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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.
It’s a shame that Signal has discontinued its support for normal SMS,
While this does suck for those of us who used it, it was the cause of a few issues:
- It was confusing to less “technical” users.
- Because of point 1, it introduced a security/privacy weakness to its userbase in that users could be tricked into thinking their communications were secure/private.
- The feature was poorly maintained due to the small team behind Signal and the decision to improve their platform vs supporting something they had minimal control over.
- Signal’s SMS feature was causing real-life delivery issues with some new users as RCS started rolling out. A user’s phone would register with RCS - and if they installed signal -which then takes over SMS messaging but couldn’t (thanks to Google) support RCS - they would stop receiving RCS messages. This is a problem caused by Google to their benefit.
hadn’t implemented RCS,
Signal cannot implement RCS on Android without Google providing an API like they did with SMS. Apple doesn’t even allow alternative SMS clients so this made no sense going forward - basically SMS/MMS/RCS is a dead-end for Signal.
is spending too much effort on “stickers”
What year is this? Signal stickers were released at the end of 2019 [0] and, in the nearly five years since, the work to maintain them is so small it may as well be zero. Check github - the work they release is public and you can see exactly what they’ve been working on.
and now keeps prodding you to donate money.
Its a free service, god forbid they ask users to contribute so they can continue to exist and provide said service to those who can’t afford it? 🤷♀️
Then there’s the broken notification with iOS users who just don’t find out that you messaged them until they launch the app.
Valid criticism IF true. I don’t have an iOS device so I can’t say much here but I do message iOS users pretty frequently and haven’t had any problem with response times - not sure if that’s because they’re always on their phone or because notifications work in most cases.
As a direct result my use of Signal has pretty much ceased.
While unfortunate for your privacy, if you were primarily using Signal for SMS, you weren’t really using Signal to begin with.
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.
SMS is not a secure way to communicate and shouldn’t be in Signal, it was a mistake from the beginning.
In their defence: SMS is not secure enough for Signal standards
This was never the expectation. It provided a unified messaging interface and a shallow barrier to entry for people used to SMS.
I could install Signal on a phone for a neophyte user and they could use it as their normal SMS app. Then you could securely message them in the same interface and all of a sudden their messages between you would be secure.
I always thought it was missing the bridge between “SMS on your phone” and “messages on any paired device”. Y u no sync SMS to my desktop client and allow responses :(
Because that would require your desktop sending the message to your phone and having your phone actually send it. The device with the SIM card needs to be the one that actually sends the SMS.
I disagree.
Signal is supposed to be a secure alternative to SMS, iMessage, WhatsApp, etc. Compatibility with less secure protocols is antithetical to that. Adding popular features of those other apps to be more competitive is how you forward the goal. (Ofc fixing bugs should come first)
