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My guess is it's because it still feels a little rough around the edges as a chat application, which shows its open source origin (most open source projects lac
by mtgx 9y ago
My guess is it's because it still feels a little rough around the edges as a chat application, which shows its open source origin (most open source projects lack sufficient funding, etc)
Every 6 months or so I try pushing it onto "normal" people, and then I realize something is not working quite right. A while ago it was the Signal desktop app that wasn't importing contacts. I also have an issue now where I can't delete/hide a contact from the contacts list in there, even though it doesn't appear on the mobile app.
Speaking of which, I wonder what's their plan for the desktop app, as I believe Google has deprecated those types of apps in Chrome and I don't think it will work anymore in about a year. I've also used WhatsApp more because the native desktop app seems much more reliable.
Then it was messages arriving too slow (waiting many minutes to be "pushed" as a notification, which is pretty bad for a chat application). I think it still has this issue.
The video call still doesn't seem to work as well as the WhatsApp video call. It seems buggy and the connection is not of the same quality. WhatsApp video calls are more resilient than Google's Duo, too, which switches to audio often.
Even the ringtone the video call uses by default is worse than the one WhatsApp uses. I know it seems like a little thing to complain about, and if it was just this one little thing, I probably wouldn't complain about it. But it's all of these together that still stop me from pressing others too much to use it.
I would also like to complain about OWS/Moxie's inability to "build a community". Yes, many cryptographers and security people like the app for the good tech it uses and such, but the organization is not actively trying to build a community or care much for it from what I've noticed. I think Durov and Telegram work on that much more, and it's important. In fact, it may be one of the primary reasons why Telegram is so much more popular.
OWS/Moxie barely even post on Twitter anymore. They release a blog post every few months. It's hard to "get excited" about the app or want to follow them closely too much when they do this.
I think this is also the reason why they're losing/have already lost an opportunity to become the default secure messenger in the Democratic party to Wickr, which is much more active on outreach and stuff like that, even though Clinton's team used Signal in the campaign and they got a lot of good press for it. But they're now blowing all of that away because of their "silence" and non-marketing focus.
- zimpenfish 9y ago> My guess is it's because it still feels a little rough around the edges as a chat application When I tried it in 2015, it frequently broke, lost chats, lost history, etc. Security means nothing if the secure app itself is unusable.
- ideologysec 9y agoTracking the changes to the Signal Desktop Application on the WhisperSystems github, it looks like they're moving to an Electron app (like Slack). Thumbs down from me for code bloat, but it'll be nice to have a separate app and not be required to keep Chrome open all the time. Video calling on Signal works a little differently than WhatsApp to my understanding; it's decentralized and so the quality is lower, but the Signal server manages to keep from collecting any data, and backdoors can't be added (it just sets up the call and then bows out).
- eadmund 9y ago> Thumbs down from me for code bloat, but it'll be nice to have a separate app and not be required to keep Chrome open all the time. In the sense of having a separate instance of Chrome, dedicated to Signal, open all the time:-) It's probably still the best, quickest cross-platform solution — which is just sad. Although I wonder how bad the current Java compatibility story is: if they used Java maybe they could reuse some of their Android code.