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Comment by mfru | Hacker News Reader

Signal exists.

Whoever knows how to download WhatsApp, knows how to download Signal.

In some countries, Whatsapp is pretty much the de facto town square. Friend groups, family groups, event planning, customer support for businesses (though now it's just talking to shitty AI bots), all on WhatsApp. You can't beat the network effects any more. One understands why Meta paid 19b for it.

Our IT department has found a way. Want to get some credentials sent to you (usually just for new accounts)? They send it only via Signal as a out of band method.

This turned Signal into the defacto default in our org.

Signal does some things well, but lacks far behind other apps in UX. It doesn't do cloud backups either, which keeps me from recommending it to less technical folks.

> It doesn't do cloud backups either,

Yes it does.

Signal recently introduced cloud backups. https://signal.org/blog/introducing-secure-backups/

Looks like the needle has moved, but reading the blog it's a recent development and only available in the beta version of the Android app.

They've probably expanded support since the initial announcement

Only in the Beta Android app for now... Signal is around for what, a decade now? And they still can't (or rather, refuse to) do the basic "copy the SQLite DB file to a folder". Edit: and even this beta feature is some bullshit proprietary thing with their own cloud and subscription rather than simply "let me export the DB file and stick it in a cloud provider of my choice".

Last time I had to reinstall my phone I ended up finding an implementation of their phone-to-phone transfer protocol to emulate a "new" device I'm transferring to just to get a dump of the data (I'd share, but don't want them to close this option, since clearly the lack of export option is very much intentional).

Then I deleted Signal and begrudgingly moved to WhatsApp (in addition to iMessage which I've already been using).

Signal has had a backup to a file you can do any you want to for years.

Never on iOS or any other Apple platform. Signal is designed not to be able to backup to iCloud either. The only option iOS users have had over the last few years is to do a device to device transfer where both phones are expected to be in physical proximity and it takes hours to transfer the data. Lost phone has meant losing all chats.

WhatsApp, which is infamous by association with Meta, backs up to Google Drive or wherever.

My biggest problem with Signal is their desktop app is awful. Telegram, for all its faults, has an excellent desktop app.

I hate writing on a phone - anything longer than a few words I use my computer for.

> Telegram, for all its faults, has an excellent desktop app.

Their developers are also very responsive to PR's, I have a couple GCC build fixes in it.

I really soured on Signal early with when running BB10, they would not let us fork and use/distribute websocket builds to get around not having google play services on available on that platform: https://github.com/libresignal/libresignal/issues/37#issueco...

I'm still a little sour on it now because there's still no way to transfer the identity since they refuse itunes/icloud backup, refuse any way to export a key, and I have to look at hideous corporate memphis icons every time I set up Signal new again on iOS (at least Android doesn't have the last thing).

I mentioned before, but I use mautrix-signal to be able to have a unified (except for telegram) messenger on desktop with nheko or element via matrix. It works really well.

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