- Can't move from iOS to Android (and vice versa) without losing your chat history because backups aren't compatible.
- Can't send media with their creation timestamps. All photos shared with family/friends via Signal can't be used to build a photo album without manually sorting pictures.
- Can't automatically save pictures to Picture Roll, Google Drive, Dropbox for integration with your other pictures.
- Only one desktop/computer can be linked to Signal desktop.
- Many useful chat widgets such as polls or real-time location are missing.
- No transcription of audio messages (WhatsApp only has a few languages) and lot of issues with audio messages such as iOS users not being able to play audio messages created on Android but not with Signal.
I don't think they should strive to reach feature parity with Telegram or asian messengers, but why can't they try to at least match WhatsApp in core functionality?
I get the privacy focus, but most of us are not dissidents in foreign countries or journalists who could be killed over their picture metadata. Give us a mode for normal users.
I regret moving my family over to Signal because before I used to have all their pictures as part of my photo stream. Since switching I need to manually save pictures but they don't have the correct timestamps then.
Absolutely not the case. I've got 2 at the moment, right now. Had 4 running when I had 4 computers I was using.
>Can't move from iOS to Android (and vice versa) without losing your chat history because backups aren't compatible.
Yeah, this is a real pain which I wish they had solved years ago. For personal reasons my daughter has her old android phone with our Signal messages on it, as it's the only way she can keep them as far as we're aware at the moment. It was a pain when I moved from Android to iOS for this reason.
>Can't automatically save pictures to Picture Roll, Google Drive, Dropbox for integration with your other pictures.
I would think this is by design. Signal is designed to be private.
>why can't they try to at least match WhatsApp in core functionality
I would imagine 'funding' and 'privacy' cover a lot of it.
Ideally, we’d agree universally: chats saved for one month (the context we can actually remember from a conversation), emails for five years (for administrative control), and conversations never recorded. However, we’ve been manipulated into needing exactly the opposite. Worse yet, we think it’s possible to maintain privacy while transcribing and archiving everything in our minds, making it public.
For many people their messenger has replaced the photo album. Its where you have all your life memories such as baby photos, first school day, etc. Forcing those to be deleted just sounds dystopian.
Companies have taught us to do otherwise for their profit, don’t forget to back up that.
Even if I would agree with you that people keep too many digital pictures, if someone wants to do it I would also defend their right, because I do not think it is that negative that is worth fighting against.
PS: to put it to the extreme shouldn't we spend any time on hacker news "but spent more time with their families, sharing stories and souvenirs."?...
You definitely need uncontrollable entities all over the world for that data to exist. Somehow you’re doing what some of those entities allow you to do, and some want you to do. That’s my point.
I think I understand why they do that (if you send someone a message on Signal, they try very hard to make it difficult for anyone but the recipient to read it, whether that's by intercepting traffic or reading data stored on your device, or rummaging through your backups) but it does make it a bit of a pain.