Privacy preserving tool has to prioritize privacy. Otherwise it’s actively harming their users. What good would it be for to have an appeal to a larger audience, if it meant sabotaging the main point of the app?
This situation to me is it seems like it’s a echo chamber bubble situation. The way Signal gets feedback for their app is kinda bullshit. It disproportionately values the input of their own developers and the very most evangelical signal users. They don’t request feedback from users at all before making changes. They push out notifications of upcoming changes through banners at the top of the app, but they never use this same mechanism to be like “Hey, doing a quick poll. Whatchu folks want?”
I don’t think it’s malice in this case. Just blind incompetence.
The announcement of dropping SMS at the time gave those vibes. They were basically saying to users “we know what’s good for ypu better than you do”.
It was a huge strategic misstep. SMS was the perfect route to get people to use Signal - you’d start with SMS conversations and then as people joined signal conversations could switch to secure chat. Now its very hard to persuade people to switch to Signal.
Now google has used the same trick to push its own messaging standard RCS.
Yeah and when people were like “hey, this decision sucks, can you not?” They were like “where was this feedback before, we’ve been discussing this on our forums for months” and its like… Obviously most people who use your app aren’t on your forums. The usage patterns of people with that much dedication to signal will be different from people who are just using the app to talk to their friends and family and treat it as a tool.
Agreed. Another change that got me was removing the ability to set a unique color for your contacts.
“We’ve removed the ability to set color for your contacts. Our users are too sophisticated to need at-a-glance ID of chat by color, but we’ve added the useless ability to change the color of your own messages you send. That’s useful, right?”
There’s no shortage of loud feedback from the userbase in their forums, but they dismiss it all and force ahead indifferently.
I thought the real reason was that RCS was finally kicking off, but Google wasn’t exposing an RCS api to normal apps. Signal never said that was the reason, but it was the only thing that made sense at the time.
That’s my main problem with Signal. They refuse to add features because they can’t be perfect. I damaged my old phone beyond it being usable and got a new one. Now it’s impossible for me to get my conversation history, because the only way to keep it is to do a backup in the app and then manually move the backup file, then restore it on your new phone. Oh, but you can’t backup and then restore to your laptop. That would be crazy talk. It’s impossible to get your conversation history to your laptop.
I’m a little late in my reply but I believe they stopped SMS support because it’s pretty expensive in the long run. Signal took off over lockdowns like a lot of platforms, and SMS texts cost quite a bit (at scale) to route and process. My anecdotal evidence (take it or leave it) is that I worked at a fairly major ecomm tech company around that same time who discontinued 2FA verification via SMS in regions like India (etc) because collectively it was costing the company millions to use that route for that purpose.
They actually offloaded the 2FA flows to free (for the user anyhow) services such as Google Authenticator and Authy etc etc (which those companies now have to spend the money on each SMS interaction and/or server costs, not the one I was working for.
Ultimately I think Signal did it because it was costing them a lot of money with not a lot of benefit as more people adopted the platform.
Honestly, SMS in signal turned out problematic for me. One of my contacts had uninstalled Signal, yet any SMSs I sent him would default to Signal messages and were never delivered.
I agree with the comments about how Signal has treated its users, and that has fucked me, but they also are a lifeline for people in very unsafe situations.
I see a parallel to how Mozilla treated Firefox users under Baker, perhaps we need a Mull build for Signal.
Textra. I bought it years ago. Had it on multiple phones. Still works great and still gets updated. Lots of options too. My favorite is a little delay timer on the send button that gives me a chance to cancel if I see a typo at the last second or just change my mind.
I am using it still, but honestly every update that I notice has made it more annoying to use - most recently adding extra confirmations to choose even a single image to send. It also hasn’t made proper support for message reactions yet, which is annoying since my contacts are increasingly using them in place of responses.
My spouse gave up on it when it stopped sending images consistently for her, and their response was to blame an app that she did not even have for the issue.
Unfortunately fossify messenger isn’t there yet for me either, and Google’s SMS feels horrible compared to textra now.
I am with you on every one of these points. The image selection process is terrible now, where before it was quick & simple. And in the past couple of updates, sending larger images and gifs was sporadic until now I always get an error. I was happy when they added message reactions, then puzzled when they just stopped at six, half of which are rarely useful.
I’ve been a paid user for years, but now I’m causally shopping for something else. If they’re giving up on their app, so am I.
I used Textra for years across maybe 4 phones. The customization is great, but it started randomly dropping ringtones on my Pixel 7 Pro…it’s the P7P that sucks ass, not Textra.
I eventually quit Textra because it doesn’t support RCS
This is what truly pisses me off about Google/Alphabet bitching about Apple not supporting RCS. Google does not offer any kind of API or access for developers to hook into RCS messaging and the have structured it in such a way with extensions to the standard that are Google only so even if there were other RCS providers it wouldn’t be fully compatible. Fuck.
It’s true. They got that shit on lock down. And the thing is… If their goals were actually what they say they are they’d let more other services access that, but instead, no. It’s actually about locking you into their ecosystem
Yeah, you can use Beeper but they require you to have Google messages installed.
I’m still running the old version of Beeper that did SMS without pairing it to Google’s RCS, though I don’t think I can get away with it for too much longer as it’s not getting updates anymore (the two versions coexisted for a period).
The primary reason is its a shit protocol - they’ve had 20 years to make a protocol that competes with existing protocols, it’s still problematic, and it’s still dependent on a phone number/SIM.
It was designed as a replacement for SMS, just bringing some of the features from SMS alternatives like iMessage. It was never designed to compete with alternatives.
The problem with rcs is that it needs to work without a data connection like sms. For that to work, every single mobile operator needs to support it and route it. For that to work they need to work together. The problem is they don’t and there are different implementations, some don’t support it at all. Even when they do, the phone needs to support it. Google is now at a point where they have rcs capable messaging on every recent Android version. Apple is now also integrating rcs into iOS. They are circumventing the operator problem by enabling rcs over wifi or your subscription data. But that’s a workaround, because it requires data, while sms just requires a cellphone signal. Until operators start working together to enable and relay rcs messages, Google and Apple habe the monopoly by having rcs routed directly to their messaging apps over the internet instead of directly to the device like sms does.
I’m using Quik SMS which is a continuation of QK SMS. I’ve found that the current state of SMS apps on Android kinda… Sucks. Fossify messenger is probs my second favorite
Feels like that keyword phrase would fuck up a lot of legitimate automated messages I actually do want (e.g. pharmacy refills, food delivery, appointment reminders, etc). Regardless, a custom keyword filter would be excellent.
Same. Pretty reliable. Decent Web interface. Can be a bit glitchy if you replace your main phone though - still using smsbackup+ to mirror them to an IMAP folder for easy search and backup.