Convincing people to use apps such as Signal is hard work and most can’t be convinced. But with those you manage to convince, do you feel happy to talk to them on Signal?
The problem is these people use Signal on Android/IOS which can’t be trusted and IOS has recently been in the news for having a backdoor. And it has also been revealed that american feds are able to read everyone’s push notifications and they do this as mass surveillance.
So not only do you have to convince people to use Signal which is an incredibly difficult challenge. You also have to convince them to go into settings to disable message and sender being included in the push notifications. And then there’s the big question is the Android and IOS operating systems are doing mass surveillance anyway. And many people find it taking a lot of effort to type on the phone so they install Signal on the computer which is a mac or Windows OS.
So I don’t think I feel comfortable sending messages in Signal but it’s better than Whatsapp.
These were some thoughts to get the discussion started and set the context.
Yeah, Signal is good enough. If people use shitty operating systems like Google’s version of Android that’s another problem and not really one that it’s my job to care about that much. What matters is the network effect and every user who moves moves from Whatsapp to Signal is one more person who gains the freedom to easily improve their digital lives further if they someday choose to do so without it costing them the ability to chat with all their friends.
The problem I have with Signal is that it itself pushes people onto the “shitty operating systems”. It does not allow registering from desktop, at least officially. There are workarounds, but they’re cumbersome (especially for a non-technical person, whom Signal is supposed to appeal to), and the official client outright tells you go to use a phone first. And even then, apparently the desktop client is not even full-featured, and not the priority.
I know there are degoogled OSes (running Graphene myself), but you’d need to get lucky or choose a phone with this in mind, while a random given laptop is likely to be able to run Linux.
I would certainly advise everyone to choose a phone with that in mind.
The desktop client is not great, but it works. There certainly are things Signal could do better. Its phone-centric nature is ridiculous and I have no idea why they cling to it. But it’s easier than trying to get everyone to use Matrix or whatever — mainly because more people have heard of it.
For my current phone, I did - I chose a Pixel. But I got aware about OS privacy while in the middle of using an unsupported phone, so for a while, I treated it as a “public place”. So making a phone private may not be viable for everyone.
Plus, the supported phones may be more expensive. Even my current one was $300, which is a lot for me, in addition to not being officially sold here.
Signal refuses to even try to accommodate for UnifiedPush or MQTT for those not using play services requiring an extra battery-draining socket to their servers. You are also still required to use one of the mobile duopoly OSs as a primary device to register (SIM still required). Good luck if you use a Linux phone, KaiOS, or just don’t want an ever-present tracking beacon on you. We all know the Electron-based desktop client is shit. I would flip this on its head & say it is the service’s probably if they choose to prioritize & mainly support the shitty mobile OS duopoly it’s their problem for providing a bad service & getting the criticism they deserve.