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Comment by pastrami_panda | Hacker News Reader

So they're removing the SMS feature but adding Stories? Sounds like we know where this is gonna end up.

I wonder how many use Signal as their default sms app on Android. I have been doing so since the start and thought it was seamleas and amazing. Including the feature for message delivery confirmation. The announcement in the app hit me completely unprepared. We can't have nice things anymore.

Stories sounds nice as a feature. It doesn't take away anything. But dropping sms support makes me bitter. I haven't found a replacement yet so happy to hear recommendations.

I used to use Signal as my default SMS app (and would prefer to have kept it that way), but I would occasionally miss texts. They typically were group MMS ones, so I split them back out.

I too was using SMS in Signal, but only because it was slightly better that the default in GrapheneOS.

That said, I thought it still sucked. Sharing a photo from another app only showed a list of Signal chats and my contacts - with existing SMS chats being absent. There was also no way to bulk delete messages - which was particularly annoying when clearing out the countless Doordash messages I get.

Kind of glad they're altogether scrapping SMS support. Hopefully a better, dedicated app will appear to take it's place as an open source SMS app.

It also allows me to reevaluate whether I even want to consider using Signal since I only talk to two people on it anyway.

Hah, good point about reevaluating. I too have only two people that I talk to via Signal itself. It's going to look quite empty in the app. But then that's the way it is for iOS as well. Oh well.

Same on LineageOS. The default sms app is pretty terrible.

Consider switching to Silence SMS app - https://silence.im/ . It allows you to send normal plain SMS / MMS to anyone. But if the other party also has Silence app installed, it has a neat feature where it uses Signal's encryption protocol to encrypt and send your SMS / MMS to the other party.

It has not been updated since 2019, so I think we can declare it dead :/

If it works fine, then why does it matter if the stable codebase hasn't been updated?

Hmmm, I haven't heard about this one before. Just installed it and it looks quite nice actually. Pretty snappy and configurable. I like it :)

It seems to be f-droid only though and not available on the Play Store anymore. Not that I'm too concerned about that.

Thanks for mentioning it!

Maybe Signal should split into two apps. One keeps SMS for their large Android userbase. The other goes on to become a privacy-respecting TikTok/Snapchat clone. The world needs both of these.

Had Signal been a decentralized service, maybe it would be possible to have both in tandem. The centralized nature of Signal is partly to blame for the fact that it's controlled by a development team who can and will piss off what may be the majority of their users. They have a lot to say about the beautiful simplicity of their protocol, so I'm skeptical of their arguments that it cannot continue coexisting with something like SMS.

After this betrayal, it is foolish to continue putting faith in the Signal team. Continuing to be a user is an endorsement of their pulling the rug from under us. Searching for suitable alternatives, and there are many candidates, is high on my priority list.

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