I miss when Signal still handled SMS. It was so effing convenient.
this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2024
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Their justification for that is so bullshit to me. They let perfect be the enemy of good
Makes me wonder what the real reason was.
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.
I think you're absolutely right.
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.
Reduce mass appeal... They appear to stiring it I this weird direction for "journalists" when there better apps for that now.
It seems like their main goal is to ensure it doesn't have mass appeal and relate to "privacy weirdos"
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?
The meta data that feds get is not enough privacy for anyone within US doing real journalism
But ok
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.
Same with your contacts. There's people I was in regular contact with that I've lost the ability to get in touch with.
On the other hand the three and a half years me and my ex fiance were together have also been wiped out. So that's a load off my mind haha
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It doesn’t anymore?
They stopped about a year ago.
Not for a couple years now.
Is there something wrong with Silence for SMS?
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.
Had never heard of Silence thanks for that. Gonna check it out.
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I use Textra
Here too, found it many years ago, bought the Pro pretty soon after and now have been using it ever since. It just does everything right.
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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 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
I eventually quit Textra because it doesn't support RCS
Fuck Google.
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.
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 use QKSMS on F-Droid.
Heads up, it is no longer mantained, quik SMS is the fork that was recently updated.
Textra
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
Mezo SMS, comes with a beautiful keyword filter. "to unsubscribe" gets rid of 99% of the spam out there.
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.
It works for me since I hate subscriptions and don't use anything that sends stuff to my phone :-)
I've been using pulse sms for a while.
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.
Good recommendation on that backup solution, just annoying that it needs a workaround
I forget why that happened. I think it was an increase in security required by Google with a newer Android version.
No love for simple mobile tools?