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In the Netherlands, was trying to promote Signal. I switched phones and lost all my history. Now I’m fairly careful with these things, and make backups, but ev
by ghusto 1y ago
In the Netherlands, was trying to promote Signal.
I switched phones and lost all my history. Now I’m fairly careful with these things, and make backups, but even I wasn’t able to get it back. Couldn’t recommend it to anyone since.
There’s a line between being secure and being useful, and they’re slightly unbalanced in Signal.
- Funes- 1y agoYou should've made sure of how Signal works with regards to chat history before you removed the app from the old phone.
- egypturnash 1y ago"the iphone 4's antenna isn't a bad design, you're just holding it wrong" - steve jobs
- jobigoud 1y agoTo be fair Whatsapp works the same, if you are not careful when changing phone you will lose your history. That's because they don't actually store your messages on their servers, they are just synchronized between devices.
- ghusto 1y agoThat's not the case though, at least for me? I had set Whatsapp to backup to Google Drive, and when I switched to an iPhone it did some automagix and all my stuff was there (and then backed up to iCloud!).
- Funes- 1y ago"{straw man}" - most HN users.
- nsagent 1y agoI have Signal on my phone and laptop. For some reason my laptop desynced from the phone, so my chat history now has a missing block of message history (that exists on the phone). I did nothing obvious to cause that desync. My guess is that my phone updated the Signal app, and I didn't update it on the laptop in lockstep. That's not a great UX, especially since there is no notification that this might happen.
- tomsmeding 1y agoDesync happens simply after a month of not using the PC client. Yes, it's that short.
- nsagent 1y agoOh wow. Good to know! Thanks for the heads up.
- philipwhiuk 1y agoHow does it handle phone theft?
- vinay427 1y agoMessage history still can’t be backed up on iOS, and also can’t be moved between Android and iOS in either direction AFAIK. There are far more gaps here than just imperfect users, which is often a UX problem as others have noted.
- jeroenhd 1y agoHad the same happen with WhatsApp. Turns out you get one chance to get the local file backup right or you're screwed.
- account-5 1y agoJust out of interest, why are you keeping your chat history? What for? All my chats are set to burn after 6 months as standard but most are shorter than this.
- fsflover 1y agoIf you, after 20 years, can process all your chat history with a (locally run!) AI, you may find a lot of interesting things about yourself and your friends.
- fwn 1y agoIt is much more likely that someone else will process all my chat history at a border checkpoint or somewhere similar and find out a lot of interesting things about me and my friends.
- fsflover 1y agoDon't keep it all on your phone and unencrypted.
- fwn 1y ago> Don't keep it all on your phone and unencrypted. I've had a 90-day message retention policy set in WhatsApp ever since the feature became available. Not because I doubt my ability to manage secure backups, but because I don't expect my contacts to act equally careful. I wish Signal supported a 90-day retention period. Four weeks (Signal max) is often too short for my contacts, which leads people to disable it altogether. I also find it frustrating that Signal only applies your message retention policy to the conversation when you initiate the conversation, not when others do. As a result, more of my conversations end up being ephemeral on WhatsApp than on Signal, which feels a bit ironic.
- rhubarbtree 1y agoYep, this is why Signal hasn’t gained great traction I think. It’s just not intuitive (and I don’t understand why it’s necessary). You could always have this level of security as an option for journalists etc without ruining the UX of all users.