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It does suck incredibly badly. I don't understand why either, why can't I just initiate a transfer from a different instance, get notified on the old phone and
by simias 8y ago
It does suck incredibly badly. I don't understand why either, why can't I just initiate a transfer from a different instance, get notified on the old phone and initiate an encrypted transfer between the two? Instead I have to write down a ridiculously long number and transfer the backup by myself. Last time I couldn't get it to work on my first try so I gave up and restarted from scratch.
- duskwuff 8y agoGiven that these are mobile phones, a more sensible way of transferring a secret between devices would be to display a QR code on the old device and scan it on the new one. You could even make this secure against local eavesdroppers by encrypting the data in the QR code with a key provided to the devices by the server.
- outloudvi 8y agoThat's how Keybase cross-sign a new device: By scanning a QR Code with the old dvice. That seems to be simple and safe enough.
- sdenton4 8y agoHaving actually built such functionality for a different android app, I can assure you that 'just transfer the file' is extremely difficult. Problems include Android API skew across versions, different OEM android implementations of those skewed APIs, and more! For transferring backups from one phone to the other, I used Xender. Probably best to just transfer with an sd card, though.
- simias 8y agoI can totally believe that, but Signal already has most of the infrastructure in place to sync messages and files across devices in a secure manner. It doesn't seem to me that it should be too difficult to repurpose it to do an initial sync between two devices.