I am looking to replace my phones text message client with something better. I am trying to make my phone clean, minimalist and less addicting (degoogling too). I even installed Niagara launcher, to give an idea of the kind of aesthetic I am looking for. Is there anything out there folks reccomend? Bonus points if its ethical and pro-privacy.
You mean for SMS? Doesn’t Signal handle that as well?
Edit : nope. Signal doesn’t handle sms
It used to, pulling that was their biggest mistake since requiring a phone number and made me trust them a lot less
Why would Signal removing support for an insecure messaging platform make you trust them a lot less? They were pretty clear about why it was done and gave plenty of warning.
I felt their reasoning was disingenuous and that supporting sms had been a massive driver of adoption, a lot of “normal” people used it as a default messenger on the advice of the nerds in their lives without any idea what signal or sms were. Removing that support was a significant rugpull and measurably detrimental to their stated goal of private communication as a default
What they found though was that people were just using it for SMS, not realizing that this meant it was insecure. People kept choosing convenience over security. Removing that support was well messaged almost a year before it was done; that’s the slowest rug pull I’ve ever seen.
Locking it to phone numbers? THAT was an untrustworthy move. But removing SMS meant that people could no longer pretend to be secure when they really weren’t.
I don’t have a screenshot handy, but it was very clearly communicated through both colour and iconography whether or not a conversation was encrypted. For people who still couldn’t tell, like my elderly relatives, removing sms support meant they went from 10% encrypted communications back to zero and forced the rest of us to expose ourselves again to stay in touch
Why? If they were already using Signal, they weren’t about to stop using it when it dropped SMS. If they weren’t using it… any encryption was window dressing anyway.
I’m not interested in arguing and have already shared my experience, hope you have a nice rest of your day. From their perspective, “texting” most people just quit working and someone had to “fix” it by switching them back to their phone’s default sms client. It’s pretty clear you haven’t been tech support for an elder, a lot of people aren’t aware of these things or making real decisions about them at all. Texting at all is a big ask, they need help looking at/sending pictures, a separate app is way too much friction
fwiw exactly my experience. Only 2 other people in my family still use Signal after that, down from ~8.
Yeah, biggest product feature for me, and when they dropped it I dropped them.
Why can’t we habe nice things? It’s all going to shit. Either because of greedy corpos, or because of bad people (sometimes one is caused by the other).