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Comment by psykovsky | Hacker News Reader

If they intend to be a messaging app then they should stop trying to be the default SMS application. They're just another messaging app.

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Agreed there: if Signal won't do SMS, they shouldn't be catching SMS intents, or they might get invoked when, for example, there's no data. (Of course, there's scope for disagreement here. SMS and particularly MMS are horrible, but sometimes horrible is all you've got.)

Maybe someone should suggest this to the team? They probably did that from the get go, but now no longer need to.

They said on Github that they are keeping it for a while, so that users still can receive encrypted SMS from users that haven't updated yet.

Okay, cool. Sounds like they're doing the right thing.

if your friend updates and you don't, the encryption still fails though

Relevant pull request: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/pull/2817

I believe the GitHub issue is about catching intents by default. In case people were thinking support for using TS as a SMS app was going away, here's an excerpt from the mailing list that says it's not:

>> [whispersystems] Can we remove the SMS feature completely?

>> Since the secure SMS option is removed. To reduce the confusion, can we remove insecure SMS option too?

> <insert thread of disagreements>

> Re: [whispersystems] Can we remove the SMS feature completely?

> Everyone can rest assured, we have no plans to do this. I'm pretty committed to an integrated messenger.

> - moxie

(For some reason this Apr 1 message is not in the mailinglist archives. Not sure what's up with that.)

I've read almost all of the comments here and I'm so confused... So I'm not going to be able to text my non-TextSecure friends with it anymore? And, if my data connection drops right before I message a TextSecure user, will it get sent plaintext over SMS then?

I guess not, at least if you want to keep your SMS's encrypted and use SMSSecure.

the superclass is "messaging apps". SMS apps vs messaging apps is an result of telco history, and the sooner we stop catering to it, the better

The transport makes a big difference. Is it going to stop working as soon as I cross the Canadian border? Is there a per-message fee if I am communicating with someone in another country? Is it going to stop working if my phone is connected to wifi and the router is broken or misconfigured, like it is at the coffee shop down the block from my house?

It's one thing to send an email, another thing to send a text, and another thing to use some proprietary messaging protocol, even if all three can be initiated by poking at the same device in slightly different ways, and I want to know which one I'm using so I can pick the right one for the situation.

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