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The Signal team has always been open about the reason why they reject third-party clients: they claim that XMPP adoption was hindered by the inability of a user
by Mediterraneo10 6y ago
The Signal team has always been open about the reason why they reject third-party clients: they claim that XMPP adoption was hindered by the inability of a user’s software to know if the software on the other end supports the same feature set. XMPP had grown into a large set of features that some clients supported and others did not.
If Signal introduces a new feature, it knows that all users’ devices will support that feature, because its own software is the only game in town.
- ComputerGuru 6y agoBackwards compatibility against a previous set of features isn't easy but it's certainly not impossible and graceful degradation is a thing.
- walrus01 6y agoYou can always define backwards compatibility that only goes to a certain lowest common denominator feature set, and no lower. For instance I have a number of httpd that support TLS1.2+ and specifically disallow SSLv3, TLS1.0 and TLS1.1. The population of browser user agents that don't understand TLS1.2 is infinitesimal at this point.
- Paul-ish 6y agoIt isn't clear if graceful degradation is possible in a security app.
- ComputerGuru 6y agoCases where a client is completely broken are never the problem: users will be forced to switch to a different client. It sucks, but it's no worse than the current state of affairs. A security-mandated change in protocol/behavior would fairly fall under that category.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 6y agoThere have been tons of problems with that concept and TLS
- upofadown 6y agoIronically OMEMO for XMPP ended up being based on the Signal protocol.