What are your others? I use signal alot personally and haven't had too many issues.
- Still need a phone number
- They refuse to post the app on f-droid (directly)
- No 3rd party clients allowed on their servers.
- Crypto thing they attempted
- I don't trust Moxie, he rubs me the wrong way.Signal is not without flaws as you say, but if you have a phone number and can access a binary, there's every reason to believe it will securely and privately transmit your messages. You are also, ofc, free to fork their client and run your own service (as others have done).
Edit: to be clearer - signal both publishes a protocol (that is thought to be secure) and provides a public service (that claims to use the signal protocol). Signal has claimed that the binary blobs they add to their public client (and the other restrictions) are required to run a public service (anti-abuse, etc). You are free to believe them or not - I do.
At the protocol level, which you are free to use, none of the problems you or the ancestors have pointed to apply. All of the alternatives people are pointing to here are at the "protocol" level - accessible only if you or someone you trust has setup a node. There's nothing wrong with that - it's a good idea - but it's no reason to attack signal's service for not being a protocol (which they also provide).
[1] https://community.signalusers.org/t/overview-of-third-party-...
I've heard WhatsApp recommended from people I trust, but I have never personally used it so can't speak from experience.
Your suggested alternatives are owned by Zoom and Facebook. I'll stick with Signal.
All of them being tied to a phone number is bad form.
> Crypto thing they attempted
well...
Signal's "source available" infra can be self-hosted but it's huge effort and relies on a bunch of cloud-specific services which need to be replaced with self-hostslable alternatives. It's also extremely poorly documented and the code quality is fairly mediocre. I wouldn't recommend trying to host Signal infra yourself; it can be done; I've done it at work and it took some months of effort, and maintaining it is a nightmare (or was, then at least) because they'd only push one huge update to GitHub quarterly or less often.
[0]:https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/10/22876891/signal-ceo-steps...
- No easy way to do and restore backups on Android and impossible to do backups on their PC client
- Does not support Android tablets at all (my mom loves hers)
- Fails to ring on Android when you call someone or someone calls you, later serving you a missed call notification (disabled Doze/battery optimization feature on Android and tested on 3 different phones with no cigar)
- No way to share your live location to friends
- Using its built in photo snapping and sharing function takes horrible pictures on Android (I suspect they're using the wrong API). If I want to send someone I'm currently texting a good looking picture I need to switch to my phone's camera APP, then back to the chat and use the photo upload function, instead of the in-app photo snapping and sharing function
Some of these bugs have been reported 3+ years ago, while these things work flawlessly on WhatsApp since nearly forever, meanwhile Signal is busy implementing crypto payment features.
I don't know about iOS, but at least for Android and PC, it still feels like an app in alpha that's not yet released to the public compared to how polished and feature rich WhatsApp and Telegram are.
The rest are all feature requests.
That said, it’s interesting to see what people think are basic requirement for a messaging app these days.
Uncontroversial example: a calculator app that doesn't have a divide key. Technically, yes, it's a separate feature from the multiply key, but it's so basic, so expected, that its absence is a bug.
From the above list, I consider "No easy way to do and restore backups on Android and impossible to do backups on their PC client" a bug, or at least a frustrating omission by design.
More like missing basic features. I never said all are bugs, I said some are bugs and that all these things exist and work on the other alternatives like WhatsApp or Telegram
If you climb in the ring with Ali, then you'd better be able to box.
And it's also the criteria of millions of other users who have not switched to Signal because of the bugs, quirks, and lack of basic features for a modern messaging app.
Just being able to send encrypted ASCII characters to someone is not enough to make a good messaging app these days.
> And it's also the criteria of millions of other users who have not switched to Signal because of the bugs, quirks, and lack of basic features for a modern messaging app.
You have absolutely no knowledge that this is why people haven’t switched, indeed it’s highly unlikely that it would have been as successful as it has if this were the case. People move to Signal because they distrust Facebook and telegram.
The more logical explanation is simply network effects and inertia. Occam’s razor.
This is mostly Androids fault... For me, even Whatsapp's built in camera is terrible. When you press the button to take a photo, it starts focussing, then takes a photo before the focussing is done. So every photo taken is reliably blurry. There isn't any way to take a non-blurry photo with the main (back) camera.
The main OS camera app works fine.
I think they have per-device logic for this sort of thing, and mine is an uncommon chinaphone, so presumably they haven't tuned the logic for it.
Also no problems with it not ringing, Signal is actually the primary way that my family calls each other now and no one has experienced it not ringing when expected.
The rest I admittedly dont use or arent impacted by.
While its not perfect in all ways, I disagree with the "alpha" quality sentiment. Especially when you are comparing it to apps that dont have the same security goals or standards.
I generally agree with gp, it's not a bad app but certainly not one id ever use if I could contact someone another way. I find the lack of interpretability with my computer especially annoying. I'm constantly left feeling like a second class citizen.
Especially when it comes to seeing my history, I linked the accounts ages ago, I barely use my phone yet I'm consistently losing messages on my pc
As for the "security" I'm pretty sure it doesn't have reproducible builds, so it's basically just "trust me bro". rather trust moxie than zuck but still don't really trust either.
I never said backups don't work, I said they're not easy to do and restore compared to other apps where it's much more seamless and hands-off. No average user knows what Syncthing is and how to set it up. People expect the messaging app to have its own backup-restore system compatible with the cloud storage provider setup in the phone's OS.
>Also no problems with it not ringing, Signal is actually the primary way that my family calls each other now and no one has experienced it not ringing when expected.
Can't concur, I've personally seen this issue across 3 different android phones form 3 different brands and there are countless people online complaining about the same issue. You were lucky.
>Especially when you are comparing it to apps that dont have the same security goals or standards.
Which security goals and standards exactly? Signal's sales pitch is that it's end-to-end encrypted, but so does WhatsApp, and until we have an independent security audit of all of Signal's code and infrastructure, the claim for "better" security goals is as valid as "trust me bro". The only thing going for it is that it's not owned by Zuck's advertising empire or owned by Russian/CCP tech magnates, and that's it, but that's a very low bar to clear.
And also, how does having "better" security goals impact the issues with picture quality the app takes or the app failing to ring when someone calls you? "Security" is not an excuse for major bugs and lack of basic features. If security is done right then it should work transparently for the bytes going down the internet pipe and not have an impact on any other features.
As to ringing, it seems that the six people with six different phones (mostly Pixels, one iPhone) in my circle mean that it isn't good luck on my part...
It's end to end by default vs Telegram which is well known to be end to end maybeish if it's explicitly setup, for private chats only. WhatsApp is WhatsApp. Maybe it's a low bar, but Signal beats those others pretty easily. And refusing to use Signal over those two due to lack of a security audit is a bit absurd... All you're getting from Telegram and WhatsApp is "trust us bro" as well.
It's not an excuse. But considering it IS transparent for many users, me included.... Not everyone is having the issues you are.
It also has some questionable decisions in it like cropping to close to the screen's aspect ratio rather than using the native aspect ratio of the sensor. I never want that behavior.