[0] They also use it as a means to help with the social graph. Building a social graph is pretty difficult and you don't want to do it completely from scratch. This is the same reason social media wants you to import your phone contacts and email contacts. The difference is that the "side benefit" to that is that they get data harvesting rather than security.
| > We're unable to provide a specific timeline.
> I'm not sure if it's true, but it feels a bit suspect.
Honestly, the best solution to this would have been to buy a cheap phone or something like a VOIP number. I don't know your situation but it seems like it is not that easy to go a year without a phone number. I definitely think Signal should do better in this but I don't think the result is unreasonable. It brings up an edge case they probably didn't consider but having a phone number "abandoned" for a year sounds like it is a very low probability situation. Being reliant on phone numbers they also have to garbage collect, right? Because a phone number is not a unique identification to a person for their life. So while I do agree your situation sucks and is very frustrating I hope you can recognize that it is (from my best guess) a very unlikely situation. That the phone number is being sat on but unused and that the squatting is happening by a legitimate person rather than a scammer.
They can do better, for sure, but I don't think I'd judge a platform harshly by the results of an extremely odd outlier situation.
I had to live without a phone for about a year. First my phone broke and I couldn't repair it or buy a new one, then I lost my phone number due to unpaid fees. I kept using the Linux Electron app, updating it as often as possible.
I saw this message on the Linux app after a while:
> Open Signal on your phone to keep your account active
I couldn't open Signal on my phone or install a new Android Signal app even on an Android VM because I wouldn't be able to get the new app verified without access to the phone number I registered with.
I wrote an email to the support team and got this reply:
> Using Signal for iOS or Android as your primary device in order to link and use Signal for Desktop was always a requirement as a QR code must be scanned to link a device. The primary device must remain active during this usage. There is no way around this.
> For more information and recovery steps please see our faq page here: https://support.signal.org/hc/articles/8997185514138-Re-conn...
> Otherwise your account will be deactivated, and you will need to reinstall and register for Signal using an up-to-date version of the application.
And as to when that deactivation would happen, they replied:
> We're unable to provide a specific timeline. We recommend registering for a Signal account on a smartphone and linking your Desktop to that smartphone within the next few weeks.
From their link it seems like there's an actual technical reason behind this. I'm not sure if it's true, but it feels a bit suspect.
So, after a couple of months of seeing this message in the Linux app, I woke up with a deactivated Signal account. I asked some of my Signal contacts to use Matrix until I get a new phone number. It seems much better in this regard - it's not mobile first and it doesn't require ongoing access to a phone number. The basic features are all there, even if there a few minor annoyances and bugs in the clients here and there.