> The only tangible evolution of signal in the past year has been new cat and dog stickers that no one asked for. Oh come on, that's just not true (and I don't

> The only tangible evolution of signal in the past year has been new cat and dog stickers that no one asked for. Oh come on, that's just not true (and I don't mean by that that the most common complaint in every thread about Signal was that lack of sticker support was hindering people's efforts of getting their friends to use Signal, although that is also true). Things the Signal team worked on in the past year include group management without revealing information about the group (including its existence) to the server (https://signal.org/blog/signal-private-group-system/ https://signal.org/blog/signal-private-group-system/) and secure value recovery (https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/ https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/), which lays the groundwork for abandoning phone numbers as identifiers and secure cloud backups of messaging history. Just because these haven't been rolled out yet doesn't mean nothing is happening. Signal also added iPad support in the past year, which is something many people have wished for for a long time. A little bit further back, Sealed Sender (https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/ https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/) means that the server no longer needs to know who is sending a message (previously, it did to prevent spoofing and for rate limiting and abuse protection). Private contact discovery (https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/ https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/) allows matching of address books without revealing them to the server. Until quite recently, there were fewer than a handful of people working on Signal, but with the funding they have now, they've ramped up hiring and have started working on features like the above. It just takes some time. Also, Signal works without Google Play Services installed.