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Comment by agundy | Hacker News Reader

They recently announced they are removing Sms support on Android which feels vastly more useful for the non-tech crowd.

They kinda were forced to by Android limiting what they can do: https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-blog-removing-sms...

This post seems say that they'd rather avoid the difficult programming challenges of working with the varied devices and protocols people use for communication generally, and just compete with other walled garden apps instead. I wish them luck, but it's a different trajectory than they were on a year or two ago.

It's not a "difficult programming challenge" if you don't even get access to the APIs for the new protocol, I don't think...

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.

> I wish them luck, but it's a different trajectory than they were on a year or two ago.

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

How? They've always been keen on the centralization aspect.

There is (sometimes?) a way for Signal users to deregister from RCS which should presumably cause other devices to send messages via SMS instead of RCS.

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/

Disabling RCS, which apparently is encrypted with the Signal protocol for G messaging, so that people can continue to comfortably use unencrypted comms (sms) in Signal messenger itself would be a really wild course of action.

https://www.verizon.com/about/news/verizon-google-messaging-...

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/google-enables-end-t...

Great context, though from an end user's perspective it was clear why and just left hanging with "find a new SMS messaging". The integration made adoption/integrating new users easier by allowing some to have one messaging app with progressive security for contacts on Signal.

Yeah absolutely, messaging wasn't great, although that's a hard thing to get right, especially considering how they have both very technical and pretty non-technical audiences.

I really hope they change course, and keep SMS. That is the single best feature of the android App. They will lose a lot of people if they don't.

I imagine it's a lot of hassle to maintain and outside of the US SMS is basically as dead as landline phones. They probably consulted their usage statistics when they made that decision.

Why? It hasn't changed in years. It's easy to use and glaringly obvious that it's a non-secure conversation. Sometimes I go to add a reaction to an SMS conversation before remembering that those don't work on SMS - the only problem I have ever had with it.

> 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.

> Why? It hasn't changed in years.

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".

Why do people keep spreading these lies about SMS being dead outside the US?

Probably because it is dead in a large number of places (e.g. I haven't used SMS in the last 10 years for anything except these automated things that sometimes are sent), and people tend to generalize that to "outside the US".

> They will lose a lot of people if they don't.

I don't think they will.

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