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0 pointsDavidSJ5y ago0 comments

FWIW, my experience with Signal sadly confirms this. There’s a critical issue for years with the iOS app that there’s no way to backup or otherwise extract your chat logs (contrary to the usual behavior of iOS apps which automatically backup to your computer or iCloud), no warning of this when you first install, and almost no communication from developers on the subject for years despite huge numbers of complaints.

They hide behind the shield of being volunteers to justify not addressing or communicating about any user concerns, but they also want to play in the big leagues and have hundreds of millions of users who would otherwise be using other chat platforms.

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proactivesvcs5y ago· 2 in thread

> They hide behind the shield of being volunteers to justify not addressing or communicating about any user concerns

I agree this lacking feature is an important matter, but the Signal team have explained why the iOS app doesn't have a backup facility. Saying there's "no communication" is not true.

I'm not sure what the purpose of saying "hiding behind the shield of being volunteers" is. Are you inferring they're lying and that they simply don't care? Perhaps that they're raking in their paycheck whilst leaving the volunteers to martyr themselves against complaining users? Neither are helpful accusations.

DavidSJOP5y ago

Not no communication. Almost no communication. They have occasionally given explanations for why the feature is difficult to implement, and occasionally given explanations for why they think the feature shouldn’t exist at all even if it could be implemented (despite it existing for Android users). They have never clearly communicated what their intent is: Will they implement it? If so, when? And they have never clearly warned users of this sharp edge in advance of installing software which will hurt them if they care about not losing control over their own data.

By “hiding behind the shield of being volunteers”, I’m not implying anything about them lying about anything. I’m saying that they have explicitly, on multiple occasions, indicated that it’s bad form for users to feel entitled to certain dealbreaker issues being fixed, or even to feel entitled to communication about whether those issues will be fixed and on what schedule. And their reason for believing users are not entitled to anything from them is that they are just volunteers.

Vinnl5y ago

But where are they supposed to do the more communication? Surely they can't go reading and responding to every thread online that discusses Signal - there's just so many of them. In GitHub, too, issues often get duplicated or drowned in comments.

(Although I strongly disagree that they should be saying when they are going to implement it, as that's only setting themselves up for failure: unless it's almost ready, there's just too many things that can influence your roadmap.)

For what it's worth, they did provide another update on this one month ago saying that they do intend to implement it and thus think it can and should be, I think: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/kt91qk/signal_p...

> Thanks, we know this is a big deal and think about it a lot. We're working on ways to do it that would be privacy preserving, and in the mean time we've got the p2p device transfer you mention.

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