I've been using Signal for a long time. I have repeatedly been unable to convince iOS users to use Signal because "I don't want another app". Android users have been much more willing to give it a shot.
As an android user myself, I much prefer having SMS built in because I use the search feature often to look back through all my SMS/Signal chats. I also regularly forward an SMS message to a Signal user, or vice versa. I'm already starting to feel like those iOS users who told me "I don't want another app"...
Signal seems to be trying to move further and further from "my preferred way to chat with people" and closer to the chat equivalent of "that protonmail account I only log in to when I need secrecy".
I obviously love having security on messages in transit, but I also like being able to keep my message history around and search my conversations for something that happened a year ago. It seems like Signal is on a trajectory to turn everything into disappearing messages. Are they the "safe for activists" communication app, or the "let's try to make as many as possible safer by default" app? Feels like they don't know.
And on top of it all the messaging is just frustrating. "we've taken away an incredibly useful and heavily used feature so we have development resource to better implement shitcoins and such" is such an irritating defense of the decision that I disabled my monthly donation.
I agree completely here. This is terrible news from my perspective too. I use Signal for _all messaging_ (e2e secure or not) for the reasons that you mention.
I've onboarded friends and family, too, ensuring them it should be set as their default messaging app and that it _just works_. Unfortunately, people in the general population seem to have pretty much zero tolerance for any friction whatsoever. If they have to use 2 apps, they'll just end up communicating with me in the clear using their "default SMS" app on their phone. That's what this is going to result it...a reduction in overall message security due to people defaulting to what's easier...which is to _not_ have to remember which app to use for which "send a message" purpose. Fuck.
I understand the argument about people in markets where SMS is expensive getting screwed sometimes when they don't realize they're sending a message over SMS. However could that not be fairly trivially solved for with some UI notification or app setting that warns you about this and allows the warning to be perm-disabled if the user doesn't care!?
I think the real reason here is this desire to transition the service into supporting usernames, which is a topic that's been discussed before (and is explicitly mentioned in the post). Right now the service is tied to your phone number. After this change I suspect it will not be or not need to be.
This is very, very unfortunate for those of us who've convinced a ton of non-technical friends and family to use TextSecure->Signal over the years...
If they have to use 2 apps, they'll just end up communicating with me in the clear using their "default SMS" app on their phone. That's what this is going to result it...a reduction in overall message security due to people defaulting to what's easier...which is to _not_ have to remember which app to use for which "send a message" purpose. Fuck.
Exactly right. In fact, I will be doing this too. Right now, I use Signal as my default messaging app, and messages go via Signal to people who've registered their phone number with Signal without me having to do anything to effect that. When Signal stops working as an SMS client, I'm not going to look up which of my contacts wants to use Signal and which can only use SMS - I'm just going to use my default SMS app for everything except the couple of group chats which are on Signal already. Messages which would have been opportunistically encrypted are now going to go out plaintext, because the friction to find out who uses Signal and who doesn't is too high.
This already happens with iOS, because the Signal app doesn't work as a default SMS client. People who use Signal and Android reliably send me messages over Signal, whereas my contacts who use Signal and iOS mostly send messages over SMS unless they're directly replying to something I've sent them over Signal.
And even if I wanted to do the work to send everything over Signal to those contacts, how am I supposed to remember exactly which of my kid's friend's parents use Signal and which don't? Fuck it, the juice isn't worth the squeeze, everything is going over SMS.
I'll just have to hope that Google figures out a way integrate a seamless, opportunistic end-to-end encryption protocol into the default Android messaging client, since Signal is deliberately dropping the ball here.
I don't like some of the decisions taken by Signal.
However, if "dropping support for SMS messaging also frees up our capacity to build new features (yes, like usernames)", I think it is something I would not miss.
Besides, I agree with them on the point that SMS leak metadata.
There's another reason for iOS users to avoid Signal: It eats up Gigabytes of storage space, refuses to ever clear it, and the devs are rather resistant to accepting that it's even a problem at all: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/issues/4916
Since there’s no server storing media, consider saving the stuff you want and dumping all the old photos and video you don’t. It’s a more secure communication tool, not an archive.
The biggest issue I can see with using two separate apps is checking who's on Signal and who isn't. That means opening up Signal to see if they're on there and then switching to SMS if they aren't. I much prefer having both types of contacts in the same UI and it's been obvious to me which messages are secure. Also, when someone then joins Signal, subsequent messages to them automatically get upgraded to being secure with no effort on my part.
Yes... Unless it's able to somehow alert you that you're texting someone with Signal, it seems like Signal will be phased out because everyone will default to SMS, unless they have a reason to use Signal for a conversation, which hurts the entire privacy ecosystem.
The Google Messages app is pretty good. It's a little thing, but it's the only app that supports tapbacks from iOS -- so on the (many) group threads I'm on that have iPhone users, I can see loves/like reactions instead of a flood of texts that say "Jane Doe loved an image".
Silence is like a less polished version of Signal. The only important feature I really think it's lacking is a search function. You can export your texts to an XML file though, so to find something from a long time ago I just export to a file and use grep to search through that.
The provide a fairly clear rationale beyond the ideological concern: users don't know/see who is on SMS and who isn't, and are being hit with high fees, and they are concerned that users may believe they have privacy when they do not.
These are reasonable issues and concerns, so I don't follow why you would question all of the other decisions they make.
Every friend using iOS that I've convinced to use Signal has uninstalled it. They stay registered, though, so I have to notice that my messages aren't reaching them, and re-send as SMS.
> I have repeatedly been unable to convince iOS users to use Signal because "I don't want another app".
Here's how I've convinced my iPhone friends. I tell them if they actually want to send pictures and videos to me that aren't potato quality they can either switch to an Android, email me, or use Signal. At this point Signal is more like a cross platform iMessage. This tends to move people over because Apple's walled garden makes group chats infeasible with mixed devices.
Signal is another walled garden, where you have no say in their decisions and simply must obey or leave. Consider Matrix if you want to have the freedom.
I have got all my friends / family using signal, but everyone else I know and everyone else they know are using SMS or whatever.
They will no doubt stop checking their signal messages from me same as iPhone users often do and I will have to change to insecure messages for all my messaging.
This will break their trust in my recommendation, as much as it will break my trust in signal.
I get the reasoning over this, but I think they fail to realise that interoperability is the most important feature. I will have to stop donating to signal over this change, it will be useless to me...
When I switched from Android to iOS this was the number one technical regression, and for years my go-to example of nice things Apple keeps from us. It’s unbelievable how Signal is sabotaging itself here.
Just use iMessage. It's not as secure as Signal since the server has the keys, but it's the easiest way to ensure that the majority of text messages you send are encrypted.
There was just an article that said that 88% of teens have an iPhone. That means that almost all of their communication is encrypted.
> I have repeatedly been unable to convince iOS users to use Signal
We don't seem to have this problem so bad in the UK/Europe. Most people I know have WhatsApp and/or Telegram, and FB messenger, and Signal (in my friend circles); all alongside SMS. I have very few iMessage groups, and use it mostly for 1to1 SMS with people I don't know well.
> but I also like being able to keep my message history around and search my conversations for something that happened a year ago
I'm dreading the day where I lose or break my iPhone and thus lose my Signal chat history. I've been using Signal for years, but this makes me still prefer other messengers when starting new chats, even if Telegram (for example) is not e2e encrypted.
(Unfortunately, I've long overcome the "I don't want another app" thing and just installed all the messaging apps. Although I kind of want to look into setting up Matrix bridges and merging everything into Element.)
The only reason this isn't a dealbreaker for me is because their sms implementation was so buggy and feature-poor that I would never have used it.
(The only reason I use signal is to talk to my girlfriend. The only reason we use it is early in our relationship I was going through a phase where I adopted annoying privacy tools. I wanted to abandon it, but after years of using it she's developed positive emotional associations between our relationship and signal, so for non-technical reasons she likes to keep using it just to talk to me)
I used to use WhatsApp with my girlfriend because I had awful cell service at work but did have wifi. We switched to Signal and have been using it for years. She only talks to me on it and iMessage for everything else but I use it for SMS too. We would literally get into arguments sometimes because she wouldn't see SMS messages I'd send her with my one bar of 3G or they would be out of order and cause confusion. I love having all of my conversations in one app. I really like Signal and if this change goes through, it might make me seriously consider just getting an iPhone next time.
> The only reason this isn't a dealbreaker for me is because their sms implementation was so buggy and feature-poor that I would never have used it.
It took me a long time to find this comment. The number of SMS messages I never received was ridiculous. I still use the app all the time, but would never use the integrated SMS messages ever again.
I honestly don't remember when I sent or received the last SMS that was not the telco's "Welcome to $country, the rates are ...". I.e. I don't have a strong opinion on this, I simply do not use SMS.
This "I don't want another app" thing is senseless to me. Why? What does it hurt having more than one communication channel? In my experience people that say this generally have no space on their phone, usually because of an unfettered willingness to install the taco bell app and the Starbucks app and whatever else.
Their underlying reasoning is correct. SMS sucks, really really bad. They're a secure communications channel. People see signal and think they're secure. Signal has no business supporting SMS. The on boarding has reached critical mass, the neyworke effect is here. If you're smart you'll abandon SMS altogether forever and just tell people to reach you some other way, not ditch the actual, over the internet encrypted channel.
Maybe in the circles you move, saying "Sorry, I don't SMS, you'll have to download this other app to message me" would fly, but I for one have to interact with a lot of people for which it would not.
This is an awful decision. I've converted some friends and family to Signal over the past years (it took a while) and it is now their default messaging app on their phones. This is going to confuse them and is going to make it difficult for me to keep convincing them that Signal is the route to use. ("Why do I need 3 apps (Android Messages, Signal, Whatsapp) to talk to people?")
I absolutely agree. Personally, I've managed to convert around 3 times as many Android users as iOS users, because of this feature. And the few people who stopped using Signal after starting using it did so because of limitations in the SMS/MMS features (fewer number of users allowed in group text, etc). I fully expect to loose 2/3 of my Signal contacts as a result of this decision, and may drop it myself if the number remaining is too small to be worth running a separate app, as most of the ones left will probably be on Matrix as well.
It also puts a spot-light on the "your phone number is your username" policy. This made perfect sense when you are using Signal for opportunistic encryption of texting. It is much less justifiable when using it as a Silo'd app. I really hope they change that and give people who were waiting for that change time to join before killing SMS support.
> It also puts a spot-light on the "your phone number is your username" policy.
I'm willing to bet that this decision is just jumping the gun by a month or two since usernames are around the corner (code exists, just not enabled. Can be used if built from source).
Though I haven't had a hard time converting (Android) users by using another app. Especially people that already use WA. The "other app" just comes off as normal. Apple is a different ball game because the walled garden, but that's also the weakness because you can't send photos/videos in group chats with mixed devices (but Signal can).
Yes, exactly. The ability to send SMS from the Signal app has meant I've been pretty successful in getting Android users to switch to Signal. Every iOS user I know always just goes back to using iMessage. Now many of those Android users won't bother either.
I hope it's communicated well to users who aren't readers of Signal's blog. I have relatives who use Signal, and they rely on its fallback-to-SMS feature, possibly without fully understanding it. I'll make sure they understand and are aware of this change, but others may be in the same position.
This is an awful decision. I've converted some friends and family to Signal over the past years (it took a while) and it is now their default messaging app on their phones. This is going to confuse them and is going to make it difficult for me to keep convincing them that Signal is the route to use.
I learned to stop trying to improve the technical lives of other people after Dropbox's decision to restrict free accounts to three devices resulted in a shitstorm of angry and confused messages from half the people I know.
You know, I haven’t really thought of it like this. Those for whom I take an interest in their technical lives typically get a spiel from me about whatever solution I’m offering. That spiel often includes something about how “they’ll probably change this eventually in ways no one wants, but the most we can do is speak up. We probably won’t get options.”
But I have to admit your perspective calls to me. I can imagine it would feel quite freeing.
I’m in a minor mess of a situation with my dad’s phone and computer because I’ve tried to be helpful. Now he resists help and that makes both of us frustrated.
I'm happy to share the best information I have with others and most of them are glad that I do.
I had recommended signal to others, but thankfully I've already warned those same people against continuing to use Signal years ago. Nobody was mad at me for Signal's actions and changing your default SMS app isn't hard anyway.
I don't think you have to stop recommending things to people just because situations change. Hasn't everybody had some service or software they depended on go from great to shitty? It's just the nature of using someone else's stuff. At some point they get greedy or busy or decide to pivot into something different from what you want and you have to find something new. Isn't everyone used to that? Why would they blame you?
I have never understood why decisions and options have to be mutually exclusive. Yes, you want to have a rock-solid, thoughtfully-design default install for new and casual users. You can still have an advanced control panel with everything a power user could want.
+1 to this. If Signal drops Android SMS support, I suspect it'll create friction within my friend group that uses it. I do not want yet another app for just text messages. No thank you.
I think I've burned a lot of social goodwill switching my family and close friends to signal and have no desire to support them through yet another change.
Honestly I'm pretty critical of the Signal app design: from the crypto nonsense, to the removal of chat bubble colors (used to be each person had a color, pretty useful in group chats), to the copious amounts of whitespace that have been linearly increasing for years, to the fact that the design has to change and break familiarity every 6 months or the devs have a stroke.
But I actually like this decision. It makes things less confusing and accidental use of unsecure SMS impossible. The downside is if you still use SMS you have to keep 2 apps, back them up separately, etc.
> "Why do I need 3 apps (Android Messages, Signal, Whatsapp)"
"You need Signal to talk to people on Signal, WhatsApp to talk to people on WhatsApp, and Messages to talk to people on SMS." Seems more straightforward than "use WhatsApp to talk to people on WhatsApp and Signal to talk to people on Signal or SMS; just pay attention to the color of the send button".
This issue for myself and many others is it makes something that used to be transparent, entirely unsupported. The UX is unambiguously worse. I could trust signal to upgrade my texts for me when possible, or not when my contacts were SMS. I don't care about always being encrypted 100% of the time. Signal was that perfect tradeoff between privacy, and ease of use, which is exceptionally rare. Providing this tradeoff is what made them popular, them going against it is counterproductive and will hurt them badly. I know this because now I'm considering leaving myself.
I dunno, all my friends use at least a handful of messaging apps (iMessage, FB messenger, Discord, Telegram, SMS). Sure people grumble about a new messaging app but the younger generation seems to not have an issue adopting new things.
I wouldn’t frame it as an issue around adopting new things. Some don’t care, some go with the flow, and some prefer to make active choices about these kinds of things.
I am very intentional and active when it comes to what has push notification privileges. I factor that into my app use consideration. I have multiple email accounts in two different email apps, each that send me notifications. I have Signal, Discord, iMessages and SMS. I have a few Google chat apps. I used to have WhatsApp and Wickr and Telegram. I have Skype, Teams, and two Mattermost servers.
It’s exhausting to constantly switch between these, so over the course of a few years I’ve been very clear in where people can expect to reach me reliably. If you need or want to chat with me on Discord, Skype, or Google whatever you need to send me an iMessage, SMS, Mattermost, or Signal message. Sending me a message anywhere else will get you a response only the next time I open that app. That only happens when someone specifically asks.
I’m OK with having 63847394038 chat and video calling apps, but I’m not OK with being instantaneously notified by an infinity such apps. I can’t be that available.
Yeah, I can understand that; but I've brought over various older family members, and non-tech friends (as in people that wouldn't have ever heard the words Discord or Telegram before in their lives) to Signal. That's who this will impact most.
And while older generations might be less willing to use a high number of apps side by side, having one kind of message in one app and the other kind of message in the other app is still much less confusing to them than dealing with the subtleties of multiprotocol if everything is forced through the single one-size-fits-all interface of a messenger that tries to do SMS on the side.
The US seems to be the only place where everyone uses iMessage, so Android users have to use SMS and suffer the bizarre shaming of the green bubble. In most countries outside the US, WhatsApp seems to be the default. SMS is just legacy 2FA messages, and various other transactional messages like parcel delivery notifications.
I'm guessing. Though I'm in the US but also in grad school. With a large number of foreign students there are similarly a large number of WhatsApp, Telegram, and WeChat users. I suspect this problem is very Americentric. India was able to get all its old people to use WhatsApp and multiple apps, I think there is a bit of an overreaction going on here. You'd think the world is ending for a feature most people didn't know existed (despite it being a prompt during signup).
I'm very upset by this decision. I've been using Signal as my SMS app for a very long time.
Messages that I would have sent via SMS currently will automatically get sent via Signal if the person I'm sending to has started using Signal without my knowledge. This has happened in several instances where I was pleasantly surprised to see a friend had started using Signal. Now that I'm forced into a separate SMS app, this will no longer be a possibility. I certainly won't be firing up Signal to see if a contact has joined before sending them an SMS.
This. Now you have to remember who is in Signal and who isn't. All because apparently the double-check mark for messages between Signal users and the unlocked icon for SMS messages is too hard to comprehend. SMH.
If I understand this, if I use SMS, I can send to everyone. If I use Signal, I can send to Signal users only. But I don't remember who's on Signal, and who's not. So I guess I will stop using Signal.
If I want to message someone I open the contact and click on one of the messengers that are listed for the phone number. Why would I leave the memorizing to my brain?
Off topic slightly, but it amazes me how much SMS is used in outside my country (maybe just US?). I literally never SMS any personal contacts, usually WhatsApp. Even business stuff, sometimes initial contact may be SMS and then could often move to WhatsApp.
I use signal with a small circle of friends, but no one I know uses SMS anymore.
I have WhatsApp installed for two different group chats, Google Chat for another couple of group chats, but apart from that SMS is the standard here (which means opportunistically iMessage / Signal). I'm in Australia, where SMS typically have no per-message cost (the only thing that's charged per use on most mobile plans here is data and international calls).
I have been receiving notifications that a person in my contact list is now using Signal for years.
Apart from that, your use case has another possible issue.
If a person stops using Signal, your messages will go to the void until Signal actually removes the user and your client switches back to SMS. This has caused a lot of confusion for some of my friends when I switched my signal account to a different phone number.
I think it's more reliable to use Signal for Signal.
Well this is also a problem. As it's said in the article, you risk getting charged for an SMS, that in some countries are expensive, most mobile plan in my country have 30+Gb for 7 euros at month, but SMS are 20 cent *EACH*. Practically in my country nobody uses SMS, and SMS are used only to receive 2 factor authentication codes (and spam).
Anyway a normal person already uses multiple messaging applications: WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messanger, Instagram direct messages, the good old email, SMS (I guess somebody they are still used reading the comments), adding Signal it's not that big deal.
... and there's the reason I will likely stop using Signal?
Signal was always one of those "win-win" apps, get more security when it's available and I don't have to worry about adding to the giant bucket of messaging apps.
They were a paragon of putting the user first and I was a strong supporter... but now... Why not Telegram? Or anything else?
I don't need the security, it was nice-to-have. Having to switch between Signal and other apps is a heavy amount of friction.
> ... and there's the reason I will likely stop using Signal?
> Signal was always one of those "win-win" apps, get more security when it's available and I don't have to worry about adding to the giant bucket of messaging apps.
Same here. I see no reason to continue using Signal if they do this.
I agree. I picked signal over deltachat to replace group MMS threads because it was less startup friction than getting everyone to login to their email accounts on a mobile account since they got SMSes for free.
Now? Delta chat is looking plenty fine for doing private group chats.
My threat model is not nation states watching my metadata, I have horrible opsec for that. My threat model is discord and whatsapp etc. tossing me and my chat groups off a cliff at their sole discretion.
Signal gave me control over chat groups, and integrated with SMS as a bonus. Now? If I'm gonna have to deal with a separate SMS app anyways, I might as well use delta chat where I know my messages are automatically backed up in my email account.
> Telegram is absolutely the worst when it comes to privacy
Really? Telegram never said that they don't store your messages on cloud, they said that they do not sell your data or share it with third parties for profit.
Telegram has received a very good score on PrivacySpy (https://privacyspy.org), in fact better than any other messaging app. Telegram is good from a regular privacy perspective unless your threat model involves fearing cloud convenience.
If you're someone who requires spy-level opsec, you should be using Threema, Session or Speek. Maybe even a self-hosted XMPP instance.
Telegram is good at what it does and it states it very clearly. It does not lie about the things it does and it is open source. All while not selling user data, not manipulating user behavior through algorithms or censoring media by calculating hashes and providing what's arguably the most feature rich messaging app on the planet for free with a verifiable source code.
Also, be careful with what you're suggesting. Not only have Matrix servers been hacked twice but matrix also leaks metadata. If you're seriously suggesting true anonymity (not consenting privacy) then Matrix is not a good option.
"why not anything else" is mostly (for me) because they are a non-profit, and unlikely to be bought by or turn into a megacorp, similar to how wikipedia runs, although they're certainly a mega-something at this point, it still feels a lot less evil than a facebook or a google.
If this were an in-depth announcement with a long and well-structured technical justification attached, I could understand. Though I suspect I'd likely disagree with the decision, I could probably accept it as a simple different of opinion if the arguments were evidently well-thought-through and considered.
This blog-post is so lightweight. There's no technical analysis. There's barely any justification. Yes we know SMS is insecure and yes - it seems plainly obvious that having them in the same UI could pose UX challenges & user confusion issues. So improve the UX and clarify the distinction. Did anyone in Signal consider the userbase or the advantages of this feature at all?
Definitely the end of my Signal usage anyway. It's my main SMS app: my primary motivator is SMS UX, the ability to securely message a tiny subset of my friends is a very nice but ultimately non-vital bonus. Having a separate app for those people isn't worth my while (they're on other platforms I use more).
They definetly should publish those points out in the open. After reading this, it just make sense they are dropping SMS, as infuriating as it is. Thanks for the link.
I guess to be fair it lets them design and support a single UX since iOS doesn't allow them to have SMS in the UX. That could have been a good argument.
Of course, they didn't bother make that argument.
And in the SMS domain Google Messages really does get annoying with the whole Google Messages vs iMessage and how nothing Google is doing with RCS benefits anyone except Google. As Google continues its war on SMS and force migration of everyone to RCS, Signal users on Android end up being the red-headed step child. That also is a good technical/strategic argument for ditching SMS.
But, again, not one that they even bothered make.
And there's always been the "tied to a phone number" issue that's been the #1 complaint about Signal. And once untethered from SMS who cares about phone numbers anymore.
Once again, not even a case they bothered to make.
"The answer is this: They dont want to add RCS support or spend the time to do it."
... confirmed by Signal in their discussion thread:
"... and Signal can’t add RCS support because there’s no RCS API on Android. Honestly, the days of any third-party SMS app are numbered."
I guess I misunderstood RCS. I thought the whole point of RCS was to be used on Android and to allow disparate third parties to use it as an open standard.
Where is the RCS API if not on Android ? Who is supposed to use RCS ?
Google also restricts their specific flavor of RCS (or at least they did awhile ago). I wanted to keep using Textra SMS but they never let Textra into RCS land.
Improving UI/UX around to clarify the SMS function is insecure is almost impossible. Google did research around SSL cert warnings a few years back, their conclusion was that people don’t read and just dismiss warnings, no mater what UI was. A frightening percentage of people also think the security padlock icon is actually a handbag.
Most people simply lack the technical basis to understand the security implications of sms. And for Signal to be a secure messaging system by default SMS needs to be removed.
That's assuming a lot of context. Your talking about a tiny icon next to the address bar in a browser. Of course people didn't always know what that was!
Signal's primary feature is encrypted messaging. You don't get it without at least seeing the word "encrypted" somewhere.
The only similarity between these two UX scenarios is that they involve encrypted network protocols. From a user standpoint there's no similarities.
Firstly, the messaging decision is presented to the user before an action (send SMS/Signal). It's capable of blocking and takes place as part of an active use flow where the user is trying to complete a task. With browsers, the differentiation in UI is displayed after a user action. It doesn't block and the user doesn't require interaction to achieve any goal. Why on earth should they pay any attention to it?
Secondly, the UX for messaging is an equivalent paths binary decision: you're asking people to choose A or B. There isn't an inherent default so a user doesn't start out with a bias toward one or the other. They can easily be required to read to proceed.
With browsers it's a yes/no binary decision: the default (yes) is insecure (for an insecure website). It requires no action from the user. The secure option (no, leave) asks the user to do something. It's a choice between inaction (insecure) or action (secure). That's heavily stacked.
Lastly, even the context surrounding the apps themselves is incomparably different. One is a security upgrade of an application everyone's been using for decades (often unknowingly; "the icon for the internet"). The other is an app people consciously download and install explicitly for security reasons (regardless of whether they understand those security reasons it's at least the motivating factor).
The people you talk about see no sense to use signal at all. So why should they install it when they have SMS? And when Signal is installed, why should the change the app and use signal instead of SMS?
What kind of technical analysis would you be looking for? Reading the post, it seems like their analysis came down to (1) fundamental values, i.e. not including insecure communications within an app when they've built their brand around being secure, and (2) UX confusion resulting in additional SMS costs and/or inadvertent data leakage. The former is a straightforward question of product strategy. Are you looking for e.g. some numbers from their UX research? This doesn't seem to ultimately be a decision about underlying technology.
> Definitely the end of my Signal usage anyway. It's my main SMS app: my primary motivator is SMS UX, the ability to securely message a tiny subset of my friends is a very nice but ultimately non-vital bonus.
I think this is the crux of it. Your primary motivator may be for a better SMS UX. But Signal's primary motivator is to provide universal secure messaging, but your typical use of Signal doesn't do that. So it's no surprise that their plans mismatch your expectations.
All centralised & protocol-locked messaging apps are subject to network effect. People moving away from Signal doesn't help the goal of universal secure messaging, regardless of whether those people are you or I.
That said, it seems they're between a rock & a hard place here since Google are defacto deprecating support for 3rd-party SMS apps.
> The most important reason for us to remove SMS support from Android is that plaintext SMS messages are inherently insecure.
This is an incredibly bad reason to remove SMS support. Sure, the fact "plaintext SMS messages are inherently insecure" is true, but the implication is not "remove SMS support".
Most people are motivated strongly by convenience. Signal is convenient because of its use as a drop-in replacement for your existing SMS client, so people use it, which increases their personal privacy and security. Removing SMS support will directly and substantially reduce Signal usage, and therefore both of those things.
The solution to "SMS is insecure" is pretty obviously "make a warning message telling users that", which also solves their second problem:
> This brings us to our second reason: we’ve heard repeatedly from people who’ve been hit with high messaging fees after assuming that the SMS messages they were sending were Signal messages, only to find out that they were using SMS, and being charged by their telecom provider.
...and the third problem:
> Third, there are serious UX and design implications to inviting SMS messages to live beside Signal messages in the Signal interface.
This is ridiculous. You're not making a paid product where if your app doesn't look perfect people won't use it - you're making a messaging app, and slightly ugly workarounds are perfectly OK.
> It’s important that people don’t mistake SMS messages sent or received via the Signal interface as secure and private when in fact they are not.
THEN DESIGN THE APP THAT WAY. IT'S NOT THAT HARD.
This post is a travesty, and the reasoning contained inside is completely insane.
Wikipedia says that Moxie is still on the Signal Board of Directors, but I find it hard to believe that he would let something this crazy go through.
> Wikipedia says that Moxie is still on the Signal Board of Directors, but I find it hard to believe that he would let something this crazy go through.
IIRC I read (some years ago) that Moxie wasn't really convinced that SMS support should stay in Signal-Android, either.
He was definitely against the encryption-over-SMS feature of TextSecure as Android and smartphones more broadly grew in marketshare. He also wrote the blog post on how it doesn't matter if you have multiple messaging apps (or federation between them) because the notification area of your phone is the modern federation engine. I may be paraphrasing a bit heavily but the post is at [1].
I agree I can see him being at least OK with removing SMS but it seems at odds with what I felt was his overall view of "get the most people the most security we can" and by extension increasing the number of people using secure messaging services to normalize it so simply using encryption isn't seen as an outlier. The latter part is closer to moot now more than ever before with WhatsApp being E2E by default and Apple having huge marketshare in some markets with iMessage.
They already tried putting a small light grey "unlocked" icon on messages. If that doesn't scream "SMS", nothing does. All available options exhausted. Time to throw in the towel.
This was one of the core features of using Signal for me. I wish they had implemented RCS and more features for SMS instead of removing it. I'm very disappointed with this feature.
As a side note, I'm on the beta, and recently got "Signal Stories". This immensely annoyed me, and had to dig through to remove it (since it wasn't obvious). After the whole crypto thing and these decisions, it might be time to find another secure messaging app.
Because it's a carrier-owned upsell feature. It's nuts that people even consider a non-Internet protocol that applications can't implement, and users have to get permission to use — from the same carriers that charge for bytes of crappy size-limited MMS messages in the same ballpark as delivery of physical letters.
It's already bad enough that I would never be able to convince family today to switch to Signal due to the removal of SMS history importing and now you want to remove the ability to send/receive SMS via Signal too? Good job guaranteeing you just cratered any additional growth of your userbase.
I've always wondered how companies become so blind to what their userbase actually wants and needs (looking at the majority of the rest of the comments here that seem to echo my sentiment as well) that we end up in situations like this. I guess "you die a hero or live long enough to become the villain" applies to apps too.
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As an android user myself, I much prefer having SMS built in because I use the search feature often to look back through all my SMS/Signal chats. I also regularly forward an SMS message to a Signal user, or vice versa. I'm already starting to feel like those iOS users who told me "I don't want another app"...
Signal seems to be trying to move further and further from "my preferred way to chat with people" and closer to the chat equivalent of "that protonmail account I only log in to when I need secrecy".
I obviously love having security on messages in transit, but I also like being able to keep my message history around and search my conversations for something that happened a year ago. It seems like Signal is on a trajectory to turn everything into disappearing messages. Are they the "safe for activists" communication app, or the "let's try to make as many as possible safer by default" app? Feels like they don't know.
And on top of it all the messaging is just frustrating. "we've taken away an incredibly useful and heavily used feature so we have development resource to better implement shitcoins and such" is such an irritating defense of the decision that I disabled my monthly donation.
I've onboarded friends and family, too, ensuring them it should be set as their default messaging app and that it _just works_. Unfortunately, people in the general population seem to have pretty much zero tolerance for any friction whatsoever. If they have to use 2 apps, they'll just end up communicating with me in the clear using their "default SMS" app on their phone. That's what this is going to result it...a reduction in overall message security due to people defaulting to what's easier...which is to _not_ have to remember which app to use for which "send a message" purpose. Fuck.
I understand the argument about people in markets where SMS is expensive getting screwed sometimes when they don't realize they're sending a message over SMS. However could that not be fairly trivially solved for with some UI notification or app setting that warns you about this and allows the warning to be perm-disabled if the user doesn't care!?
I think the real reason here is this desire to transition the service into supporting usernames, which is a topic that's been discussed before (and is explicitly mentioned in the post). Right now the service is tied to your phone number. After this change I suspect it will not be or not need to be.
This is very, very unfortunate for those of us who've convinced a ton of non-technical friends and family to use TextSecure->Signal over the years...
Exactly right. In fact, I will be doing this too. Right now, I use Signal as my default messaging app, and messages go via Signal to people who've registered their phone number with Signal without me having to do anything to effect that. When Signal stops working as an SMS client, I'm not going to look up which of my contacts wants to use Signal and which can only use SMS - I'm just going to use my default SMS app for everything except the couple of group chats which are on Signal already. Messages which would have been opportunistically encrypted are now going to go out plaintext, because the friction to find out who uses Signal and who doesn't is too high.
This already happens with iOS, because the Signal app doesn't work as a default SMS client. People who use Signal and Android reliably send me messages over Signal, whereas my contacts who use Signal and iOS mostly send messages over SMS unless they're directly replying to something I've sent them over Signal.
And even if I wanted to do the work to send everything over Signal to those contacts, how am I supposed to remember exactly which of my kid's friend's parents use Signal and which don't? Fuck it, the juice isn't worth the squeeze, everything is going over SMS.
I'll just have to hope that Google figures out a way integrate a seamless, opportunistic end-to-end encryption protocol into the default Android messaging client, since Signal is deliberately dropping the ball here.
However, if "dropping support for SMS messaging also frees up our capacity to build new features (yes, like usernames)", I think it is something I would not miss.
Besides, I agree with them on the point that SMS leak metadata.
Does anyone have recommendations for a good default SMS app on Android?
Personally like TextraSMS. Has a free ad-supported version, but I paid to remove ads when it was on sale several years ago (maybe $1).
4.4 stars. I believe it's $3 or $5 to remove ads now.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.textra
Also surprised me the other day when a friend used an iOS reaction, and it applied it correctly on my end.
> Added support for Reactions (also known as Tapbacks) received from iOS Apple devices.
https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=com.moez.QKSMS
https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/10/29/it-looks-like-pulse...
QKsms is open source but abandoned more than a year, so I guess Simple SMS at Fdroid should be ok, it's from the guy behind Simple Gallery
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft....
These are reasonable issues and concerns, so I don't follow why you would question all of the other decisions they make.
Here's how I've convinced my iPhone friends. I tell them if they actually want to send pictures and videos to me that aren't potato quality they can either switch to an Android, email me, or use Signal. At this point Signal is more like a cross platform iMessage. This tends to move people over because Apple's walled garden makes group chats infeasible with mixed devices.
They will no doubt stop checking their signal messages from me same as iPhone users often do and I will have to change to insecure messages for all my messaging.
This will break their trust in my recommendation, as much as it will break my trust in signal.
I get the reasoning over this, but I think they fail to realise that interoperability is the most important feature. I will have to stop donating to signal over this change, it will be useless to me...
There was just an article that said that 88% of teens have an iPhone. That means that almost all of their communication is encrypted.
We don't seem to have this problem so bad in the UK/Europe. Most people I know have WhatsApp and/or Telegram, and FB messenger, and Signal (in my friend circles); all alongside SMS. I have very few iMessage groups, and use it mostly for 1to1 SMS with people I don't know well.
I couldn't care less about this.
That's not true at all. I assume that besides Signal you use WhatsApp, though?
I can't understand who and why anyone cares about SMS these day, besides receiving government emergency notifications.
I'm dreading the day where I lose or break my iPhone and thus lose my Signal chat history. I've been using Signal for years, but this makes me still prefer other messengers when starting new chats, even if Telegram (for example) is not e2e encrypted.
(Unfortunately, I've long overcome the "I don't want another app" thing and just installed all the messaging apps. Although I kind of want to look into setting up Matrix bridges and merging everything into Element.)
(The only reason I use signal is to talk to my girlfriend. The only reason we use it is early in our relationship I was going through a phase where I adopted annoying privacy tools. I wanted to abandon it, but after years of using it she's developed positive emotional associations between our relationship and signal, so for non-technical reasons she likes to keep using it just to talk to me)
It took me a long time to find this comment. The number of SMS messages I never received was ridiculous. I still use the app all the time, but would never use the integrated SMS messages ever again.
Their underlying reasoning is correct. SMS sucks, really really bad. They're a secure communications channel. People see signal and think they're secure. Signal has no business supporting SMS. The on boarding has reached critical mass, the neyworke effect is here. If you're smart you'll abandon SMS altogether forever and just tell people to reach you some other way, not ditch the actual, over the internet encrypted channel.
My elderly mother pushes one button to text me and everyone else anything else is a show stopper, End of story.
It also puts a spot-light on the "your phone number is your username" policy. This made perfect sense when you are using Signal for opportunistic encryption of texting. It is much less justifiable when using it as a Silo'd app. I really hope they change that and give people who were waiting for that change time to join before killing SMS support.
I'm willing to bet that this decision is just jumping the gun by a month or two since usernames are around the corner (code exists, just not enabled. Can be used if built from source).
Though I haven't had a hard time converting (Android) users by using another app. Especially people that already use WA. The "other app" just comes off as normal. Apple is a different ball game because the walled garden, but that's also the weakness because you can't send photos/videos in group chats with mixed devices (but Signal can).
I hope it's communicated well to users who aren't readers of Signal's blog. I have relatives who use Signal, and they rely on its fallback-to-SMS feature, possibly without fully understanding it. I'll make sure they understand and are aware of this change, but others may be in the same position.
I learned to stop trying to improve the technical lives of other people after Dropbox's decision to restrict free accounts to three devices resulted in a shitstorm of angry and confused messages from half the people I know.
But I have to admit your perspective calls to me. I can imagine it would feel quite freeing.
I’m in a minor mess of a situation with my dad’s phone and computer because I’ve tried to be helpful. Now he resists help and that makes both of us frustrated.
I had recommended signal to others, but thankfully I've already warned those same people against continuing to use Signal years ago. Nobody was mad at me for Signal's actions and changing your default SMS app isn't hard anyway.
I don't think you have to stop recommending things to people just because situations change. Hasn't everybody had some service or software they depended on go from great to shitty? It's just the nature of using someone else's stuff. At some point they get greedy or busy or decide to pivot into something different from what you want and you have to find something new. Isn't everyone used to that? Why would they blame you?
This is why we need at least open source clients that can be forked when these decisions are made.
[^1]: https://wordpress.org/about/philosophy/
Because Whatsapp and Signal are walled gardens. (Everyone knows why IM>sms)
Until next year?
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20220701IP...
But I actually like this decision. It makes things less confusing and accidental use of unsecure SMS impossible. The downside is if you still use SMS you have to keep 2 apps, back them up separately, etc.
> "Why do I need 3 apps (Android Messages, Signal, Whatsapp)"
"You need Signal to talk to people on Signal, WhatsApp to talk to people on WhatsApp, and Messages to talk to people on SMS." Seems more straightforward than "use WhatsApp to talk to people on WhatsApp and Signal to talk to people on Signal or SMS; just pay attention to the color of the send button".
I am very intentional and active when it comes to what has push notification privileges. I factor that into my app use consideration. I have multiple email accounts in two different email apps, each that send me notifications. I have Signal, Discord, iMessages and SMS. I have a few Google chat apps. I used to have WhatsApp and Wickr and Telegram. I have Skype, Teams, and two Mattermost servers.
It’s exhausting to constantly switch between these, so over the course of a few years I’ve been very clear in where people can expect to reach me reliably. If you need or want to chat with me on Discord, Skype, or Google whatever you need to send me an iMessage, SMS, Mattermost, or Signal message. Sending me a message anywhere else will get you a response only the next time I open that app. That only happens when someone specifically asks.
I’m OK with having 63847394038 chat and video calling apps, but I’m not OK with being instantaneously notified by an infinity such apps. I can’t be that available.
I don't know anybody else who uses Silence so I could exchange encrypted messages with them.
Oh well. Maybe somebody here could resurrect this?
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.smssecure.smssecure/
https://git.silence.dev/Silence/Silence-Android/
Dead Comment
Messages that I would have sent via SMS currently will automatically get sent via Signal if the person I'm sending to has started using Signal without my knowledge. This has happened in several instances where I was pleasantly surprised to see a friend had started using Signal. Now that I'm forced into a separate SMS app, this will no longer be a possibility. I certainly won't be firing up Signal to see if a contact has joined before sending them an SMS.
Apart from that, your use case has another possible issue. If a person stops using Signal, your messages will go to the void until Signal actually removes the user and your client switches back to SMS. This has caused a lot of confusion for some of my friends when I switched my signal account to a different phone number.
I think it's more reliable to use Signal for Signal.
Anyway a normal person already uses multiple messaging applications: WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messanger, Instagram direct messages, the good old email, SMS (I guess somebody they are still used reading the comments), adding Signal it's not that big deal.
Signal was always one of those "win-win" apps, get more security when it's available and I don't have to worry about adding to the giant bucket of messaging apps.
They were a paragon of putting the user first and I was a strong supporter... but now... Why not Telegram? Or anything else?
I don't need the security, it was nice-to-have. Having to switch between Signal and other apps is a heavy amount of friction.
> Signal was always one of those "win-win" apps, get more security when it's available and I don't have to worry about adding to the giant bucket of messaging apps.
Same here. I see no reason to continue using Signal if they do this.
Now? Delta chat is looking plenty fine for doing private group chats.
My threat model is not nation states watching my metadata, I have horrible opsec for that. My threat model is discord and whatsapp etc. tossing me and my chat groups off a cliff at their sole discretion.
Signal gave me control over chat groups, and integrated with SMS as a bonus. Now? If I'm gonna have to deal with a separate SMS app anyways, I might as well use delta chat where I know my messages are automatically backed up in my email account.
Telegram is absolutely the worst when it comes to privacy, it has access to everything you do and say.
If you want a master app, have a lot at matrix.org with bridges.
Really? Telegram never said that they don't store your messages on cloud, they said that they do not sell your data or share it with third parties for profit.
Telegram has received a very good score on PrivacySpy (https://privacyspy.org), in fact better than any other messaging app. Telegram is good from a regular privacy perspective unless your threat model involves fearing cloud convenience.
Even FBI's leaked documents confirmed that Telegram does not ever share user data easily. [Source](https://www.securitynewspaper.com/2021/11/30/leaked-fbi-docu...)
If you're someone who requires spy-level opsec, you should be using Threema, Session or Speek. Maybe even a self-hosted XMPP instance.
Telegram is good at what it does and it states it very clearly. It does not lie about the things it does and it is open source. All while not selling user data, not manipulating user behavior through algorithms or censoring media by calculating hashes and providing what's arguably the most feature rich messaging app on the planet for free with a verifiable source code.
Also, be careful with what you're suggesting. Not only have Matrix servers been hacked twice but matrix also leaks metadata. If you're seriously suggesting true anonymity (not consenting privacy) then Matrix is not a good option.
If this were an in-depth announcement with a long and well-structured technical justification attached, I could understand. Though I suspect I'd likely disagree with the decision, I could probably accept it as a simple different of opinion if the arguments were evidently well-thought-through and considered.
This blog-post is so lightweight. There's no technical analysis. There's barely any justification. Yes we know SMS is insecure and yes - it seems plainly obvious that having them in the same UI could pose UX challenges & user confusion issues. So improve the UX and clarify the distinction. Did anyone in Signal consider the userbase or the advantages of this feature at all?
Definitely the end of my Signal usage anyway. It's my main SMS app: my primary motivator is SMS UX, the ability to securely message a tiny subset of my friends is a very nice but ultimately non-vital bonus. Having a separate app for those people isn't worth my while (they're on other platforms I use more).
The migration off it will be an unwelcome pain...
https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-blog-removing-sms...
Wonder why the blog post omitted all of that and focused on nonsense instead?
I found two top-level comments linking it, upvoting those might help:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33181525
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33181647
Of course, they didn't bother make that argument.
And in the SMS domain Google Messages really does get annoying with the whole Google Messages vs iMessage and how nothing Google is doing with RCS benefits anyone except Google. As Google continues its war on SMS and force migration of everyone to RCS, Signal users on Android end up being the red-headed step child. That also is a good technical/strategic argument for ditching SMS.
But, again, not one that they even bothered make.
And there's always been the "tied to a phone number" issue that's been the #1 complaint about Signal. And once untethered from SMS who cares about phone numbers anymore.
Once again, not even a case they bothered to make.
... confirmed by Signal in their discussion thread:
"... and Signal can’t add RCS support because there’s no RCS API on Android. Honestly, the days of any third-party SMS app are numbered."
I guess I misunderstood RCS. I thought the whole point of RCS was to be used on Android and to allow disparate third parties to use it as an open standard.
Where is the RCS API if not on Android ? Who is supposed to use RCS ?
Most people simply lack the technical basis to understand the security implications of sms. And for Signal to be a secure messaging system by default SMS needs to be removed.
Signal's primary feature is encrypted messaging. You don't get it without at least seeing the word "encrypted" somewhere.
Firstly, the messaging decision is presented to the user before an action (send SMS/Signal). It's capable of blocking and takes place as part of an active use flow where the user is trying to complete a task. With browsers, the differentiation in UI is displayed after a user action. It doesn't block and the user doesn't require interaction to achieve any goal. Why on earth should they pay any attention to it?
Secondly, the UX for messaging is an equivalent paths binary decision: you're asking people to choose A or B. There isn't an inherent default so a user doesn't start out with a bias toward one or the other. They can easily be required to read to proceed.
With browsers it's a yes/no binary decision: the default (yes) is insecure (for an insecure website). It requires no action from the user. The secure option (no, leave) asks the user to do something. It's a choice between inaction (insecure) or action (secure). That's heavily stacked.
Lastly, even the context surrounding the apps themselves is incomparably different. One is a security upgrade of an application everyone's been using for decades (often unknowingly; "the icon for the internet"). The other is an app people consciously download and install explicitly for security reasons (regardless of whether they understand those security reasons it's at least the motivating factor).
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I think this is the crux of it. Your primary motivator may be for a better SMS UX. But Signal's primary motivator is to provide universal secure messaging, but your typical use of Signal doesn't do that. So it's no surprise that their plans mismatch your expectations.
All centralised & protocol-locked messaging apps are subject to network effect. People moving away from Signal doesn't help the goal of universal secure messaging, regardless of whether those people are you or I.
That said, it seems they're between a rock & a hard place here since Google are defacto deprecating support for 3rd-party SMS apps.
This is an incredibly bad reason to remove SMS support. Sure, the fact "plaintext SMS messages are inherently insecure" is true, but the implication is not "remove SMS support".
Most people are motivated strongly by convenience. Signal is convenient because of its use as a drop-in replacement for your existing SMS client, so people use it, which increases their personal privacy and security. Removing SMS support will directly and substantially reduce Signal usage, and therefore both of those things.
The solution to "SMS is insecure" is pretty obviously "make a warning message telling users that", which also solves their second problem:
> This brings us to our second reason: we’ve heard repeatedly from people who’ve been hit with high messaging fees after assuming that the SMS messages they were sending were Signal messages, only to find out that they were using SMS, and being charged by their telecom provider.
...and the third problem:
> Third, there are serious UX and design implications to inviting SMS messages to live beside Signal messages in the Signal interface.
This is ridiculous. You're not making a paid product where if your app doesn't look perfect people won't use it - you're making a messaging app, and slightly ugly workarounds are perfectly OK.
> It’s important that people don’t mistake SMS messages sent or received via the Signal interface as secure and private when in fact they are not.
THEN DESIGN THE APP THAT WAY. IT'S NOT THAT HARD.
This post is a travesty, and the reasoning contained inside is completely insane.
Wikipedia says that Moxie is still on the Signal Board of Directors, but I find it hard to believe that he would let something this crazy go through.
IIRC I read (some years ago) that Moxie wasn't really convinced that SMS support should stay in Signal-Android, either.
I agree I can see him being at least OK with removing SMS but it seems at odds with what I felt was his overall view of "get the most people the most security we can" and by extension increasing the number of people using secure messaging services to normalize it so simply using encryption isn't seen as an outlier. The latter part is closer to moot now more than ever before with WhatsApp being E2E by default and Apple having huge marketshare in some markets with iMessage.
[1]: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
As a side note, I'm on the beta, and recently got "Signal Stories". This immensely annoyed me, and had to dig through to remove it (since it wasn't obvious). After the whole crypto thing and these decisions, it might be time to find another secure messaging app.
I'm not sure exactly what is exposed in the framework API regarding RCS, and how it compares to the relative ease of receiving SMS and MMS messages.
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I've always wondered how companies become so blind to what their userbase actually wants and needs (looking at the majority of the rest of the comments here that seem to echo my sentiment as well) that we end up in situations like this. I guess "you die a hero or live long enough to become the villain" applies to apps too.