I expect messages to disappear when I turn on disappearing messages and not when I don’t turn them on.
But yes, I agree it’s not the right choice for me and many others who want to have full ownership over our data, and they should make that clear in advance.
> But yes, I agree it’s not the right choice for me and many others who want to have full ownership over our data,
The whole point of Signal is you have full ownership of your data. You said you can transfer the data to another device, right? I get that inability to export cleanly is an annoying bug, but technically you have full control over your data the whole time. It seems to me that it's easier to guarantee no one else can get your data (at the expense of data export friction), than it is to provide "do anything you might want with your data" while still guaranteeing privacy.
Being able to transfer to another copy of the same app, but not to a different app, and being forced to delete the original data in the process, is not ownership of your data.
But yes, I agree it’s not the right choice for me and many others who want to have full ownership over our data, and they should make that clear in advance.