“When you use Signal, your data is stored in encrypted form on your devices. The only information that is stored on the Signal servers for each account is the phone number you registered with, the date and time you joined the service, and the date you last logged on.”
This isn’t an ad, I wasn’t paid for this post. Just to clear the air: fuck facebook, fuck elon musk and twitter, fuck anyone who thinks this is a paid advertisement. I wish I was paid for this shit, I just wanted to spread the word. Thank you. 😀 👍
There’s no point in Signal if you want to use SMS
The idea isn’t that I want to use SMS, the idea is to get people used to using one single app. Back when Signal had SMS support, it was my primary texting app. Anyone who had Signal I could talk to over Signal and anyone who didn’t I talked to over SMS. This got me to convert several friends and family to Signal, and we were able to immediately switch from SMS to Signal chats.
Removing the barrier of juggling apps is paramount. No casual user wants to have to remember who they talked to on which app.
Exactly this. I used signal exclusively as my messaging app for years, and even talked a number of other people into using it, so when we talked with each other it was encrypted. But when signal pulled SMS support, almost all my friends dropped it because they only wanted one messaging app and not all their contacts were on it, so then it became useless to me as well.
I think it’s a trade off because a lot of the people who fall into the less tech savvy catagory don’t understand that SMS is unencrypted. I can at least see merit in the argument that a false sense of security is worse than no security. I wish they made it a setting you could toggle, even if it was off by default.
Are there any people left who use just 1 app for messaging? There’s WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Signal, Telegram, Viber, WeChat, Snapchat, Discord, Slack, Line, etc, etc. And these are just the main ones.
You’re missing the point. Removing sms support just adds another barrier to it. No one else in my family cares about privacy as I do.
I want to use Signal. Not everyone else on my contacts list does.
It was much easier to convince people to switch to Signal when you could just say it takes the place of your SMS app. Now it’s just another app to keep track of.