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Signal usage survey, what versions do you use? Wanted for potential Flatpak adoption
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this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
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I quit using signal after they stopped supporting text messaging on Android. I had my whole family using it and that just evaporated overnight 😭
Same. I just didn't have any use for signal after SMS removal. Yes I know SMS is insecure but I was stuck. Either you use a separate secure app and magically convince everyone else to use it whilst falling back onto a separate SMS app anyway (for those who don't use the encrypted app). Or alternatively you just have to use a mainstream app like Google Messenger with SMS plus RCS.
At least when signal supported it I could migrate family to signal and then our communication would be encrypted and they could still message everyone else over SMS. It meant a large portion of my messages were encrypted. After SMS removal everyone I had on signal just quit so there was no one to communicate with. Trying to get people to use multiple apps was like herding cats.
So your family used SMS? Sms is horrible, you should just not use it.
If signal supported encrypted SMS that would be useful. DekuSMS is the only alternative here, as Silence is abandoned.
But it makes sense that they dont want to pretend SMS was a good standard.
Meanwhile, they use a phone number for anything, ironic
My parents are approaching 60. I told them that the signal text message app would work a lot like iMessage if we both used it. And it did. It was great. For the other people that used signal, the experience was generally better. For other people that didn't, SMS was fine because that's how I was going to talk to them anyway.
The thing is, My parents are not going to go to more than one app to communicate with other people. Since it no longer sends and receives text messages, it doesn't work with 99% of the other people in their lives.
They own and run a pretty large business. There's no way that they're staying on more than one messaging platform. You can talk all day about what they "should" do, but at the end of the day just getting them to switch to another app was a huge lift for me. Not only did they switch back to regular SMS, I burned a lot of credibility with them on tech related stuff through no fault of my own.
Repeat this story for the 90 or so people I had converted. There was no critical mass, so adoption evaporated overnight because my social graph is not enough to provide any sort of critical mass and adoption.
That sucks I am very sorry to hear that.
The thing is just that nobody should use SMS really. If they have a business they may have experience with it and whatever but really, dont use SMS at all...
Then it is just a single messaging app.
It makes no sense to include unencrypted SMS in an encrypted messaging app over secure protocols. Like, SMS are all scanned, surveilled and can easily be manipulated.
I think they just gave very valid reasons to include sms in signal, adoption. It took me years to get my contacts on signal and I was finally at the point that >80% of my messages were encrypted, that dropped to <10% the day sms was dropped. If I refused to use sms I would effectively be cutting contact with my family.
SMS is also the common standard for talking to people.
For the vast, vast majority of people, the technical security of, ‘hey, you want to catch a movie next saturday’, is far less important then the message actually getting through.
Qute simply, it is far more important for a communication method to be easy and universal then to be secure against attacks the vast majority of people do not think they will ever encounter. When most people want to tell their neighbor two houses down that the dog has gotten out again being able use the app they already use to communicate is far more important to them then then a bunch of technical jargon about end to end encryption.
I hate that the developers of secure messaging apps in particular are deaf to this. It's so easy to just add SMS as a fallback and yet they refuse to.
Thats email too, which is less bad
Why is email less bad than SMS? It’s about as (in)secure.
Email also fulfills a different role, as it is for longer, more formal, and less time sensitive messages. Nevertheless, more modern and technical encrypted email clients go out of their way to still work with unencrypted messages insteand of being deliberately incompatible as Signal is.
Email uses modern TLS, SMS uses some ancient encryption from the 90s or so, that just doesnt work.
If you trust the servers email is fine.
You can use Deltachat to chat over email. The protocol is universal its just how you use it.
Trust me a signal/xmpp/matrix message could look like an email too.
Email + Encryption is poorly optional yes. But you are asking for an internet chat service to support a different, ancient, insecure and unprivate protocol that has nothing to do with it.
Deku SMS supports encrypted and unencrypted SMS, this makes sense.
Yes, you could technically use email like SMS, while the standard allows for up to five days for the message to go through that’s pretty rare, in practice it’s primarily used to send long messages from one computer to another, not a single sentence or two between phones.
In practice, it is about as secure as SMS, as both require similar levels of dedicated effort to interpret. Most of the actors with the hardware used to intercept and decrypt SMS are the same actors who can compromise a server, or outright have acess to the backdoor they paid 10 million to put in RSA. Not that they need it, as the largest email providers by far do often work with law enforcement anyway. Both SMS and email attacks are seen at about the same rate and scales, which is to say rarely outside of government agencies where both are unfortunately routine.
Signal is primarily designed and marketed to fufill the same basic role as SMS, as evident from just how much of an afterthought anything but the mobile app is, how said app copies the same format as SMS for messages, how it required an phone number to use and sync phone contacts, and how it did support SMS for quite some time. It is emently reasonable for Signal to have continued to have featured the messaging format most of the people it could talk with used.
Agree that in practice SMS are intercepted just as much as Emails. But its entirely different and SMS does not use RSA afaik.
The last paragraph stressed for me how confusing this would be for noobs. A messenger that seems to do exactly the same but differently. People would not get it and think if they use Signal for SMS this would be secure somehow.
Whatsapp never integrated SMS and its used everywhere. Okay, there are video conference platforms that allow to log in via the phone network, but yeah, dont do that.
In the US on Android, unencrypted SMS messaging comes default. How do you propose getting a technologically illiterate boomer to not use SMS?
They went from doing some communication secure with signal, to doing no secure communication, because of a rug pull of a genuinely convenient feature. The problem with communication apps is that it is almost impossible to convince anyone to use anything they haven't heard about, if it is not very convenient. They're not going to use a separate app just for communicating with a single person/a few people.
Looks like RCS might be viable in the future when it works on both iphones and androids though. I just hope that it doesn't all go through googles servers.
RCS is still not available for Android. For now proprietary Google Messages is required to connect Google proxied RCS servers.
And I would be suprisied if this won't stay that way.
RCS is controlled by a few companies and also requires a specific app. Nearly all messengers work on iOS too (apart based Briar)
You do realise that mobile data is non-existent or limited in some counties right? Even here in New Zealand mobile data is still limited or expensive and the main communication, especially between people who don't know each other, is SMS. Some encryption is still better than nothing.
Crazy. But Signal never encrypted SMS.
And even if they did, this would be worse than signal protocol and really confusing, because SMS only worked between signal and an sms app, encrypted sms would only work between signal and signal too.
So you would have the same encryption over 2 protocols and people may just stay with sms all the time which is baaad.
So seperate apps, I dont get peoples problems.
I recommend DekuSMS for encrypted SMS.
That's why Silence was forked from Signal.
You don't get people's problems because I'm going to hazard a guess that it's not a problem for you and therefore you don't actually have any lived experience with the issue. Or not currently anyway. But given you don't seem to be too interested in peoples actual experiences and seem more interested in talking over people and insisting that your eristic arguments are the only right answer, I'm going to leave this conversation here and continue to have a hard time converting family and friends to Signal because they still use SMS and Signal doesn't give a shit about people in countries where SMS dominates.
My comment was not personal or anything, so I ask you to also please stay rational.
I also complained about Signal not supporting encrypted SMS, but again, Whatsapp never supported SMS and still is used like all over the world.
Signal doesnt have to be better than Whatsapp to deserve adoption. It already is, and everyone should just replace it.
I was clear about that, and threw Whatscrap off my device, spent hours convincing people to switch, and at least in my bubble that worked pretty okay as they are left-y and even though often tech illiterate accept that Signal is like a baseline of Security and simply not hard to use or anything.
A statement: if you use SMS to avoid whatsapp, maybe you should prefer to use Whatsapp. I dont and in rare cases I use whatsapp, but literally nobody gets how insecure SMS is. I immediately ask them to install an encrypted SMS app and nobody does, which kinda sucks.
I am in a lucky position to not rely on SMS. I dont get the "as little apps as possible" mentality of people that at the same time have like all the tracking apps on their devices.
I just have understanding for Signal to have dropped SMS. It is misleading to have it in the same App, nobody gets shit.
In the current situation I will convince people that already have Whatscrap to also install Signal. Like nobody deletes whatsapp, which takes away lots of the arguments for using Signal (meta is still getting all the "who knows whom").
I understand that it sucks for you. And supporting SMS really is no big efford. But I also understand Signals position.
FOSS doesnt always need to be better than proprietary tracking garbage. People need to be f**ing educated to intrinsically use anything that is more privacy friendly.
Btw Silence is no longer maintained so I recommend DekuSMS.