"the iphone 4's antenna isn't a bad design, you're just holding it wrong" - steve jobs
To be fair Whatsapp works the same, if you are not careful when changing phone you will lose your history. That's because they don't actually store your messages on their servers, they are just synchronized between devices.
That's not the case though, at least for me? I had set Whatsapp to backup to Google Drive, and when I switched to an iPhone it did some automagix and all my stuff was there (and then backed up to iCloud!).
"{straw man}" - most HN users.
I have Signal on my phone and laptop. For some reason my laptop desynced from the phone, so my chat history now has a missing block of message history (that exists on the phone). I did nothing obvious to cause that desync. My guess is that my phone updated the Signal app, and I didn't update it on the laptop in lockstep. That's not a great UX, especially since there is no notification that this might happen.
Desync happens simply after a month of not using the PC client. Yes, it's that short.
Oh wow. Good to know! Thanks for the heads up.
Message history still can’t be backed up on iOS, and also can’t be moved between Android and iOS in either direction AFAIK. There are far more gaps here than just imperfect users, which is often a UX problem as others have noted.