You are absolutely right! Plus, getting a copy of all your contacts is and invasion of privacy for an app that is advocating for privacy and security. You cant even use a online voip phone number for this app. Its just such a turn off and I'm extremely disappointed with endorsements from people like Snowden ignoring such fundamental flaws.

> You cant even use a online voip phone number for this app.

That's incorrect. Signal works perfectly fine with any mobile, landline or VoIP number.

In fact, what you just claimed is wrong. The app waits for the phone to receive the text and there is no way to enter the verification code you receive in another voip app. This is on top of not being able to use this app on multiple devices.

Let the SMS verification expire and do a phone call verification.

Concerning multiple devices: I use Signal on my phone and on two desktops, works perfectly fine.

I have tried that and it didnt work but I'll give it a try one more time. Regarding multiple devices I mean multiple mobile devices (iOS and Android apps) and not through a browser and extension.

> Plus, getting a copy of all your contacts is and invasion of privacy for an app that is advocating for privacy and security.

You really need to do research into this before making this claim. The phone numbers are hashed (Or something like it) before being sent to the Signal servers.

Unfortunately, hashing provides no meaningful protection here. The preimage space (i.e. the set of all possible phone numbers) is just too small. See https://whispersystems.org/blog/contact-discovery/

Hm, Signal was never about anonymity, it's just an end-to-end encrypted chat and marketed as such.

I thought the system was supposed to provide encryption to known communication, not anonymity?

If that's the case, choosing to use an existing identity management system most people are part of is an excellent bootstrapping decision. Identity management is hard, and it's a fair problem to punt on if it's not your focus.

Encryption != anonymity. (In fact, it usually does the opposite, because encrypted messages stand out.)