A lot of people, myself included, have it installed but never use it after they dropped SMS support.

Only a tiny fraction of my contacts use Signal, and most of those are also on Whatsapp, Telegram, Discord, and others.

Signal offers essentially nothing to me.

The sms decision made signal go from THE messaging app on my phone to an app I only use with a very small subset of my contacts. It is infuriating that they didn't allow users to retain that functionality when it costs them nothing, and they could have disabled it by default.

I still use Signal a lot, since most people I frequently talk to use it. However, this was extremely frustrating. Having 1 messaging app for so long was incredibly nice.

You paid them nothing and are infuriated. Interesting.

Many people care about Signal, and it is okay to dislike their decision. OP didn't demand from Signal to support SMS, but they expressed their emotions about the change.

Signal is an awesome project but some of their decisions annoy many users. E.g. Signal does not allow to automatically save all pictures in the gallery. It's a privacy feature, but it's inconvenient since it forces me remember to download each image seperately.

Except real privacy?

Not even that, because it is linked to phone numbers.

Username registration is currently being tested: https://community.signalusers.org/t/public-username-testing-...

> and register for a new account with a phone number (you can use the same one you’re using in Production).

I hope that they make it so you can register WITHOUT a phone number. Perfectly fine if it's not the default. This is post is currently implying that is not currently the case.

So this puts signal on par with telegram, not above? Am I missing something?

Telegram's encryption is opt-in which means most people don't use the encrypted chats at all.

Yep, a great example: https://dessalines.github.io/essays/why_not_signal.html#phon...

Signal is private, but not anonymous. Related, but two different things.

Afaik you can crrate an account without a number.

No. You can just hide it from other users in group chats now (and perhaps 1:1, didn't yet check but you still need one to sign up)

Where is the option for group chats please?

Does that require the sealed-sender thingy?

Not yet, but they are working on that.

Why is it more private than WhatsApp?

Pay attention to WhatsApp's wording (all privacy/security claims start with "your messages"), and their privacy policy, and you'll see that while message involving with individuals (non-Business users) are secured, your contact list is not, neither are chats with businesses or the metadata about you chatting (destinations, frequency, time)

I encourage you to read the article, but Signal minimizes the metadata it stores about you, doesn't hold on to you contact list, doesn't keep information about your IP address, etc.

WhatsApp instead makes tons of money from this kind of metadata.

Using WhatsApp means Facebook/Meta knows the timestamp, sender and recipient of every message sent.

My lawyer stopped using signal due to the sms support being dropped. It became too much of a hassle and wasn't worth it.

Many of my family also dropped Signal.

It is now really only used by the hyper-privacy conscious.

I really don't get why people are still using SMS. Is data really that expensive?