> outside the US
that's a 330m-person population, which is also home to Signal. Not only do I get SMS from people like neighbors and so that I don't especially want to convert, SMS is used to send payment receipts/pickup notes in restaurants, 6 digit verification codes for many websites and so on. If you are outside the US and don't have to deal with SMS congratulations, but for the large number of people in a territory where it is still a key part of digital infrastructure, arbitrarily yanking the feature is a huge pain.
It has though. RCS has come along, which means that you might send an SMS to someone, and their response gets "upgraded" to RCS. If your app doesn't support RCS (and it's impossible to support RCS right now, because the APIs aren't available), you'll never see it.
The choice is between "Keep maintaining the functionality and have people get progressively angrier that their messages are going missing" or "drop it entirely".
I don't think they will.
But there's also certainly something to be said for deciding where to spend your time. Sure, getting regular SMS right on many different devices might be a difficult programming challenge, but if that means you can't spend time on making sure your service scales, or that people are able to hide their phone number, or... Then that's not laziness, that's making a hard choice.
MobileCoin which is Signals self printed crypto (think what FTT was to FTX) was released: December 6, 2020
Their trajectory a year or two ago is no different
People's Android devices can be opt in to receive messages via RCS based on phone number with either Google or their carrier. If the number is registered via Google, the number can be deregistered using a form. [1] For Verizon, it seems you can call Customer Support at 800-922-0204 to disable RCS. [2] Presumably other carriers have similar options.
Once RCS is disabled at Google/carrier level at the phone number level, other RCS compatible phones will fall back to SMS/MMS for delivering messages, which will cause the Signal app to be able to read messages via Android SMS APIs.
Seems like quite the hassle to set up an SMS app.
[1]: https://9to5google.com/2020/06/19/google-messages-disable-rc...
[2]: "How do I turn off Advanced Messaging" https://www.verizon.com/support/advanced-messaging-faqs/
https://www.verizon.com/about/news/verizon-google-messaging-...
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/google-enables-end-t...
I love this! I wish WhatsApp had such a toggle, since nobody in my contacts uses the "Status" feature so I just want to hide it somewhere.
I'm not sure if I'll use it much, but giving me a simple setting to decide for myself makes me much more optimistic towards this.
Also, less super compressed images/videos. I get they have to save space but sheesh they look like garbage
To avoid compression you can send photos as a document.
I always wonder how non-HNers use such software, if even the dedicated people are struggling.
Not sure how much degraded battery affects it. I recently got my iPhone 8 degraded because of battery and honestly I didn't notice anything.
Even my old iPhone 4S is a little beast. I remember playing Asphalt racing game. It pushed it to 60 FPS and its graphics was stunning, better than need for speed. If phone can render AAA game at 60 FPS but struggles with some chat app, this chat app does not respect is users. I mean it's just a bunch of grey squares with some text and lame shadows. DOS on i386 could render it fast enough.
Sometimes I can't decide who's more crazy - me who demands adequate performance from simplistic apps or people who accept this state of things.
Ehhh that's a >5 year old CPU. I wouldn't describe it as "extremely powerful" even on a phone.
Anecdotally, going from an iPhone 8 to a 13 pro max was a night and day difference. Not just because the CPU was noticably faster, but because the 120Hz display makes everything more responsive. Sure you don't need that hardware for a chat app but unless some product guy forces the issue, devs aren't even gonna notice fps dropping below 120 because most of them don't use ancient phones.
Signal is still my slowest messaging app. It's not some subjective complaint about jank: compared to Telegram and Messages, Signal is much slower to load and share.
Aside: I asked - they, and their friends, don't give an f about twitter.
Every time you send you have to manually choose if you want higher quality over smaller size. You can't set a default option.
You can crop crop photos, but the crop handles don't work properly and often spring back if you only want to crop in one dimension.
There's an anti-pattern where there's a separate tool selection and tool edit UI on the screen at the same time, so if you are in a hurry and hit 'Save' without hitting 'done' (immediately above it) your changes are discarded.
But if you hit the discard button, you have to confirm it in a modal dialog. It's faster to discard changes by hitting 'save'.
There are pen and highlighter tools so you can draw on an image. but no shape tools, in case you wanted to blank out someone's face.
There's a text tool with some display options. But it's always in the middle of the image. You can move it around, but only after you have typed the text. You can pick color but you can't change the font. It's faster to make a meme online.
You can't use any text effects like italic, bold, or underline either.
Remember how there were going to be blurring tools built in so you could blur faces if you were an activist or journalist? Offered in Beta, never made it to production.
Well, you could just put a sticker over their face, using one of Signal's (extremely cringey) stickers, or by uploading your own. But you can't paste an emoji.
On desktop, you can drag a sticker over the photo with the mouse, and it gets a little '+' in a box to show you're copying the sticker. Then it disappears. Why? Because it was designed for a touch UI and only clicking on a sticker will actually add it.
These are just the problems with image handling/markup. I could make many more lists for other aspects of the app. The markup tools would be kind of superfluous, but it is useful to be able to do thm within the app...only they're implemented in a way that is a source of constant frustration.
If you bring this up with them on Twitter or so people will rush to say 'well Signal is for secure messaging, use an art program if you want fancy image editing lol.' The same people who rush to defend Stories and stickers as 'broadening appeal' while simultaneously saying 'nobody uses SMS anyway' even though SMS is ubiquitous in Signal's home market. It has degenerated into fanboyism at this point.
> Every time you send you have to manually choose if you want higher quality over smaller size. You can't set a default option.
I didn't even notice I wasn't sending high quality images. The setting they picked sends photos such that they look like original quality on my phone screen. If I want to view a photo on a high quality monitor or print it I'd send it some other way.
> There are pen and highlighter tools so you can draw on an image. but no shape tools, in case you wanted to blank out someone's face.
It's pretty easy to scribble it out quickly. I do use a separate app for sensitive redactions.
> It has degenerated into fanboyism at this point.
Fair criticism. My feelings about Signal are similar to my feelings about voting. It obviously sucks, but no one has figured out anything better after quite a few years.