FWIW, my experience with Signal sadly confirms this. There’s a critical issue for years with the iOS app that there’s no way to backup or otherwise extract your chat logs (contrary to the usual behavior of iOS apps which automatically backup to your computer or iCloud), no warning of this when you first install, and almost no communication from developers on the subject for years despite huge numbers of complaints.

They hide behind the shield of being volunteers to justify not addressing or communicating about any user concerns, but they also want to play in the big leagues and have hundreds of millions of users who would otherwise be using other chat platforms.

> They hide behind the shield of being volunteers to justify not addressing or communicating about any user concerns

I agree this lacking feature is an important matter, but the Signal team have explained why the iOS app doesn't have a backup facility. Saying there's "no communication" is not true.

I'm not sure what the purpose of saying "hiding behind the shield of being volunteers" is. Are you inferring they're lying and that they simply don't care? Perhaps that they're raking in their paycheck whilst leaving the volunteers to martyr themselves against complaining users? Neither are helpful accusations.

Not no communication. Almost no communication. They have occasionally given explanations for why the feature is difficult to implement, and occasionally given explanations for why they think the feature shouldn’t exist at all even if it could be implemented (despite it existing for Android users). They have never clearly communicated what their intent is: Will they implement it? If so, when? And they have never clearly warned users of this sharp edge in advance of installing software which will hurt them if they care about not losing control over their own data.

By “hiding behind the shield of being volunteers”, I’m not implying anything about them lying about anything. I’m saying that they have explicitly, on multiple occasions, indicated that it’s bad form for users to feel entitled to certain dealbreaker issues being fixed, or even to feel entitled to communication about whether those issues will be fixed and on what schedule. And their reason for believing users are not entitled to anything from them is that they are just volunteers.

But where are they supposed to do the more communication? Surely they can't go reading and responding to every thread online that discusses Signal - there's just so many of them. In GitHub, too, issues often get duplicated or drowned in comments.

(Although I strongly disagree that they should be saying when they are going to implement it, as that's only setting themselves up for failure: unless it's almost ready, there's just too many things that can influence your roadmap.)

For what it's worth, they did provide another update on this one month ago saying that they do intend to implement it and thus think it can and should be, I think: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/kt91qk/signal_p...

> Thanks, we know this is a big deal and think about it a lot. We're working on ways to do it that would be privacy preserving, and in the mean time we've got the p2p device transfer you mention.

> But where are they supposed to do the more communication? Surely they can't go reading and responding to every thread online that discusses Signal - there's just so many of them.

They could put out an official statement on their web site about the matter that everyone can reference. "We intend to do this and here's the way we intend for it to work, and we expect it to take roughly 1 year ±6 months to implement. Here's the GitHub issue to track our progress."

Or they could post something on this thread on their official forums which has 18.7k views, 731 likes, and 384 replies: https://whispersystems.discoursehosting.net/t/ios-backup-kee...

This isn't rocket science; plenty of other organizations have ways of disseminating information to millions of people so that everyone knows what's up. I don't expect the White House Press Secretary to speak to me personally, but I do expect her to answer questions from reporters and make official statements about matters that huge numbers of people care about.

Either way, there needs to be some acknowledgment that this is not just a nice-to-have feature request, but that things are actively, terribly broken for certain users at the moment. They should not be working on aesthetic features like Stickers when something is so fundamentally broken. They should be acknowledging their users' pain, apologizing for having screwed up, and emphasizing that they appreciate the priority of this matter.

And until the issue is fixed, it would also take approximately 0 effort for them to warn users about this prior to installing or using the app, so that users can opt out in the meantime if they want control over their data.

>> Thanks, we know this is a big deal and think about it a lot. We're working on ways to do it that would be privacy preserving

Thanks, that's a small step in the right direction which I hadn't seen. Still, it comes after years of being almost entirely mum on the subject, and "think[ing] about it a lot" isn't terribly great comfort to users who have been stuck in the lurch for literally years. How long are they going to be thinking about it? When do they start taking action? What does "privacy preserving" mean?

> This isn't rocket science; plenty of other organizations have ways of disseminating information to millions of people so that everyone knows what's up.

Is that so? Do people know when WhatsApp is going to add feature x or address bug y?

> Thanks, that's a small step in the right direction which I hadn't seen. Still, it comes after years of being almost entirely mum on the subject

Does it? Or is it possible that you also hadn't seen all earlier instances where they made statements like that? It's just that that sounds very possible to me, given how many different issues there are that affect many different people.

(In addition to the other questions you mention seem unanswerable, unless it really is there one and only number one priority, which seems unlikely given e.g. events like the outage not too long ago.)

As they've claimed, this is a security vulnerability, instead of a software bug. If they really think this is a vulnerability, send to Signal's email: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007320791-Ho...

But even then, there's really no point in trolling the PR section of Github besides griefing. Just fork the thing and make a better Signal if you believe so harshly that there's no hope with Moxie at the helm.

Even if one thought that this would help the people that need help on this matter, you can't really fork signal as it is today, I think. Or at least whatever it is that signal is using on its servers because that is very unlikely to be the software in its public repo, which hasn't been updated in almost a year. And even for a while before then, most of the commits were version bumps with no visible changes on the code.

If anything, that's another problem with signal that's not getting enough attention (that I've seen): It claims to be open source, but as of now, it doesn't seem to be. At least not in the servers.

Not only that, but Signal has indicated that third-party clients are not welcome to use their servers. So even if you contented yourself with forking the client, you can't use it.

https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...

Just fork it isn't useful if they believe this is putting people in danger right now.