<story><title>Removing SMS support from Signal Android (soon)</title><url>https://signal.org/blog/sms-removal-android/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>daedalus_j</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve been using Signal for a long time. I have &lt;i&gt;repeatedly&lt;/i&gt; been unable to convince iOS users to use Signal because &amp;quot;I don&amp;#x27;t want another app&amp;quot;. Android users have been much more willing to give it a shot.&lt;p&gt;As an android user myself, I much prefer having SMS built in because I use the search feature often to look back through all my SMS&amp;#x2F;Signal chats. I also regularly forward an SMS message to a Signal user, or vice versa. I&amp;#x27;m already starting to feel like those iOS users who told me &amp;quot;I don&amp;#x27;t want another app&amp;quot;...&lt;p&gt;Signal seems to be trying to move further and further from &amp;quot;my preferred way to chat with people&amp;quot; and closer to the chat equivalent of &amp;quot;that protonmail account I only log in to when I need secrecy&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I obviously love having security on messages in transit, but I also like being able to keep my message history around and search my conversations for something that happened a year ago. It seems like Signal is on a trajectory to turn everything into disappearing messages. Are they the &amp;quot;safe for activists&amp;quot; communication app, or the &amp;quot;let&amp;#x27;s try to make as many as possible safer by default&amp;quot; app? Feels like they don&amp;#x27;t know.&lt;p&gt;And on top of it all the messaging is just frustrating. &amp;quot;we&amp;#x27;ve taken away an incredibly useful and heavily used feature so we have development resource to better implement shitcoins and such&amp;quot; is such an irritating defense of the decision that I disabled my monthly donation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nicholasjarnold</author><text>I agree completely here. This is terrible news from my perspective too. I use Signal for _all messaging_ (e2e secure or not) for the reasons that you mention.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve onboarded friends and family, too, ensuring them it should be set as their default messaging app and that it _just works_. Unfortunately, people in the general population seem to have pretty much zero tolerance for any friction whatsoever. If they have to use 2 apps, they&amp;#x27;ll just end up communicating with me in the clear using their &amp;quot;default SMS&amp;quot; app on their phone. That&amp;#x27;s what this is going to result it...a reduction in overall message security due to people defaulting to what&amp;#x27;s easier...which is to _not_ have to remember which app to use for which &amp;quot;send a message&amp;quot; purpose. Fuck.&lt;p&gt;I understand the argument about people in markets where SMS is expensive getting screwed sometimes when they don&amp;#x27;t realize they&amp;#x27;re sending a message over SMS. However could that not be fairly trivially solved for with some UI notification or app setting that warns you about this and allows the warning to be perm-disabled if the user doesn&amp;#x27;t care!?&lt;p&gt;I think the real reason here is this desire to transition the service into supporting usernames, which is a topic that&amp;#x27;s been discussed before (and is explicitly mentioned in the post). Right now the service is tied to your phone number. After this change I suspect it will not be or not need to be.&lt;p&gt;This is very, very unfortunate for those of us who&amp;#x27;ve convinced a ton of non-technical friends and family to use TextSecure-&amp;gt;Signal over the years...</text></comment>
<story><title>Removing SMS support from Signal Android (soon)</title><url>https://signal.org/blog/sms-removal-android/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>daedalus_j</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve been using Signal for a long time. I have &lt;i&gt;repeatedly&lt;/i&gt; been unable to convince iOS users to use Signal because &amp;quot;I don&amp;#x27;t want another app&amp;quot;. Android users have been much more willing to give it a shot.&lt;p&gt;As an android user myself, I much prefer having SMS built in because I use the search feature often to look back through all my SMS&amp;#x2F;Signal chats. I also regularly forward an SMS message to a Signal user, or vice versa. I&amp;#x27;m already starting to feel like those iOS users who told me &amp;quot;I don&amp;#x27;t want another app&amp;quot;...&lt;p&gt;Signal seems to be trying to move further and further from &amp;quot;my preferred way to chat with people&amp;quot; and closer to the chat equivalent of &amp;quot;that protonmail account I only log in to when I need secrecy&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I obviously love having security on messages in transit, but I also like being able to keep my message history around and search my conversations for something that happened a year ago. It seems like Signal is on a trajectory to turn everything into disappearing messages. Are they the &amp;quot;safe for activists&amp;quot; communication app, or the &amp;quot;let&amp;#x27;s try to make as many as possible safer by default&amp;quot; app? Feels like they don&amp;#x27;t know.&lt;p&gt;And on top of it all the messaging is just frustrating. &amp;quot;we&amp;#x27;ve taken away an incredibly useful and heavily used feature so we have development resource to better implement shitcoins and such&amp;quot; is such an irritating defense of the decision that I disabled my monthly donation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ndsipa_pomu</author><text>The biggest issue I can see with using two separate apps is checking who&amp;#x27;s on Signal and who isn&amp;#x27;t. That means opening up Signal to see if they&amp;#x27;re on there and then switching to SMS if they aren&amp;#x27;t. I much prefer having both types of contacts in the same UI and it&amp;#x27;s been obvious to me which messages are secure. Also, when someone then joins Signal, subsequent messages to them automatically get upgraded to being secure with no effort on my part.</text></comment>