Signal at the moment requires a phone number. People don't like that e.g. for privacy reasons. Signal said they'll eventually support usernames, this is a signal that there's progress.

Signal will still require a phone number for registration. You will be able to hide your phone number and use a username instead.

I hope I can finally put signal on my second phone with the same account.

You can with new molly.im update

Crap, I wish I could use it without a phone number altogether.

I was hoping this would be the case. It's the problem with telegram too, you can show a username but you must still have a phone number.

Matrix does this really well though. So I use that a lot. Unfortunately not many people do.

Session [0] is an up and coming, open source E2EE messenger that doesn't rely on phone numbers (and doesn't require them). It also routes messages through Tor. It's fast and reliable, and I always get notifications on time.

It has some disadvantages though, depending on how you use it. Your ID is a 66 character long hexadecimal hash instead of a classic username. Another disadvantage I've found is the paltry 10 MB attachment limit - trying to share a short video clip I made on my phone required several re-encodes to dip below the limit. Even some still photos will hit that limit, depending on complexity. So not very good for sharing media, but great for texting, in my experience.

[0]: https://getsession.org/

That hash thing alone pretty much guarantees it will remain a geek thing unfortunately :(

> Crap, I wish I could use it without a phone number altogether.

Me too, I wonder if it's a technical difficulty/limitation or just a business decision.

I parsed that title so wrong, I thought Username Integration Test was a fault they just commited and were caught red handed.

Based on that integration test a phone number is still required.