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Signal is terrible. I use the app still, but it’s horribly buggy. The disappearing messages, a hallmark feature, is fundamentally broken in some way that I can’

by cwhiz 6y ago

Signal is terrible. I use the app still, but it’s horribly buggy. The disappearing messages, a hallmark feature, is fundamentally broken in some way that I can’t fully comprehend. Totally unreliable. Telegram is better in every way... except security.

brink 6y ago
And honestly the security is "good enough" for what I do, which is chat with friends and family on it.
Melting_Harps 6y ago
> Telegram is better in every way... except security. Which is why anyone bothers with these type apps in the first place, I'd like to say I'm dissapointed with the sentiment towards Signal, especially given how many here work in tech and understand how leaky these apps are designed to be and how hard development can be with a bare bones team (I experienced this first hand), but it never fails to bank on the notion that convenience will always win against security. regardless of expectation(s). Shrug... I like Signal more: and I think Telegram has many useless features that are not of any interest to me and only create needless bloat at the expense of security/privacy which is untenable, so while I hope some bugs get sorted in Signal as I run both I know why I side with Signal. I also understand that Signal runs on a thin donation based hacker budget and Moxie Marlinspike's podcast on Joe Rogan is a really cool watch that made it clear to me it's just a hacker project that scaled really well and is in need of funding and staff. I think Joe revealed himself to be a part of the money-centric Corpo class to Moxie's dismay when he refused to have that rock, paper, scissor match and you could see the disappointment in his eyes when Joe reacted almost offended at the idea that Moxie had anything worth his stake and could so quickly ascribe a dollar value to it. It reminded me that it's okay to care about the messenger (guest) that his podcast attracts rather than Joe or the brand he's created around himself, even though I agree with may of his points I struggle to think its nothing more than hook or gimmick most times. I don't really enjoy any of his standup and find a lot of his quips to be childish and immature reactions to what seem like feckless attention grabbing that can derail a guest's conversation or train of thought, much like uninvited fart jokes would amongst otherwise fascinating discussion and in depth arguments: then again he is a comedian first and foremost. With all that said, donate to help get those fixes on Signal sorted here [0]! 0: https://signal.org/donate/ https://signal.org/donate/
- IlliOnato 6y ago
  The problem is, even if I can be OK with bugs and problems with Signal UI, I cannot make my friends (or my 80-year-old Mom) be OK too. I personally know literally nobody who uses Signal (and a number of my friends are geeks:-)). Network effect, you know... :-(
  - godelski 6y ago
    I'm curious what bugs you've experienced? The only ones I've seen are on my friends' phones and they are because those phones have extremely aggressive battery optimizations that essentially block Signal from running in the background. Once it is turned off then things work smoothly. I imagine this is a network effect related issue and that apps like WhatsApp are getting special presets because their popularity.
    - machello13 6y ago
      Out of curiosity, are these friends running Android or iOS devices?
      - godelski 6y ago
        Android. Usually cheaper phones too.
  - 7v3x3n3sem9vv 6y ago
    Moved my grandma and some family over to it. Zero complaints after ~2 years of using it, and that's the best part about it. You don't need to be a "geek" to use it. Knowing everyone's data (at least in transit) is secure is pretty great.
  - spacemanmatt 6y ago
    My whole immediate family and parents are on Signal because of me. They prefer the call quality and access to desktop messaging. For my part, I find it fully amusing when a add another parent to my contacts, and they come up in Signal. <3
bigiain 6y ago
I'm curious as toileting what you see as "horribly buggy" and what brokenness you see in disappearing messages? I use Signal on iOS, and it's pretty much flawless. Extremely rare for me to even hear friends (many of which I communicate with using Signal) talking about problems, I vaguely recall having something go wrong a long time back, but can't even recall what it was now, only that it went away and started working properly fairly quickly/easily. (I disagree with Moxie's choice to use real phone numbers as an underlying hard requirements, and also with the choice to notify people when other people from their contact lists start using Signal - but I understand why he made those choices (to piggyback pre existing social graphs) and respect how he implanted it without needing to grab my contact list and have it vulnerable on their servers...)
- _hl_ 6y ago
  I use signal on Android and an iPad. On the iPad, sharing photos etc to signal doesn't work, it looks like the touch input coordinates get translated incorrectly with the input location of the send button being somewhere off the screen. On Android it's flawless.
- jethro_tell 6y ago
  Yeah, I'm fine with phone numbers. It's skating to the puck in the world we live(d) in when they built it out. The way they inform which users in your contacts have signal should be opt.
- cwhiz 6y ago
  The expiring messages fail in hilarious ways, all the time. Things like a few random messages from a prior day that are funny out of context all by themselves. If I open signal on my laptop sometimes it does this ridiculous “time lapse” where it strolls through messages one at a time. Sometimes all the messages just randomly wiggle on my screen. No idea why. I get that security verification thing all the time. All the time. Got a new phone late last year and it wouldn’t sync. Sticker packs will rearrange themselves at random. I could go on for ages. It is hilariously buggy.
op03 6y ago
Telegram is a business. Ads are coming this year. Signal is basically a non profit (so far). Thats all I need to know to make a choice given the track record of the robotic buffoon class that believe everything that momentarily scales up needs to be monetized asap to shit out one mindless billionaire here and there.
- jlelse 6y ago
  Ads are only coming to public channels were channel owners already publish ad messages. Signal is located in USA, so it's quite easy for NSA et al to pressure Signal to implement backdoors.
  - midasz 6y ago
    This comment is downvoted but as a person in the EU I can wholly agree with it. It's not that I never use american made/hosted products but it is definitely a consideration when making a choice. It's not that I don't like Americans, but your government and government agencies have verifiably proven that they don't care about the things I care about.
    - tick_tock_tick 6y ago
      I mean haven't we learned time after time, leak after leak the EU countries just shove data on their own citizens over to the USA? I feel like you comment is ignoring decades of history.
- dkirill 6y ago
  So do you think Telegram owners should subsidise its maintenance which costs tens or hundreds millions $ per year?
- AndriyKunitsyn 6y ago
  Telegram is not a business in a sense that it didn’t have any intelligible business model prior to this ads thing (which is not even live yet and this HN thread is the first time I heard about it). For more than 7 years since its launch, the slick app, servers that instantly synchronize non-secret chats, and basically unlimited file storage were provided for free to use. Really free, no ads, no paid services. If you think about the amount of money that it all cost, it’s _insane_. So it begs the question: are Telegram’s founders really that kind of people willing to donate hundreds of millions for people’s messaging privacy with an additional option of maybe returning some of these money 7 years later with ads, or Telegram is just an elaborate FSB honeypot? I guess we’ll never know for sure, but I’m more cautious about services that offer too much for free, not too little.
kelnos 6y ago
I keep hearing people day that Signal is horribly buggy, but I've never even experienced one bug in the (Android) app. I've used it moderately for 3-4 years now. (I haven't used the disappearing messages feature, though, so I can't speak to any possible bugs there.)

by cwhiz 6y ago

brink 6y ago

And honestly the security is "good enough" for what I do, which is chat with friends and family on it.

Melting_Harps 6y ago

> Telegram is better in every way... except security. Which is why anyone bothers with these type apps in the first place, I'd like to say I'm dissapointed with the sentiment towards Signal, especially given how many here work in tech and understand how leaky these apps are designed to be and how hard development can be with a bare bones team (I experienced this first hand), but it never fails to bank on the notion that convenience will always win against security. regardless of expectation(s). Shrug... I like Signal more: and I think Telegram has many useless features that are not of any interest to me and only create needless bloat at the expense of security/privacy which is untenable, so while I hope some bugs get sorted in Signal as I run both I know why I side with Signal. I also understand that Signal runs on a thin donation based hacker budget and Moxie Marlinspike's podcast on Joe Rogan is a really cool watch that made it clear to me it's just a hacker project that scaled really well and is in need of funding and staff. I think Joe revealed himself to be a part of the money-centric Corpo class to Moxie's dismay when he refused to have that rock, paper, scissor match and you could see the disappointment in his eyes when Joe reacted almost offended at the idea that Moxie had anything worth his stake and could so quickly ascribe a dollar value to it. It reminded me that it's okay to care about the messenger (guest) that his podcast attracts rather than Joe or the brand he's created around himself, even though I agree with may of his points I struggle to think its nothing more than hook or gimmick most times. I don't really enjoy any of his standup and find a lot of his quips to be childish and immature reactions to what seem like feckless attention grabbing that can derail a guest's conversation or train of thought, much like uninvited fart jokes would amongst otherwise fascinating discussion and in depth arguments: then again he is a comedian first and foremost. With all that said, donate to help get those fixes on Signal sorted here [0]! 0: https://signal.org/donate/ https://signal.org/donate/

IlliOnato 6y ago
The problem is, even if I can be OK with bugs and problems with Signal UI, I cannot make my friends (or my 80-year-old Mom) be OK too. I personally know literally nobody who uses Signal (and a number of my friends are geeks:-)). Network effect, you know... :-(
- godelski 6y ago
  I'm curious what bugs you've experienced? The only ones I've seen are on my friends' phones and they are because those phones have extremely aggressive battery optimizations that essentially block Signal from running in the background. Once it is turned off then things work smoothly. I imagine this is a network effect related issue and that apps like WhatsApp are getting special presets because their popularity.
  - machello13 6y ago
    Out of curiosity, are these friends running Android or iOS devices?
    - godelski 6y ago
      Android. Usually cheaper phones too.
- 7v3x3n3sem9vv 6y ago
  Moved my grandma and some family over to it. Zero complaints after ~2 years of using it, and that's the best part about it. You don't need to be a "geek" to use it. Knowing everyone's data (at least in transit) is secure is pretty great.
- spacemanmatt 6y ago
  My whole immediate family and parents are on Signal because of me. They prefer the call quality and access to desktop messaging. For my part, I find it fully amusing when a add another parent to my contacts, and they come up in Signal. <3

bigiain 6y ago

I'm curious as toileting what you see as "horribly buggy" and what brokenness you see in disappearing messages? I use Signal on iOS, and it's pretty much flawless. Extremely rare for me to even hear friends (many of which I communicate with using Signal) talking about problems, I vaguely recall having something go wrong a long time back, but can't even recall what it was now, only that it went away and started working properly fairly quickly/easily. (I disagree with Moxie's choice to use real phone numbers as an underlying hard requirements, and also with the choice to notify people when other people from their contact lists start using Signal - but I understand why he made those choices (to piggyback pre existing social graphs) and respect how he implanted it without needing to grab my contact list and have it vulnerable on their servers...)

_hl_ 6y ago
I use signal on Android and an iPad. On the iPad, sharing photos etc to signal doesn't work, it looks like the touch input coordinates get translated incorrectly with the input location of the send button being somewhere off the screen. On Android it's flawless.
jethro_tell 6y ago
Yeah, I'm fine with phone numbers. It's skating to the puck in the world we live(d) in when they built it out. The way they inform which users in your contacts have signal should be opt.
cwhiz 6y ago
The expiring messages fail in hilarious ways, all the time. Things like a few random messages from a prior day that are funny out of context all by themselves. If I open signal on my laptop sometimes it does this ridiculous “time lapse” where it strolls through messages one at a time. Sometimes all the messages just randomly wiggle on my screen. No idea why. I get that security verification thing all the time. All the time. Got a new phone late last year and it wouldn’t sync. Sticker packs will rearrange themselves at random. I could go on for ages. It is hilariously buggy.

op03 6y ago

Telegram is a business. Ads are coming this year. Signal is basically a non profit (so far). Thats all I need to know to make a choice given the track record of the robotic buffoon class that believe everything that momentarily scales up needs to be monetized asap to shit out one mindless billionaire here and there.

jlelse 6y ago
Ads are only coming to public channels were channel owners already publish ad messages. Signal is located in USA, so it's quite easy for NSA et al to pressure Signal to implement backdoors.
- midasz 6y ago
  This comment is downvoted but as a person in the EU I can wholly agree with it. It's not that I never use american made/hosted products but it is definitely a consideration when making a choice. It's not that I don't like Americans, but your government and government agencies have verifiably proven that they don't care about the things I care about.
  - tick_tock_tick 6y ago
    I mean haven't we learned time after time, leak after leak the EU countries just shove data on their own citizens over to the USA? I feel like you comment is ignoring decades of history.
dkirill 6y ago
So do you think Telegram owners should subsidise its maintenance which costs tens or hundreds millions $ per year?
AndriyKunitsyn 6y ago
Telegram is not a business in a sense that it didn’t have any intelligible business model prior to this ads thing (which is not even live yet and this HN thread is the first time I heard about it). For more than 7 years since its launch, the slick app, servers that instantly synchronize non-secret chats, and basically unlimited file storage were provided for free to use. Really free, no ads, no paid services. If you think about the amount of money that it all cost, it’s _insane_. So it begs the question: are Telegram’s founders really that kind of people willing to donate hundreds of millions for people’s messaging privacy with an additional option of maybe returning some of these money 7 years later with ads, or Telegram is just an elaborate FSB honeypot? I guess we’ll never know for sure, but I’m more cautious about services that offer too much for free, not too little.

kelnos 6y ago

I keep hearing people day that Signal is horribly buggy, but I've never even experienced one bug in the (Android) app. I've used it moderately for 3-4 years now. (I haven't used the disappearing messages feature, though, so I can't speak to any possible bugs there.)