It's really quite easy to get. SMS is not secure. They want their app to be called secure. And iMessage is not secure either, and not just because of SMS, but because the whole protocol is flawed [1]. So you're basically comparing two classes of apps: one insecure, and one secure, and you wonder why they don't both work the same way.
I'm also really tired of seeing the SMS argument for all new chat applications that appear. SMS is a dinosaur and it deserves to disappear. A lot of people don't rely on it already (likely over a billion, or virtually all WhatsApp users, and there are more apps like it). New apps shouldn't be held back just because some users still rely on it.
SMS is the IE6 of the carrier world. To see the same people decry email insecurity, but at the same time want to use SMS by the carriers that are "tight partners" with intelligence agencies all over the world, and in a world where the police is increasingly using more phone-spying tools without a warrant is really mind-boggling.
I do fully agree with you that Signal needs a proper desktop application that works (I still can't seem to be able to import phone numbers from the phone to the Chrome app - it always fails for me).
This is the exact same issue PGP and other secure communicators face: noone will use them if they're INCONVENIENT. At this point Signal is just a worse version of proprietary WhatsApp and a significantly worse version of iMessage. It doesn't offer anything better or anything new. SMS might be insecure, but its integration offers convenience which makes for a great stepping stone to making Signal widely used and available.
If we actually take a moment to heed what history taught us is: noone gives a damn about security. It's a nice tick on the feature list, but it's a low-priority tick. It'll always be trumped by convenience and networking effets. Without understanding that, Signal is on its way to the garbage dump of history together with PGP, XMPP and countless other secure protocols.
SMS integration is a great trojan horse to make people use it - just replace the existing messenger and you can message to people via your computer! As the userbase grows, Signal switches to secure communication anyway until you can finall y drop the SMS support. But without that user growth, it's exactly what I wrote above - a shitty version of iMessage and WhatsApp.
[1] https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2016/03/21/attack-o...
I'm also really tired of seeing the SMS argument for all new chat applications that appear. SMS is a dinosaur and it deserves to disappear. A lot of people don't rely on it already (likely over a billion, or virtually all WhatsApp users, and there are more apps like it). New apps shouldn't be held back just because some users still rely on it.
SMS is the IE6 of the carrier world. To see the same people decry email insecurity, but at the same time want to use SMS by the carriers that are "tight partners" with intelligence agencies all over the world, and in a world where the police is increasingly using more phone-spying tools without a warrant is really mind-boggling.
I do fully agree with you that Signal needs a proper desktop application that works (I still can't seem to be able to import phone numbers from the phone to the Chrome app - it always fails for me).