That's my point. I hate systems that require a phone number, as they usually mean that I have a substandard experience when I'm not on my phone and I can't sign my children up so that we have a general chat tool.
The only option ends up being massively over the top team style chats like Rocketchat, Mattermost, Discord, or Slack. So we end up back on Hangouts.
A bit shit for general family conversation.
[Edit] If they do allow signing up/in with a username then I'll probably be all over it. That would be awesome news.
I'm unsure if they will allow signups without phone numbers, but they don't store that information. Signal doesn't have it. [0][1] It is very possible they go around this though.
[0] https://signal.org/blog/looking-back-as-the-world-moves-forw...
[1] (time-stamped to only the important part) https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=894&v=Nj3YFprqAr8&feature=yo...
> they usually mean that I have a substandard experience when I'm not on my phone
> I can't sign my children up so that we have a general chat tool.
This isn't a privacy thing, this is a general tool that is fundimentally broken if I'm not on my phone.
I'm not always on my phone, and my kids don't have phone numbers.
They are unusable.
In my experience the desktop client is slow, buggy, and takes eons to start up. There's also no web version, making it awkward to use on computers other than your own.
I would be more willing to switch over to Signal if it wasn't so lacking in this regard.
No. Threema does not require a phone number (it uses one for the registration verification, but your account is not linked to that number).