I've assimilated most friends and all family very easily by educating them about the why. Not to mention if you're a parent explicitly banning sharing of photos with relatives via social media. People accept any small inconvenience or lack of feature quickly. But at this point I'm not following on the "so behind" comment. Care to elaborate?

On top of the myriad of missing features that for example Telegram has, the UI/UX for Signal (at least on the iOS app) is far behind. The app feels laggy and slow in comparison to Telegram or Messages (only other apps I use). It has giant text bubbles with large padding which IMO looks terribly ugly. Also, Telegram now has dark mode which I find very useful. And as mentioned, as silly as gif support is, it's a nice feature to have. If only Telegram used Signal's encryption by default.

On Android... Slow and laggy: not in the least, maybe this is IOS specific. Giant text bubbles: again on Android this is not a problem. Dark mode: Signal has had this for well over a year at this point. GIF support on Android has been there for almost a year as well.

The downside to Telegram? I don't trust it - so even if any of the above we're true they're all subjective and in my mind not worth compromise.

It's small things like gif/emoji support, @-ing people with their nickname/username sends them a dedicated notification on facebook messenger.

As much as I hate fb, messenger is a pretty decent application.

Signal has both gif and emoji support.

Does it? That's good, I haven't used it recently and it used to be pretty basic.

Their Android app at least is way too difficult to use.

I tried it with my friend some time ago and we just couldn't figure out in a reasonable amount of time how to add each other etc.

I consider both of us tech savvy and we have absolutely no trouble with other IM clients or more archaic stuff like IRC.

Difficult to use? I'm even more confused as there is literally nothing to do to "add" someone.

As I stated our entire family uses Signal across Android, IOS and desktop. That age range in our entire family group is 20s to 70s and I happen to be the only user who would be considered tech savvy.

Yes.

We didn't have each others phone numbers in our contacts.

Manually adding by phone number didn't work.

At this point we just gave up.

I use prepaids because I travel a lot so my mobile numbers are just throwaways.

I'd rather not give _all_ of my contacts to an app anyway.

So there really should be a way to manage contacts inside the Signal client and add people via screen names or email addresses.

Contact permission is only required to associate a name with a number. All you would need to do is type in a phone number and Signal would have worked.

I agree that it would be nice to have another root artifact for using signal (screen name, email, etc). The one frustrating piece about Signal is not being able to use it across mobile devices.

However it needs to be considered Signal was originally securing texts via TextSecure. It didn't, fundamentally, come up as a Slack or Telegram competitor. So that design decision may make it feel "behind" in comparison. However, I'll again state that I don't trust the others. There's no way you could force me to use FB Messenger or Google (product here). Most complaints here are fundamentally still UI/UX, not privacy. And useable privacy was the original intent. Signal has that in spades.

Thank you for the explanation.

I'm curious though; what happens if someone takes over your phone number? Eg. If the operator re-assigns a prepaid number?