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Comment by aleksandrm | Hacker News Reader

Signal is dropping SMS support soon. It was one of the main features that I was able to convince my friends and family to use this app, a convenient all-in-one messaging app. Without it I'm not sure anymore, quite a baffling decision on their part.

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Many years ago when Signal was quite new I thought that they should implement SMS mirroring, similar to how you can access iMessage on your phone/laptop, and how services like Pushbullet and Project Fi offered SMS mirroring. It'd be a great "carrot" to get people using Signal and the more that did, the less would actually be using SMS!

I submitted a feature request and it was promptly denied. I got the impression they never really wanted to support SMS from the beginning. It was just a carrot even then, and they weren't going to focus any more effort on it.

I am disappointed by this but my family is 50/50 iPhone and Android. I'm not sure anyone knew of the SMS integration.

Seems to be the same with my crowd. The only people who messages me over text is my dad and distant relatives. But I haven't tried to push Signal on them. While I do understand the "need" here, I do think it is easier to push on Gen Xers and younger as they are far more comfortable with multiple messaging apps (and I don't know of one that doesn't have multiple. Minimum SMS + WA, but usually includes GroupMe, Telegram, and Facebook Messenger). I know this is an issue people are pretty vocal about but I'm having a hard time believing it just isn't a sampling bias.

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