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djaychela parent
I think you are completely reversed in how you're analysing the situation there, so I'd like you to expand on it - two questions:

1: How does WhatsApp give you ownership over your data that Signal doesnt?

2: How is Signal locking this data?

mmcnl
With WhatsApp I can backup and restore my messages. With Signal I cannot. I had to reset my iPhone 2 weeks ago because "system storage" was magically taking up 30GB of my 128GB iPhone. The iCloud backup restored everything perfectly, including my 15-year old WhatsApp history. However all my Signal messages were lost. And even worse, this is apparently by design. You can't backup your messages on an iOS device. It's my data, let me do it what I want. But that's not possible, the data can only exist in a proprietary compiled app.

WhatsApp is a lot better in this regard. I can backup my messages in multiple ways, and I can even export a conversation as a ZIP file straight from my iPhone.

djaychela OP
You definitely can back up your messages on signal.

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Ba...

mmcnl
Yes, and then it says...

"Messages are only stored on your devices. Without an existing message history accessible to you account transfers are not supported."

So that means: no backup and restore. A backup means: I can still access my messages after my phone ends up at the bottom of a lake.

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