Does anyone have recommendations for a good default SMS app on Android?
rcs support works well, the emoji reactions are good. the web ui for it is pretty alright. I use the quick responses and scheduled send from time to time. and it cleans up my 2fa codes automatically.
Also, it now sends emoji reactions over sms which is a nice little graceful degredation from sms.
Really convenient to be able to respond to texts without having to take out my phone.
These are reasonable issues and concerns, so I don't follow why you would question all of the other decisions they make.
They could just show the literal word "SMS" in the send button.
I think that would be more obvious than wha tthey do now (button being grey instead of blue with a minimally changed lock symbol [1]).
[1]: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007318911#an...
I guess that's just a pipe dream though.
https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/10/29/it-looks-like-pulse...
QKsms is open source but abandoned more than a year, so I guess Simple SMS at Fdroid should be ok, it's from the guy behind Simple Gallery
Personally like TextraSMS. Has a free ad-supported version, but I paid to remove ads when it was on sale several years ago (maybe $1).
4.4 stars. I believe it's $3 or $5 to remove ads now.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.textra
Also surprised me the other day when a friend used an iOS reaction, and it applied it correctly on my end.
> Added support for Reactions (also known as Tapbacks) received from iOS Apple devices.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft....
I've used other tools in the Simple suite and I love them.
Although I like using F-Droid, this app is also available on the regular Play Store as well.
Do I? Not being snarky here, I just really don't understand why I need WhatsApp.
No one I know uses WhatsApp to communicate with me. No business I deal with uses WhatsApp to communicate with me.
In fact, I'm not sure what value WhatsApp provides as I've never used it.
I'd appreciate it if you'd elucidate on your point. Mostly because if you're correct, I'm obviously missing something extremely important.
Almost everyone I message with defaults to WhatsApp, or even insists on it. A few also have Signal or Facebook Messenger or iMessage.
SMS is only for notifications and such. Even some businesses default to WhatsApp.
There was just an article that said that 88% of teens have an iPhone. That means that almost all of their communication is encrypted.
I mean in context of signal we don't just talk about some form of transport encryption but e2e
I'm mainly concerned about SMS spoofing and mass surveillance. iMessage protects against that. The only way the government can read your messages is by serving Apple with a warrant to obtain your iCloud backup.
If I had a lower risk tolerance, I would disable iCloud backups to improve my security.
I would argue that if you are relevant enough apple and sms are both equally easy to get for them.
If we talk here about signal, I don't think the alternative should be iMessage but telegram etc.
In terms of encrypted messaging, the popularity in my friend group is:
1. iMessage
2. Signal
3. WhatsApp (only for talking to non-US people)
4. Matrix
> but instead the Signal backup just keeps getting larger and larger...
One begets the other.
> I'd love to be able to move it off the device
If you don't want infinite history, set a conversation length limit. It is in the storage settings.
If you want to backup messages on iOS go complain here[0]. For Android, you already have this ability.
[0]https://community.signalusers.org/t/ios-backup-keeping-messa...
My ideal solution would be to export any message older than a month to an archive on my NAS, ideally in a format that the app could search on request. Keep my history, keep the on-device space nice and small.
I take advantage of the Android backup feature, and the backup syncs over to my NAS via SyncThing automatically, but that's only useful for restoring a brand new phone up to the latest state.
I'm confused at what is stopping you from doing this?
> ideally in a format that the app could search on request.
Are you not able to import these backups into the desktop client? IIRC it is just reading from a file structure. I don't see why a small script couldn't resolve this. Obviously you wouldn't be able to search on your phone, but you said you didn't want that data on your phone anyways. If you did want to search on your phone from your computer's storage, I think you're asking way too much of them (and in danger of asking them to store data for you, which they never will do). But this is hacker news, and I don't see why you can't hack together that tool in a weekend. Probably just a few beers on a Friday is enough for it tbh.
As far as I know the backup is encrypted.
> Are you not able to import these backups into the desktop client?
No, the desktop client is not standalone, and ONLY syncs with the a phone to get content. Moreover, if you don't use the client for a period (2-3 weeks in my experience?) it de-syncs that desktop client. Re-connecting that desktop to your phone will only sync messages starting as-of the connection, so there's no way to get the desktop app to pull your whole history. (This is another gripe I have about their sacrifice of actual usability for security that only helps a few very specific use-cases.)
You're probably rigth about hacking something together. Someone has created a library [0] allegedly for decoding the backup files. Friday night is D&D night though, so I haven't had the chance. :-)
I agree that there aren't really any great solutions. But the alternative is that Signal stores your data. I think this would make a lot of users very upset and compromise part of Signal's core mission.
This is one area where, and I know what you're going to say, but Matrix actually does really well. My data, on my server, in my house, not tied to any specific single device I own but distributed across several and backed up in an encrypted manner.
But you've got me thinking about the data export option. Saturday is coming. Hmm...
I'm actually a fan of Matrix. I just see Matrix and Signal as different tools. You're probably aware of it, but if not, there is a Matrix bridge for Signal.
> But you've got me thinking about the data export option. Saturday is coming. Hmm...
Hey, I'm really hoping it works. Let me know how it goes!
'I'd take a decent "export my chats" option' is a very simple statement. There is no way within Signal to just export a whole conversation to a file.
You can on Android and Desktop. On Mac see ~/Library/Application\ Support/Signal for your data. The only issue is with iOS which I agree is an issue, but does not seem to be the parent's issue.
That's why I wrote 'within Signal.'
As a simple example of how this could get messy, suppose I wanted to back up all my Signal messages, install a different operating system, install Signal there, and load up my old messages. I do have the IT skills to just find the database file and move it manually, but I'm only confident about that because I know its an SQLite database, where the keys are stored etc.
It's still an IT problem I would prefer not to have, vs the simple option of 'Do you want to export this conversation, with all the security implications Y/N' or 'Import this previously archived conversation?'
If this "accessible searchable archive" is stored "off of the device", how exactly would the device access and search the archive? Facebook can store your Facebook Chat history on their servers no problem, but E2E encryption makes this much more complicated for Signal!
It's not impossible, Apple does it with iMessage, although that was actually a pretty recent addition despite all of Apple's resources!
Exactly. I'm saying you can't have both low storage and full chat history. These two cannot work without a storage server. I have suggested a method of using the desktop client as the storage server but I agree that there is no great solution.
> It's not impossible, Apple does it with iMessage
That does come with significant tradeoffs though. Now we have to trust Apple that they haven't taken our keys and that they still aren't handing over this data. It is a tricky situation.
Meanwhile if my counterparty and I have communications in Signal that we want to preserve at scale, it's impossible to do so. A simple example would be that I have years' worth of conversations with my wife that I can't easily back up any where. We could export every picture and video by hand and screenshot or copy the text of every message, but that would be extremely time-consuming and tedious.
That's the basic problem. The data is already only semi-secure in that it's subject to exfiltration without consent. It's just inconvenient. And where parties do consent, it's very inconvenient because it's many many hours of work; in the end, it's just more security theater.
This is one of the problems with Signal having a bit of confusion about what exactly it's use-case is. There are plenty of cases where locking down the ability to save/view/export messages are valuable, and Signal provides tools to be able to do that. Making that the mandatory case though means that it's harder to adopt as a general-purpose communication platform.
The need to decide if the goal is still to get as many people off of SMS/facebook-messenger as possible, or if the goal is to provide extreme security to dissidents and protestors, or if they're going to spend the effort to be able to do both effectively and let you choose which conversations or messages get which level of protection.
It's like when Signal asks you to put in your PIN, but it's the same PIN you use to unlock your phone. There's a different Signal PIN, but that functions as a check for when you install Signal on a new device. Your regular PIN is just a repeat of your phone PIN, and thus adds exactly zero security.
I do like Signal and I think they have done a lot of good. I do think they have a lot of valid criticism against them but also I think a lot of people aren't providing useful criticism (it is a shame that's happening here, on a forum that should be filled with tech experts). People also aren't realistic. A 25 person team working at a non-profit aren't going to have the same development capacity as a 250 person team.
[0] (maybe go to the bottom) https://community.signalusers.org/t/usernames-in-signal/9157
These are purely my observations of the discourse around Signal and should not be taken as a universal truth. Only my subjective reality.
I'm not aware of any major vulnerabilities in Matrix (but I'm not following) closely. I'm also not aware of any in Signal, which I know is frequently audited. There is an SGX attack, but it is often blown out of proportion (highly technical attack that requires an unlocked phone to be in the physical hands of the attacker).
Telegram gets a lot of shit because they prop themselves up as a privacy app but aren't. The default is that things are not encrypted. They use a proprietary encryption scheme. They store user data on their servers. These are not the marks of a privacy app.
I explained how imo Signal has burned the goodwill of a some of its early adopters. Meaning not recommending it to my friends and buying my mom an iPhone. Now there's an argument to be made that it's not very smart to dismiss the app, but that's what happened.
I'd be very surprised if they manage to salvage its image at this point
Because the in-app option to clear them all does not free the space.
Your only way of saving things is to either manually save every picture and video, or manually highlight and copy the text in your conversations. The latter defeats any security arguments (other than of inconvenience) but also throws away useful information like timestamps of messages.
My Signal database takes up many GB on my phone, and it's constantly complaining about running out of space. Much of this is the years-long record of conversations with my wife. I'd like to back these up, but I can't. Are you gonna tell me that I shouldn't be using a secure messaging app to communicate with my own family members?
Not “delete all my chats/delete an entire thread.”
Settings > Data and storage > Manage storage > Keep messages
then choose from the listed options
Those two groups of contacts then got mixed making it much harder to see who's on Signal and who isn't.
Back then I thought that was deliberate. It would be surprising to me, if the desire to avoid that self-inflicted confusion would have contributed to the decision to discontinue SMS support.
I couldn't care less about this.
I can't understand who and why anyone cares about SMS these day, besides receiving government emergency notifications.
Regardless of that, you can still always receive SMS for the 3 outdated services that still use it.
(As my friend used to ironically say: "Is your grandma so senile that she can't type `configure; make; make install`?")
I don't even open the SMS program if I get a code. I type it from the notification area. I certainly don't have to answer to it.
That's not true at all. I assume that besides Signal you use WhatsApp, though?
And yes, WhatsApp is prevalent here.
I merely describe the current status in Germany.
I've onboarded friends and family, too, ensuring them it should be set as their default messaging app and that it _just works_. Unfortunately, people in the general population seem to have pretty much zero tolerance for any friction whatsoever. If they have to use 2 apps, they'll just end up communicating with me in the clear using their "default SMS" app on their phone. That's what this is going to result it...a reduction in overall message security due to people defaulting to what's easier...which is to _not_ have to remember which app to use for which "send a message" purpose. Fuck.
I understand the argument about people in markets where SMS is expensive getting screwed sometimes when they don't realize they're sending a message over SMS. However could that not be fairly trivially solved for with some UI notification or app setting that warns you about this and allows the warning to be perm-disabled if the user doesn't care!?
I think the real reason here is this desire to transition the service into supporting usernames, which is a topic that's been discussed before (and is explicitly mentioned in the post). Right now the service is tied to your phone number. After this change I suspect it will not be or not need to be.
This is very, very unfortunate for those of us who've convinced a ton of non-technical friends and family to use TextSecure->Signal over the years...
However, if "dropping support for SMS messaging also frees up our capacity to build new features (yes, like usernames)", I think it is something I would not miss.
Besides, I agree with them on the point that SMS leak metadata.
SMS does leak metadata but guess what, that leakage is going to continue because people aren't going to just cut off their SMS-only-using friends and relatives. Now they'll be leaking Metadata from an even less secure app, so the user is in no way better off.
Exactly right. In fact, I will be doing this too. Right now, I use Signal as my default messaging app, and messages go via Signal to people who've registered their phone number with Signal without me having to do anything to effect that. When Signal stops working as an SMS client, I'm not going to look up which of my contacts wants to use Signal and which can only use SMS - I'm just going to use my default SMS app for everything except the couple of group chats which are on Signal already. Messages which would have been opportunistically encrypted are now going to go out plaintext, because the friction to find out who uses Signal and who doesn't is too high.
This already happens with iOS, because the Signal app doesn't work as a default SMS client. People who use Signal and Android reliably send me messages over Signal, whereas my contacts who use Signal and iOS mostly send messages over SMS unless they're directly replying to something I've sent them over Signal.
And even if I wanted to do the work to send everything over Signal to those contacts, how am I supposed to remember exactly which of my kid's friend's parents use Signal and which don't? Fuck it, the juice isn't worth the squeeze, everything is going over SMS.
I'll just have to hope that Google figures out a way integrate a seamless, opportunistic end-to-end encryption protocol into the default Android messaging client, since Signal is deliberately dropping the ball here.
Gutted. I will end up switching to a different provider. Absolutely don't know if I'll be able to convince family and friends to switch again.
I don't really see Signal as a useful tool for my uses after this change. I liked the SMS and encrypted messages in one place thing even though some friends rarely check it. For those friends I send SMS through Signal. There are certainly issues with group chats and media but nothing bad enough to consider using two apps. Now I have to look for a new tool, and figure out what to do with certain archive conversations I'd like to retain.
>Now we will get neither
Correct me if I'm wrong, but:
- If you and your counterparty are both using Signal, nothing about the security of your communication changes.
- If your counterparty was not using Signal, your messages were over SMS/MMS and therefore not encrypted in the first place, and so once again, nothing about the security of your communication changes.
Are you seeing something I'm not?
I have (iOS-using) friends I have convinced to register their numbers with Signal...but they never check Signal. They do check SMS.
This actually drove me away from using Signal for SMS on Android, because I couldn't send those friends SMS messages through Signal. They could only go out as Signal messages, and my friends never checked them.
Fortunately, I only have a handful of friends in this category, and virtually everyone else I talk to does use and check Signal, but it's a usability problem both ways.
This is what Google's RCS implementation is, to my understanding.
Although the end-to-end bit might be a bit on the squishy "kinda-maybe-sorta" side, rather than Signal's enforcing of it.
There's an overwhelming mountain of evidence that says that ends poorly.
As far as instant messaging services are concerned, I have let go my earthly tether; entered the void; empty and become wind.
This is actually a complaint of mine. I've regularly had Signal send secure messages to people who have tried Signal in the past, but have since uninstalled the app (or in iOS's case, they 'offload' apps when you don't use them frequently which silences notifications). This results in me thinking my messages are sent only to find out that they'll never read them. I then get frustrated and have to go back and re-send the message via SMS.
Here's how I've convinced my iPhone friends. I tell them if they actually want to send pictures and videos to me that aren't potato quality they can either switch to an Android, email me, or use Signal. At this point Signal is more like a cross platform iMessage. This tends to move people over because Apple's walled garden makes group chats infeasible with mixed devices.
We don't seem to have this problem so bad in the UK/Europe. Most people I know have WhatsApp and/or Telegram, and FB messenger, and Signal (in my friend circles); all alongside SMS. I have very few iMessage groups, and use it mostly for 1to1 SMS with people I don't know well.
(The only reason I use signal is to talk to my girlfriend. The only reason we use it is early in our relationship I was going through a phase where I adopted annoying privacy tools. I wanted to abandon it, but after years of using it she's developed positive emotional associations between our relationship and signal, so for non-technical reasons she likes to keep using it just to talk to me)
It took me a long time to find this comment. The number of SMS messages I never received was ridiculous. I still use the app all the time, but would never use the integrated SMS messages ever again.
Their underlying reasoning is correct. SMS sucks, really really bad. They're a secure communications channel. People see signal and think they're secure. Signal has no business supporting SMS. The on boarding has reached critical mass, the neyworke effect is here. If you're smart you'll abandon SMS altogether forever and just tell people to reach you some other way, not ditch the actual, over the internet encrypted channel.
My elderly mother pushes one button to text me and everyone else anything else is a show stopper, End of story.
The people you want to send you SMS like companies that need your phone number can't do SMS, and the ones you'd rather message you elsewhere sometimes insist on SMS. It's annoying.
They will no doubt stop checking their signal messages from me same as iPhone users often do and I will have to change to insecure messages for all my messaging.
This will break their trust in my recommendation, as much as it will break my trust in signal.
I get the reasoning over this, but I think they fail to realise that interoperability is the most important feature. I will have to stop donating to signal over this change, it will be useless to me...
I'm dreading the day where I lose or break my iPhone and thus lose my Signal chat history. I've been using Signal for years, but this makes me still prefer other messengers when starting new chats, even if Telegram (for example) is not e2e encrypted.
(Unfortunately, I've long overcome the "I don't want another app" thing and just installed all the messaging apps. Although I kind of want to look into setting up Matrix bridges and merging everything into Element.)
As an android user myself, I much prefer having SMS built in because I use the search feature often to look back through all my SMS/Signal chats. I also regularly forward an SMS message to a Signal user, or vice versa. I'm already starting to feel like those iOS users who told me "I don't want another app"...
Signal seems to be trying to move further and further from "my preferred way to chat with people" and closer to the chat equivalent of "that protonmail account I only log in to when I need secrecy".
I obviously love having security on messages in transit, but I also like being able to keep my message history around and search my conversations for something that happened a year ago. It seems like Signal is on a trajectory to turn everything into disappearing messages. Are they the "safe for activists" communication app, or the "let's try to make as many as possible safer by default" app? Feels like they don't know.
And on top of it all the messaging is just frustrating. "we've taken away an incredibly useful and heavily used feature so we have development resource to better implement shitcoins and such" is such an irritating defense of the decision that I disabled my monthly donation.