They could put out an official statement on their web site about the matter that everyone can reference. "We intend to do this and here's the way we intend for it to work, and we expect it to take roughly 1 year ±6 months to implement. Here's the GitHub issue to track our progress."

Or they could post something on this thread on their official forums which has 18.7k views, 731 likes, and 384 replies: https://whispersystems.discoursehosting.net/t/ios-backup-kee...

This isn't rocket science; plenty of other organizations have ways of disseminating information to millions of people so that everyone knows what's up. I don't expect the White House Press Secretary to speak to me personally, but I do expect her to answer questions from reporters and make official statements about matters that huge numbers of people care about.

Either way, there needs to be some acknowledgment that this is not just a nice-to-have feature request, but that things are actively, terribly broken for certain users at the moment. They should not be working on aesthetic features like Stickers when something is so fundamentally broken. They should be acknowledging their users' pain, apologizing for having screwed up, and emphasizing that they appreciate the priority of this matter.

And until the issue is fixed, it would also take approximately 0 effort for them to warn users about this prior to installing or using the app, so that users can opt out in the meantime if they want control over their data.

>> 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

Thanks, that's a small step in the right direction which I hadn't seen. Still, it comes after years of being almost entirely mum on the subject, and "think[ing] about it a lot" isn't terribly great comfort to users who have been stuck in the lurch for literally years. How long are they going to be thinking about it? When do they start taking action? What does "privacy preserving" mean?