this post was submitted on 01 May 2024
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The Signal messenger and protocol.
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It's a shame that Signal has discontinued its support for normal SMS, hadn't implemented RCS, is spending too much effort on "stickers" and now keeps prodding you to donate money. Then there's the broken notification with iOS users who just don't find out that you messaged them until they launch the app.
As a direct result my use of Signal has pretty much ceased.
I can't blame them for asking for money, it's a free app but it isn't free to run.
That said the notifications are royally annoying. My partner has an android, but calls almost never come through and messages are hit and miss.
Asking for money is one thing. Asking for money after removing functionality that I depended on is quite a different thing.
To be clear, I voiced my concerns in writing and was ignored.
This comment reads kind of weird, as if you feel personally snubbed that they "ignored" your concerns when in reality the app developers just had different ideas about what direction the app would go in.
Like, that's totally fine! At the end of the day if you were only interested in a replacement SMS app then Signal just wasn't for you. As someone whose primary interest is the security and privacy guaranteed by Signal not only encrypting messages but also message metadata (something Google's RCS explicitly does NOT do) I'm perfectly satisfied with how it functions.
That said, I don't care about stickers or the weird crypto integration, but it satisfies my other needs and includes a desktop client to boot, so I have nothing to complain about.
I really wish Signal still had SMS support because the network effect was a lot more powerful, and it was easier to "sell" to my friends, back when it was that way.
In their defence: SMS is not secure enough for Signal standards
I think they already fixed the IOS notification issue, at least for the beta/testflight version. But yes, I agree with you that their priorities as of late have been head-scratching.
I suppose their focus has been on bringing signal in line with other contemporary messengers to give it a similar level of appeal as something like WhatsApp, targeted towards "regular (and not necessarily privacy focused) people".
I admit i really miss SMS integration, that sort of made it Android's answer to iMessage, except that it's still available cross platform.
Glad for the addition of user names at least.