first" red flag.

That said, I also want to use signal without my phone. Things like usernames would be great.

That said, part of me thinks that’s an engineering problem, not a UX problem. Why are engineering problems being pushed into the UX requirements?

If they manage to make the UI and feature set as complete as iMessage, it would convince people to switch to Signal much much faster than Google's pity RCS bashing of Apple.

Just a week ago I replaced the sms app with signal for two people.

This was the main reason why I just installed signal and still use it vs telegram because of this exact feature :-(

Come on signal what ya doing stop!

I'm happy we have an available secure chat for people that need/want it, but I'm more than happy to keep it relegated to niche uses until it gets more user friendly.

I do think Signal deserves a lot of criticism but I'm always amazed how a forum of programmers and highly tech literate users just trashes a small team of hackers fighting against big tech. They are open source. We are the ones that can help them. There are plenty of custom builds out there (that do access official Signal servers) and you can build this feature back in if you want. I don't think it is a problem if Signal decides it has more important features to support with their tiny team. But if you want more features you got to donate either time or money. This is "HACKER" news, so get hacking.

"From the beginning, the team behind Signal put people and their needs at the core of their commitments. They understood that iron-clad security is fairly pointless if people can’t use, access, or feel comfortable with it. In other words, if my friends won’t use a messaging app, it doesn’t work as a messaging app. It works as a thought experiment, at best. Understanding this, Signal’s developers and designers created an app that honors people’s needs and expectations, while maintaining strict privacy promises."[1]

I'll echo the other comments here talking about network effects, onboarding friction, and social capital wasted convincing friends/family.

[1] https://signal.org/blog/announcing-signal-president/

Maybe I'll grab the source code, rip out all the Signal parts, and just use that.

Next step: Please stop using phone numbers as a user ID. I have lots of throwaway phone numbers, but many people don't want to leak their phone number to every single person they want to have an encrypted conversation with.

I haven't for many years, for sending (except for one time I wanted to test a modem driver SMS function).

I regularly use Signal, Telegram and Google chat and used to use whatsapp until it was banned by my employer but the only time I ever use SMS is to receive automatic authorisation SMSs

- Setting up phone for relatives

- Replacing Android Messages with Signal

- “So this is the App to send and receive SMS, and you can also send me and many others secure and free messages on there”

My optimism for Signal becoming mainstream just faded...

If not: please Signal guys - that's just a step back. People who write SMS won't stop writing SMS, you just allow another party to do whatever is good for them. And searching through _all_ messages is really a big thing for some of us.

Why not just add some awareness items - visible eyes and ears and dollar signs, together with the information what information is given away and that this might cost money?

"We have now reached the point where SMS support no longer makes sense."

They should have let the users decide that

If Signal does enable creating accounts with non-identifiable user names instead of phone number, then it will be a great improvement and a protocol that can be used for activists.

[1]: https://github.com/mollyim/mollyim-android

This is a horrid decision. Everyone above already covered the reasons why better than I could.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25848278

I would drop Signal for that app, even if I had to pay for it.

I can see how this is a hassle to maintain though; just for example, my Huawei consistently resets the default sms app to the crappy stock one every time I use their "ultra battery saver mode" (which I otherwise like a lot) even though I explicitly included signal in the list of apps that are allowed to run in that mode.

So I can see how the ecosystem makes this an annoying feature...

I find myself very glad to have focused my efforts on moving family and friends into the Matrix ecosystem instead of Signal. Not that Matrix is perfect, but I don't have to worry about the rug getting pulled out from under my feet. :(

But whatever. I only send and receive SMS very rarely these days, so I installed Silence on my phone. It's still annoying, though. Having one app for SMS and encrypted messaging was very convenient.

Now, if signal could get rid of the phone number requirement...

If I get a SMS in Signal and I reply with Signal, it sends a Signal message - not a SMS.

I think the only one that's totally anonymous is Wickr

Does anyone here have a good suggestion for an SMS app for Android?

They just keep on bugging.

All of my family use iOS though, so this is already their use case. I understand less code is more secure, and a unified codebase between devices is good -- heck. This might even lead to no more phone number requirement.

But this still stinks for my use case.

FWIW though, I was more upset about the cryptocurrency thing.