> “It’s not designed for you” is a reasonable response to you’re building a niche product for a niche audience. But it’s important to note, that is explicitly not Signal’s goal. Signal is advertising itself as an encryption platform for everyone.

Aren’t people with no phone increasingly niche?

I’m not trying to be combative but I would argue attempting to build your app for every single use case is literally a million niches which would require so many concessions and that is the opposite of Signal’s approach. Signal has no interest in building for odd and strange use cases and instead choose the most likely use case and build specifically and securely for that use case.

> "I’d like for Signal to reach billions of users. I know what it takes to do that. I did that," says Acton. "I’d love to have it happen in the next five years or less."

When you look at a platform like Slack, it's fine for the devs to say that they don't care about certain users, because Slack is not a universal chat app. Slack has a very specific market: business users. Other users are nice, but not really required, and it's fine for them to go use something else. Signal on the other hand doesn't really have a specific market; they've always described their target market as just 'everyone'.

This is extra-tricky for a chat app because network effects come into play. An app that I can use by myself without relying on anyone else doesn't need to be particularly inclusive: 90% support (or even lower) is probably good enough. But if Signal decides that it's not for 10% (or even 1%) of the people in my social group, then there's a very real chance we might all abandon it. Supporting 99% is excluding not just 1% of your users, but also everyone directly connected to those 1% of users.

And honestly, I would push back on the idea that smartphones are going to reach even 99% saturation any time soon. There's an very consistent demographic of people who don't have phones: kids who are given hand-me-down tablets or laptops. I know a nontrivial number of parents who are waiting longer to give their kids phone numbers, but they still want their kids to be able to message friends and family members. I don't think in 5 years we'll be at the point where every single 5-10 year old has a smartphone.

This is exactly the situation I'm in, where I'm trying to figure out how to allow younger family members to communicate with me, with their parents, with their friends. Even if I set them up with phone numbers, I'm asking them to break contact with anyone else in their social network that doesn't have a phone.

And as the OP states, it isn't just the people who avoid mobile phones who won't switch to tethered protocols, but people who want to message the people who avoid mobile phones. And a high proportion of us have elderly relatives, and we email or Skype or Facebook them.

Note that the polish concerns I have aren't just for Android though -- some of my contacts are only on desktop, and Riot's desktop app also has issues with contrast, resource usage, notifications/updates, searching in encrypted rooms, key synchronization. Even on the backend, setting up closed communities is just really confusing and buggy. I had to abandon a community and recreate it half way through because it bugged out trying to remove an empty E2E room and then couldn't add/remove/edit any rooms after that point -- and this was on the main, public Matrix homeserver.

It's getting better. A year ago, I don't think I could have used Matrix/Riot to the extent I'm using it now. I don't want to be too critical, because it's improving at a genuinely impressive rate. I'm still betting on Matrix being the future-proof choice for me to make for the majority of my chat/community infrastructure.

It just feels like it's still early in development, clients like RiotX are still in beta -- which makes it tricky when I'm trying to roll it out in "production" to very young and very nontechnical users.

On E2E, search is now implemented, as is totally revamped verification and cross signing and fixed key sync, as per https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/matrix/

Communities are a trainwreck but next up to get fixed in the coming months.

Thanks for sticking with it; we’re catching up as fast as we can...

And I just installed RiotX and it shows reactions correctly!

Hopefully comments like this aren't too exhausting. There's two sides of it, one of which is all the stuff to complain about. But the other side is that stuff like Pantaliamon is really cool -- it means if I want to build a custom chat client with weird features, I can have decent encryption for free without having to worry that I'm doing something horribly insecure. The bridges are still getting polished, but similarly, they're also amazing because bridges allow me to make very forward-facing, future-proof decisions about where I want to host communities and I know that I won't have to abandon existing members that are on platforms like Discord.

The core project is just really exciting, it addresses all of these problems that I've had in the back of my head for a long time. There's this wonderful feeling where you're constantly annoyed about something and feel like there's nothing you can do about it, and then one day you find out that not only does someone else feel the same way, but they're actually fixing it. And even more than that, just finding out that it is actually possible for those problems to be fixed; that there's going to be a point in my future where that happens.

So there's admittedly a lot of impatience there, but it's coming from a very hopeful place, and I hope it isn't discouraging.

Is this to work around the Android background task auto-killing?

Note that you can hide the notification by long-pressing it.