I was saying that maybe, Signal did not want to push their users to trust the Apple backup by default.
Signal is a nonprofit foundation, it's not like they are trying to squeeze their users with their own secure backup.
But there is also nothing (except for some secret reason they refuse to elaborate) that prevents them from allowing users to actively chose to trust Apple. Except for their own internal reasons, that is.
It's the user's data after all. The user should be able to control and access it. Sensible defaults makes sense, but the outright refusal to explain why they prevent it is very odd. I have a decent "IT hygiene", I keep my operating system updated with patches, I don't download pirated/cracked software, I have hardware-enabled encryption on my storage devices, I have a good password for my local account, I encrypt my local iPhone backups.
Why should I not be allowed to include my Signal chats in those local backups? Signal has never answered that question, which is very strange.
Same as I said above: you are asking for a new feature. Their default is those 20 lines that "protect" the files. If they want to offer you a way to still enable it, someone has to do it. Someone has to work on the UX of it, maybe there is a need to explain to the users why it is less secure when this feature is enabled, and then there is work to do with the criticisms that will come next time someone shoots themselves in the foot because of this feature (because "Signal shouldn't have allowed that in the first place").
I know, you will say "it's not much". But everybody asks for their "small feature", and projects generally can't do everything that everybody asks them to do (and usually for free).
I find it totally valid if they choose that they won't offer features to lower their security, and instead they will work on features having sufficiently good security. Which in this case is the secure backup.
The gap in understanding here is that Signal already trusts iOS by providing an app. It trusts it even more by providing notifications (with sender and content) that go through Apple’s systems. It integrates with CallKit to work with the Phone app. Putting iCloud alone in a separate bucket doesn’t make sense. They could’ve done this same backup with a 64 character recovery key and stored the data in iCloud. Signal made an intentional choice not to allow backups on iOS.
One can only hope that the point about supporting other backup endpoints/storage gets implemented sooner rather than having to wait several more years.
Again: they could have, but it would have taken time and resources. The complaint here is not that Signal doesn't want to allow backups: they are just announcing a secure backup feature.
The complaint is that Signal did not do it earlier, and instead decided to prevent what they considered an insufficient solution.
> Putting iCloud alone in a separate bucket doesn’t make sense.
Of course it makes sense. What you say is akin to saying "end to end encryption makes no sense, because if you have to trust iOS anyway, you may as well trust the server".
Because I trust Android and run Signal there does not mean that I want it to auto-upload my messages to Google Drive. I don't see what makes it so hard to understand.
> One can only hope that the point about supporting other backup endpoints/storage gets implemented sooner rather than having to wait several more years.
Yes, I hope that too. On top of hoping, one could donate, to slightly contribute to paying the developers that work on it.
