> Signal indicated that arbitrary usernames is something they're working on.
no offense but they've been saying this for years, the feature may eventually come but I'm not holding my breath
no offense but they've been saying this for years, the feature may eventually come but I'm not holding my breath
Signal never used SMS as a transport. It only provided a UI to have unencrypted SMS messages alongside Signal chats. As far as Signal messenges themselves go, phone numbers always were an arbitrary ID string.
Having a username that isn't a phone number would have only more clearly segregated the SMS feature from Signal chat; and the desire for that segregation is one of the key excuses they came up with for dropping SMS support from the Signal app.
Signal is a merge of the TextSecure and RedPhone applications; back when it was still called TextSecure, it did use SMS as a transport for encrypted messages.
SMS wasn't removed to make way for arbitrary user IDs. that would have been surprising even though i prefer IDs over SMS support. but if SMS was on the way out already it made sense to wait with implementing arbitrary user ID support until then. and now they have one less excuse not to implement it