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I hate to say it, but Signal. Signal has consistently been a pain to use for my moderately sized (<15) friend group chat and for 1-on-1 threads too. Messages

I hate to say it, but Signal. Signal has consistently been a pain to use for my moderately sized (<15) friend group chat and for 1-on-1 threads too. Messages sometimes don't arrive or arrive out of ordered and appear in the wrong order, scrolling up has random jumping behavior, opening the chat in iOS causes my audio to stop playing, there is explicitly no way to back up any of the chat, copying multiple messages is broken on desktop, search is super slow and search result previews have been corrupted for as long as I can remember, sharing links through the iOS share menu causes the app to behave super weird or just crash (my mom can't share links with me through Signal), you can't mute conversations on desktop (IIRC there have been two PRs implementing this feature in the last 2 years; both not pulled), mutual verification is so frustrating that I literally got yelled at when trying to explain it to my parents, I sometimes can't take pictures from within the app, when I can take pictures the viewfinder is half the resolution of the actual camera and everything looks blurry, the most recent app update causes a several second lag whenever I open the group chat, and I am throughly convinced that every issue I've mentioned is so low priority for the people running the show that they won't get fixed for a very long time. At least we have stickers now. Seriously though I believe in what Signal is doing and will probably continue to use and suggest the app. But it will hurt every time I do it.

mdaniel 6y ago
Have you reported that behavior, preferably with a debuglogs attachment in their GitHub tracker (or even the community forum)?
- dmurray 6y ago
  That would be a fair question if GP had complained about one specific but niche bug. It's disingenuous when he complains about multiple problems, at least some of which don't need a detailed bug report to discover, and specifically points to two PRs addressing one of his complaints which weren't merged.
nikisweeting 6y ago
Yes, I've given up trying to report these issues as it's been years since my initial reports and I've never seen the things I reported fixed. Signal desktop has been broken for almost a year for me "Error handling incoming message" is shown instead of each message. Theres no easy way to transfer messages between devices out-of-band when migrating to a new device (e.g. via encrypted binary backup blob). Messages constantly fail to arrive when they're sent, I often get them days after the person sent them. etc. I could go on...
- jcrawfordor 6y ago
  Signal desktop "works" for me in the sense that I usually receive messages, but probably about once a day one of my conversations suddenly displays somewhere from 20 to 70 lines of "Error handling incoming message." In talking to people this doesn't seem to be in response to any actual activity by the person on the other end. I feel like I've seen Signal problems appear and get fixed, like for a couple months the desktop client just wouldn't get half or so of the messages I received, and then one day it seemed fine again. But the long deluges of "Error handling incoming message" have been present, as far as I can tell, for the entire time that I have used Signal Desktop, perhaps 3 years. I guess I consider it a feature now. :/
vin047 6y ago
Can’t comment on the rest of your criticisms but you can (finally) backup chats to iCloud – features’ been present for the last few months.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  Edit: Please ignore this. Gated behind enabling two factor authentication for some reason. Which I'm never enabling because (A) it's impossible to turn back off and (B) you need a second Apple device for the second factor.
  - vin047 6y ago
    By two factor you’re referring to the Signal PIN? If so, A) is there any real reason that you’d need to turn it off? b) where does it say you require a second Apple device? Looking at the documentation though, I think I should retract my statement about Signal featuring iCloud backups... according to the docs 1) you can only transfer your data from one device to another and 2) the transferable data doesn’t include message history ️
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      I'm sorry, I thought you were talking about something completely different. Please ignore me.
jeanvalmarc 6y ago
Weird, as anecdotes go I've always thought the signal iOS app was very polished. I just checked three of those issues (camera access, shared links, search) on an iPhone 11 Pro Max and I wasn't able to reproduce. I suspect Signal may not have a QA group large enough to test on every phone/environment.
bzb3 6y ago
I admit I've never used signal for chatting (since no friends of mine have it) but just browsing the menus on Android and iOS left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Everything looked and felt very amateurish.
andrewkdinh 6y ago
Unfortunately, I’ve encountered many of the same issues, so I would recommend trying either Session (fork of Signal) [1] or Telegram (less secure but supports bots) [2] [1] https://getsession.org/ https://getsession.org/ [2] https://telegram.org/ https://telegram.org/
- AriaMinaei 6y ago
  Telegram is not just “less secure”. It’s not secure, period. Messages are stored on the server in plaintext. That’s what makes it orders of magnitude easier for them to implement all those features (large groups, channels, bots, etc).
kochthesecond 6y ago
I wont herald Signal as epitome og UX, but I have never seen most of these issues on iOS. My biggest complaint now is general slowness/sluggish and the fact that sometimes messages will still arrive out of order...

mdaniel 6y ago

Have you reported that behavior, preferably with a debuglogs attachment in their GitHub tracker (or even the community forum)?

dmurray 6y ago
That would be a fair question if GP had complained about one specific but niche bug. It's disingenuous when he complains about multiple problems, at least some of which don't need a detailed bug report to discover, and specifically points to two PRs addressing one of his complaints which weren't merged.

nikisweeting 6y ago

Yes, I've given up trying to report these issues as it's been years since my initial reports and I've never seen the things I reported fixed. Signal desktop has been broken for almost a year for me "Error handling incoming message" is shown instead of each message. Theres no easy way to transfer messages between devices out-of-band when migrating to a new device (e.g. via encrypted binary backup blob). Messages constantly fail to arrive when they're sent, I often get them days after the person sent them. etc. I could go on...

jcrawfordor 6y ago
Signal desktop "works" for me in the sense that I usually receive messages, but probably about once a day one of my conversations suddenly displays somewhere from 20 to 70 lines of "Error handling incoming message." In talking to people this doesn't seem to be in response to any actual activity by the person on the other end. I feel like I've seen Signal problems appear and get fixed, like for a couple months the desktop client just wouldn't get half or so of the messages I received, and then one day it seemed fine again. But the long deluges of "Error handling incoming message" have been present, as far as I can tell, for the entire time that I have used Signal Desktop, perhaps 3 years. I guess I consider it a feature now. :/

vin047 6y ago

Can’t comment on the rest of your criticisms but you can (finally) backup chats to iCloud – features’ been present for the last few months.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago
Edit: Please ignore this. Gated behind enabling two factor authentication for some reason. Which I'm never enabling because (A) it's impossible to turn back off and (B) you need a second Apple device for the second factor.
- vin047 6y ago
  By two factor you’re referring to the Signal PIN? If so, A) is there any real reason that you’d need to turn it off? b) where does it say you require a second Apple device? Looking at the documentation though, I think I should retract my statement about Signal featuring iCloud backups... according to the docs 1) you can only transfer your data from one device to another and 2) the transferable data doesn’t include message history ️
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    I'm sorry, I thought you were talking about something completely different. Please ignore me.

jeanvalmarc 6y ago

Weird, as anecdotes go I've always thought the signal iOS app was very polished. I just checked three of those issues (camera access, shared links, search) on an iPhone 11 Pro Max and I wasn't able to reproduce. I suspect Signal may not have a QA group large enough to test on every phone/environment.

bzb3 6y ago

I admit I've never used signal for chatting (since no friends of mine have it) but just browsing the menus on Android and iOS left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Everything looked and felt very amateurish.

andrewkdinh 6y ago

Unfortunately, I’ve encountered many of the same issues, so I would recommend trying either Session (fork of Signal) [1] or Telegram (less secure but supports bots) [2] [1] https://getsession.org/ https://getsession.org/ [2] https://telegram.org/ https://telegram.org/

AriaMinaei 6y ago
Telegram is not just “less secure”. It’s not secure, period. Messages are stored on the server in plaintext. That’s what makes it orders of magnitude easier for them to implement all those features (large groups, channels, bots, etc).

kochthesecond 6y ago

I wont herald Signal as epitome og UX, but I have never seen most of these issues on iOS. My biggest complaint now is general slowness/sluggish and the fact that sometimes messages will still arrive out of order...