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Comment by codethief | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

IIRC I read (some years ago) that Moxie wasn't really convinced that SMS support should stay in Signal-Android, either.

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He was definitely against the encryption-over-SMS feature of TextSecure as Android and smartphones more broadly grew in marketshare. He also wrote the blog post on how it doesn't matter if you have multiple messaging apps (or federation between them) because the notification area of your phone is the modern federation engine. I may be paraphrasing a bit heavily but the post is at [1].

I agree I can see him being at least OK with removing SMS but it seems at odds with what I felt was his overall view of "get the most people the most security we can" and by extension increasing the number of people using secure messaging services to normalize it so simply using encryption isn't seen as an outlier. The latter part is closer to moot now more than ever before with WhatsApp being E2E by default and Apple having huge marketshare in some markets with iMessage.

[1]: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

The ecosystem has kept moving, and Signal has not been keeping pace.

Whether Signal can catch up to its open and closed source competition remains an open question, and I don't think features like Signal Stories are going to be what helps them start nipping at the heels of the other much larger competition.

> I agree I can see him being at least OK with removing SMS but it seems at odds with what I felt was his overall view of "get the most people the most security we can"

You're right:

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/6134#issu...

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