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Comment by ianopolous | Hacker News Reader

I was a great fan of TextSecure until a few days ago. I had encouraged a bunch of friends to install it. One of them couldn't get rid of a notification from TextSecure about an unread message despite there being none, and eventually they uninstalled it. Then, for the next 4 months TextSecure blackholed every message I sent this friend without warning either them or me. They never received a single message from me. After discovering that I uninstalled it.

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You'll find that this is true for every messenger on Android, since there is no way to detect someone uninstalling without unregistering.

TextSecure has delivery receipts so you can see when your messages aren't being delivered, and there's a web-based unregistration flow on the Open Whisper Systems website so that users can unregister their numbers if they've uninstalled.

Thanks for the reply, Moxie. I realise I sound negative, but I do love your work. The app gave me no indication that delivery was failing. Couldn't you detect the failure when you try and forward on the message from your servers (if it is a push architecture)? Happy to give you my details if you want to look into it.

It's using the Google Android push stuff, which means to deliver a message to a phone, Moxies server sends a message to Google to ask Google to push a message to the phone ASAP. So he gets no feedback.

"there is no way to detect someone uninstalling without unregistering"

The TextSecure app could ping your server with a "I am still here" message if it goes a week without sending any messages. Don't hear from it for two weeks? Unregister it.

Would this not work?

Not having a connection for a month doesn't necessarily mean you're not "still here".

But it does mean messages can't be delivered to you.

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