Comment by edent
3 years ago
SMS was, in my opinion, the killer feature for Signal. Telling people to install yet-another-inbox which was only going to be used by their one privacy-weirdo friend was a non-starter.
Saying "this is a better SMS app" got people on-board and let them "upgrade" to secure messaging. That's why I started using it in the "TextSecure" days.
But, sadly, I agree with Signal's reasoning here. Mixing the two protocols was annoyingly complex. If someone stopped using Signal, messages you sent to them would never arrive - with no notification. And there's no obvious way to "downgrade" to SMS.
I was working on RCS a decade ago. I'm glad to see it is finally getting somewhere - but I'm sad it is at the expense of better and more secure protocols.
Problem is Signal people had really odd visions how to make basic functionality work. This isn't really because SMS/MMS are bad(yes they are).
But there are threads in their issue tracker where Signal people would disagree with basically functionality of responding to text messages on dual sim devices. "We'll always use the Signal registered number as default".
One part of this is a terrible(but working) protocol, the other is really weird product management where basic needs of the consumer are brushed aside with a "I know best approach" that doesn't really work when you're not in the shoes of apple and have the ability to just replace SMS altogether.
Yeah, I've hit this interesting attitude from Signal developers when I noticed they hijack the SMS datastore which then becomes inaccessible to tools like SMS Backup & Restore and tools that forward SMS notifications to other devices.
The developers were adamant that they know better than me what I want from my SMS tool. And then proceeded to work on crypto and stories.
Agreed. I remember when - years ago - they unilaterally switched all Android devices to use the Apple emoji. No consultation, no investigation with users, no reason other than they wanted consistency across their apps.
Took a lot of grumpy users before they backtracked.
I use and like Signal. I'm not smart enough to disagree with some of their technical decisions, but I wish they could have found a way to make SMS/RCS work.
Just to add some citations.
You can see various threads where people complained about the forced Apple emoji e.g. https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/3712 and https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/3675
Signal's own FAQ says
> Signal Android includes built-in emoji functionality for consistency between platforms
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360017561992-Wh...
I can see why some people would want a toggle, but defaulting to Apple emoji seems like the obviously correct thing to do. I suspect a major reason why HNers hate emoji in general is because they see different images from what gen-z sees and therefore have a hard time understanding jokes that rely on how these images look.
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One thing you need to keep in mind is that if you want an app with strong security, the less code you have, the easier it is to achieve the goal.
By definition, Signal is not going to have bells and whistles and niche features, to keep the codebase lean and easier to avoid security weaknesses.
If you want an app with many features, use Telegram.
(They did however ship emoji reactions in Signal because most people actually like it and the other apps do have it; curiously missing in Telegram).
And yet, they added crypto, stories, reactions, animated stickers and all that stuff while refusing to allow people to keep their loved-ones messages when their phone falls in to a toilet.
I don't think the reasoning for their implementation is as well thought out as you claim here.
>> curiously missing in Telegram
Telegram has had emoji reactions since 2021 -- https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/now-y...
Telegram has emoji reactions as well
As a Dutch person, I'm still amazed that the US still seems to use SMS as much; mind you, our phone plans here were "you get 1000 text messages and X minutes or a bajillion megabytes of data"; that + 'free' international messaging / calls with services like Whatsapp quickly pushed people to data-only messaging like Whatsapp or maybe FB Messenger. We also have a big immigrant population that like to chat with their family wherever they may live, and international calls / text messages are stupid expensive.
I can imagine that's less of an issue in the US; do you pay extra for text messages and calls that go across state lines?
FWIW, I'm not American.
In the UK, where I am, most contracts have unlimited SMS. I think even the cheapest PAYG plans include massive bundles.
Lots of companies send out reminders by SMS because it is universally accepted. Not every customer has WhatsApp.
We do generally pay extra for international calls, though text messaging is often free (assuming you’re talking about international states. US states, of course, are all treated as the same country).
Almost all phone plans have unlimited (domestic) texting and calling and differentiate themselves with data, reliability and ”free” perks like subsidized Netflix. You really have to go out of your way to find a plan with limited texts/calls.
It's actually mostly some parts in central Europe where texting is expensive. For most parts of the world texting is quite important.
I don't understand why people on this board keep forgetting that central Europe and the US is the minority of the world population.
Everyone keeps bringing up WhatsApp. But it seems that everyone has all but forgotten that WhatsApp became so popular not because they only focused on the US market, but because they went around the globe and specifically targeted feature phones as well. I.e. they understood that their own home turf isn't enough to make a dominant chat application.
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Why are you people always so proud of having all your communication owned by Meta? With Meta dictating which phones you can use to communicate with others?
Where are you getting the idea from that "we" are proud of our communication being controlled by a commercial party? I'm pretty sure most people are not proud, but either poorly informed or not willing to make the trade off for more security while losing half their social network.
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No, my phone plan in the US was unlimited call and text. So it was either imessage with everyone or text.
I've gotten SMS messages from iPhone users. In some Apple centric areas (rich people or people who think/want to pretend they're rich), I think iMessage is the default.
Fine by me. If they want a better experience, I have almost every messaging app on the Dutch market bridged to my Matrix server so I don't care, they'll just have to live with the lack of features if they want to chat with me (or install something like Signal).
I don't care about RCS and other ISP standards that exist to squeeze more money out of texting. I'll use Telegram/Signal/WhatsApp calling before I'll use my phone app because my subscription doesn't include free minutes (and I barely call anyway) so I've gotten the benefits of tech like WiFi calling through VoLTE for years before ISPs bothered sending their VoLTE profiles to my phone.
Probably because I haven't witnessed the Textsecure days: I didn't even know Signal was doing SMS, until these days. Certainly didn't convince anyone to use Signal by telling them it was a better SMS app. So SMS as killer feature seems to be, at least for my peer group, firmly in the past.