Hacker News Reader

Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

Also:

- There is no way to back up your message history (with photos, etc). This could be done using their (annoyingly pushed to users) "PIN", but isn't.

Few people realize that if your phone dies today, your history is GONE. From what I saw, once people do realize this, it's game over for Signal. WhatsApp is just easier, "everybody is there", and it does back up your history.

EDIT: Yes, it's on iOS. Yes, I realize this might not matter to you, but it matters to a lot of people. And if Signal tries to "bring privacy to the masses", this needs to be fixed. I've seen multiple people stop using Signal after losing all their data.

View on HN

Signal has backup on Android, and fairly fast image management, but it's lacking on iOS. That points to a lack of developer resources.

What you call WhatsApp history is other people being able to read your messages.

WhatsApp is violently agressive in demanding you use your phone and give access to your contacts. You can't use it without feeling violated.

Signal is similarly coercive about contacts - only "Yes" and "Not now", and once they get them, there's no way to delete the data they've got.

Desktop Signal still keeps showing me other people who also have Signal, but whom I've never even tried to contact via Signal, only because years ago I've mistakenly let them see my contacts.

You can deny the Signal app the address book permission and it still works.

Signal contact discovery is also the most privacy preserving approach available anywhere, using only the partial hash of their phone number. You don't have to share your contacts -- but yes, your contacts may share their truncated hash list, and hence discover that your number is tied to a Signal identity, but it is on their phone that the number maps to a name, not in any network traffic or on a Signal server.

We're really not getting any better solutions until secure MPC becomes more practical.

https://www.howtogeek.com/708651/can-you-use-signal-without-...

https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/

> That points to a lack of developer resources.

No, that points to prioritization issues. Many other features were developed and added over the years, but backup was not. It's not an accident, it's a result of multiple decisions where backing up user data was not seen as important.

I see no reason to back-up my history ever. I don't use signal for anything that needs to be archived. Nor do any of my friends. One of the selling points of signal is the feature that it doesn't automatically save photos, this is a good feature. You manually save the photos you want to save.

And I thought people regularly backed up everything worth saving from phones to non phone archive anyway.

> I see no reason to back-up my history ever. I don't use signal for anything that needs to be archived.

Every single time this comes up, someone chimes in saying they don't need it.

That does not invalidate the users who do need it. If I can't keep my messages from device to device, I'm not going to use Signal.

With far more manual effort than should be required, I can move my messages from Android device to Android device, if the old device is still functional. That's still not fully sufficient; I need a reliable automatic (encrypted) backup solution.

Signal on Android has backups and migrations. Maybe the IOS signal doesn't?

iOS signal has no backups and migrations routinely fail. I've lost years of message history multiple times attempting iOS -> iOS migrations. It's a shame it's so botched and has made me stop recommending Signal to people entirely.

Some people want their complete messaging history, but encrypted so that only they can see it. And backed up so that... well... they don't lose it.

Not having the ability to backup and archive my messages means Signal controls my data, not me. It reminds me of my past fights with closed source, proprietary software and file formats.

I do off-device Signal backups all the time, and have successfully restored.

You have on Android, but not iOS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com