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Comment by nextstep | Hacker News Reader

Just use Signal

It’s fine for ephemeral chats. But one of the pissoffs of restoring the phone is losing all of my signal messages each time. I threw it on Android device today since it was getting annoying explaining to my active signal contacts each time my identity changed and I will have at least another restore ahead of me still.

I've switched devices and had my Signal history and identity carry over. Signal does do chat backups.

I think you need the old device in hand to do it. If you wipe the device and restore from a backup, there's no way to transfer the history. There's some new cloud backup feature in Signal Android Beta, but this wouldn't help on an iPhone.

There's an option for a password-protected backup to the local filesystem. Of course you need to copy that backup to somewhere else if you want to be able to restore it without the old phone.

Signal's sub-par desktop app and "you can't restore more than five days of history and if you want more you're wrong" approach, together with the complete inability to use the normal app on more than one device (phone + tablet, for instance), makes for a pretty terrible user experience.

The protocol and the service behind it are state-of-the-art, but it's a tough sell if you're coming from something that just works on every device, like iMessage or WhatsApp.

I do not understand why your comment got downvoted:

I do receive spam in Signal, because i had to register a phone number.

I loose my chat history if I do not log into the desktop client for FIXNUM days.

The desktop client may crash as soon as you kill its supporting terminal.

I have tried the user name feature once and signal reported, that they had lost my username, I would need to create a new one.

I have not tried backup and restore. So far I am not in the mood for a potential failure.

That or something like Matrix, although I use Signal myself.

This thread was depressing to me — I can't believe we're still dealing with the lack of a truly open near universally used secure messaging system.

> That or something like Matrix, although I use Signal myself.

I bridge signal to matrix on my homeserver using signal-mautrix: https://github.com/mautrix/signal

This allows me to use different phones without going through transfer/wipe. Still needs a primary device though, which was the iPhone until yesterday.

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