Signal-iOS Alternatives

Signal-iOS reviews and mentions

• Signal 7.0 released for iOS – Private Phone s
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Feb 2024
• Police Can Spy on Your iOS and Android Push Notifications
  1 project | /r/technology | 7 Dec 2023
• Police used Cellebrite to break into my phone, how do I prevent this in the future?
  3 projects | /r/privacy | 6 Dec 2023
• Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications -US senator
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Dec 2023

  Fortunately, they did foresee this! The push notification only contains enough information to tell the phone that it should fetch the actual notification content from Signal's servers.

  Here's a Signal dev talking about it on the Signal-Android GitHub: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/12961#iss...

  And similarly for Signal-iOS: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/issues/962#issuecomm...

• Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive
  7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Nov 2023

  This was a nice, detailed read. I was happy to note this about employee compensation since paying them well is a good thing apart from their personal motivation to work on this (even at a comparatively lower pay than in other companies/projects):

  > When benefits, HR services, taxes, recruiting, and salaries are included, this translates to around $19 million dollars per year.

  > We are proud to pay people well. Our goal is to compensate our staff at as close to industry wages as possible within the boundaries of a nonprofit organization.

  That said, I really dislike Signal for a few reasons. The first is what many people have already talked about very often — forcing to use a phone number to register. Since the SMS or call costs are quite high, Signal could adopt the iMessage approach to verification, which is having the user send an SMS to the service (this will cost the user some money depending on which country the SMS is sent to). This could be decided based on the country code so that the current SMS OTP model can coexist.

  Signal is obstinate on a few aspects on user experience, more so on iOS/iPadOS. Firstly, it refuses to provide a data backup mechanism for iOS/iPadOS. If someone loses their devices, there is no way to restore older messages. Even setting up a new device requires the old device to be in physical proximity to transfer the data. Signal does integrate with CallKit (to act like a phone app) and with Apple’s notification services, but refuses to allow the user to backup the data with a password to encrypt it.

  Secondly, I found this paragraph in this post to be disingenuous:

  > Such practices are often accompanied by “growth hacking” and engagement maximization techniques that leverage dark patterns to keep people glued to feeds and notifications. While Signal is also free to use, we reject this kind of manipulation, focusing instead on creating a straightforward interpersonal communications app. We also reject business models that incentivize such practices.

  Signal on iOS/iPadOS wants the user to enable notifications and to share contacts. If notifications are disallowed and if contacts upload is disallowed, it will pester every few days about it. One might think this is a silly mistake that Signal isn’t aware of. But it was reported some years ago and Signal responded that it will not fix it because it believes this is the only way. [1] Not even an option where this is a toggle for those who want no notifications or don’t want to share contacts (Signal does have a toggle for contact joining notifications).

  Signal is also not that reliable in delivering messages in a timely manner compared to other apps (the GitHub repo has many repetitive issues on this topic over all these years).

  Finally, since Signal has poorer UX in general, which isn’t an easy or cheap thing to handle, I use it only with less than a handful of people who I know and who use it.

  I’d donate occasionally so that Signal can continue to exist, but I don’t feel like supporting it every month with all these issues, some of which look like Signal showing me the middle finger.

  [1]: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/issues/4590#issue-72...

• Telegram raises $210M through bond sales
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Jul 2023

  I also use both extensively and I agree, Telegram has the best UX of any messaging app. The desktop app is QT I think so it feels very snappy compared to Signal's electron app.

  Signal's iOS app is a native Swift/UIKit app and open source however, so I'd encourage you to report any bugs or issues you find: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS

• App crashes on open | iOS 16.5 | will stop donation
  2 projects | /r/signal | 29 May 2023

  Yeah I was able to find a few tasks that might be similar to your issue, though I don't know the exact details how the app behaves in your case, as in if you get error message or something like in this issue, or if it just closes on open like in this issue comment. Regardless, the generated crash report from the phone itself is probably good to add in your email to support (which is different from the debug log, just to specify in case you have been sending only that, here's a link for more details).

• I have absolutely had it with Signal (lack of basic backup options)
  1 project | /r/signal | 21 May 2023
• Rewriting the Messenger codebase for a faster, smaller, simpler messaging app
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 May 2023

  My bet is on "object-oriented obfuscation" and bloat caused by "modern" coding styles. Looking through the Signal source you linked to, I see tons of the former. There is an absolutely insane amount of boilerplate-looking code in here, for example: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/tree/main/Signal/src...

  I don't know Swift or the iOS UI API, but a lot of that code seems to be manually creating and positioning UI elements and otherwise implementing UI functionality that I'd expect the OS to handle. It's a lot of code that should really be data (arrays, structures).

  To offer a huge contrast, a long time ago I wrote an MSNP chat client in pure Win32, and it was around 2kloc. The binary was 24KB. Of course it only supported contacts, presence, and text messaging, but I still can't see features like audio/video or the crypto that Signal has needing 100x more, especially if they use OS functionality for much of them.

• Camera quality during video call
  1 project | /r/signal | 11 Apr 2023
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