My network is all on Signal and Signal has been good to us. Matrix may become the way of the future but for now Signal is a good place to be for this lot.

I think Signal is trying too hard to be secure, and they are missing a lot of convenience features.

For example, you can't migrate from Android to iOS or vice versa. You'll lose all your messages and groups.

Or it's really hard to export all the photos someone sent you. I get that my iCloud library isn't as secure, but I really want to make sure I don't lose those photos if I lose my device. The photos aren't that sensitive.

The security notifications are also well-meaning, but hard to make sense of. You sometimes get notifications for changed security numbers, when people change their phone, sometimes folks show up twice in groups, etc. It's all a bit hard to understand and difficult to use.

And finally, it seems that messages are sometimes delivered a bit unreliably or with a long delay.

I've been using signal for a few years. I'm now in a situation that I use two different phones but signal only allows you to be connected to a single device, and you only see the messages in your history for the particular device you received it on. You can't migrate messages, the UI is extremely basic and isn't a responsive design so you have no control over window size on larger screens. There's just so many annoying little things about it, but overall it's pretty solid. I'm looking for a better solution now though.

It really needs some more effort put in on UI design, data migration and linked devices. Development is very slow. I hoped it would improve but nothing has changed for years.

Signal is great. I wish more people used it because I trust it more than anything that’s a product of Facebook. No matter what they claim, I always worry there’s something they aren’t admitting to.

I see a lot of people here struggling to get contacts to drop sms and imessage. i have had success in getting a lot of friends on signal because cross platform group mms is dogshit.

i can't get any whatsapp people to budge though

Signal set the industry standard for encryption and privacy, and it's what I tend to point people towards. The one down-side is that it is still tied to your phone number, so solutions like Element/Matrix or XMPP with OMEMO might be a little better for some use cases. My wife, kids and I use Conversations(.)im for our intra-family chats and use Signal for talking to everybody else.

I am a fan of Signal but mine has been broken for like six months now. Anyone else getting this bug? I try to open it and get an error 'Couldn't open Signal, send a bug report to troubleshoot' etc. I sent the bug report to the developer team at the address provided but they couldn't really figure it out. I've tried deleting the app and reinstalling and all that to no avail.