How about putting it on F-droid? That won't happen as they ship to much proprietary software.
Signal wants to provide updates themselfs to make sure they are fast in case of big security bug. F-Droid can lag behind to provide new version of app.
But they should at least provide F-Droid repo.
F-droid is only a few days behind at most. They are arguing against F-droid with evidence that's out of date. I think it has more to do with laziness than anything.
The good news is that Molly exists.
Laziness is a very negative way of putting it. Another would be prioritisation - with limited budget, what is the best way to get as many people as possible to have their communications encrypted?
Its so strange that you need to use Twinhelix' random project or Molly, as Signal doesnt care
It sucks that they don't allow a survey without logging in first. Had to create an account extra for taking part...
The worst part about signing up somewhere is the amount of email spam that will land in you inbox. I don't know about their specific configuration, but by default Discourse (the forum software they use) sends weekly "digest emails" if you haven't visited the site for a week. So make sure to turn them off.
Use SimpleLogin and Bitwarden for everything. I never use the same email or password anywhere and can turn off receiving emails from the source for each account.
Its not a Signal survey, this is by a random user.
You can register anonymously.
The way you posted this made it seem it was an official signal survey
Not being able to run Signal on my Android tablet feels really inconvenient. That would be no. 1 on my wish list
Try Molly on both devices but yeah Signal should fix this.
That's the biggest pain point with Signal and WhatsApp in my opinion. Telegram does it, but then of course it's much easier for them to support. Sharing content from my tablet is such a hassle.
I use warpinator to share between my phone, laptop and desktop at home. It uses the local network.
But yea, I use signal to share often, when I am out.
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.
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.
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.
This is just a random user doing a very unrepresentative poll back in June last year - I don't think it'll influence Flatpak adoption in any way.
I don’t care about the packaging format so much as about either having a Qt or GTK version or even just being able to open it in my browser.
There is Flare. I haven't used it myself because it's not official and I don't know what it will do to e.g. my backups, but just sharing in case you're interested.
The heck are you all talking about? The post says Linux and Flatpack, while everyone somehow is discussing why signal is not on f-driod.
How the heck is this related?
Hahaha, any comment here makes no sense. This is just to help that guy have an actually somewhat useful survey, because Signal devs have very strange priorities
I prefer the deb that works. I get a signal.update almost every other day. I don't remember to update my flatpaks anywhere near that often. I also appreciate that it doesn't force me to include dependencies that are already met.
I'm thinking about abandoning Signal given the fact that they use AWS servers, still insist on requiring a phone number to use the APP and haven't yet implemented nicknames like Telegram
If you want absolute control over your communications, the only way is to self-host an XMPP server
Your data is always encrypted before it reaches the AWS servers though, so it's not like Amazon has access to them. The phone number/nicknames is still in progress, but it's hard to do that securely, and given that their user base is really big now, they also need to make sure it works well for everybody.
Why not matrix?
Matrix, the protocol, is quite nice.
Element, the Matrix reference client, is too complicated IMO. If everyone were to only use FluffyChat, it would be great but then FluffyChat afaik doesn't implement every protocol feature and and you could end up in compatibility issues with Element users.
Purely as a client I find Telegram the most convenient. I think more should copy their homework from there, heck perhaps post the client to Matrix.
Personally I install it with pacman and generally avoid Flatpaks due to annoying problems I've had with it limiting filesystem access in the past. My biggest problem is that it seems to "forget" that I'm logged in if I don't use it regularly, meaning I have to regularly re-auth it on my desktop since I use it infrequently there.
Flatpaks are generally made way to loosely. Always "not breaking" > "being secure".
So this should not really be the case, drag&drop doesnt work yet, maybe copy-pasting files doesnt if the app cannot access that directory statically (you need to add an attachment from within the app, your file picker will open which is a "portal" which links that file into the apps container and thus allows the app to see it.)
Everything else works normally, screensharing too
That's an understandable goal, but as a user, breaking the user experience when I go to send a file to someone only to find that I can't even see it in some apps is a deal breaker. If the app can't be trusted to do that, I won't use it.
Oh look an essay full of fearmongering that adds nothing to the discussion. Thanks for contributing!
Tbf it does suggest several alternatives.
The appeal of signal is it is a good option (may have flaws but it is better than say discord) and it's pretty easy to get normies using it, all the other alternatives you mentioned are obscure and convincing normies such as friends and family to use them is much harder, and while signal isn't perfect, it's certainly better than whatsapp or other proprietary solutions
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