“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. 😀 👍
I’d love to switch to Signal but the lack of sms makes it a NO from me. Everyone I know uses sms on their phone, and there’s no way I’ll be able to convince them to use two messaging apps when sms is already universal and convenient. 😭
It always baffles me that apparently in some places people still use sms. I mean besides the fact that it isn’t encrypted at all, sms doesn’t even give you group chats, the ability to send images and videos or many other of features basically every other messenger has, right? Where I live it’s about (just guessing the numbers here tbh) 90 % WhatsApp, 7% telegram and 3 % signal. Is there any reason that in some places so many people stay with SMS? I don’t think I’ve send or received one in the last 10 years or so (besides companies sending me a TAN or whatever)
I’ve never used group chats, so that was never an issue. Most people don’t care if their messages are encrypted. And sms automatically swaps to mms when sending pictures and videos.
Donno why Whatsapp never took off on the U.S and tbh I’m glad since Meta owns it.
Meta owns it now, I guess - I always figured that the critical bulk of their user base came from before the acquisition.
I initially learnt about Signal when Meta (then Facebook) bought them out and a bunch of Australian reporters immediately switched their anonymous tipoff lines from Whatsapp to Signal.
As an iPhone user who most of the people I message are also iPhone users. I need sms to communicate with the 3 or 4 people who use android and they don’t have any other app for messaging.
I read that’s mostly an US thing. For some reason a lot of people still text there.
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.
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.
I just use iMessage lol
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.
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.
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.