No More Phone Number Swaps: Signal Messaging App Now Testing Usernames
Offering usernames will allow people to stop giving out their phone number —a sensitive piece of information— in order to connect with others on the messaging app.
Discussion on Signal's forum
I hope they look into how they are treating desktop clients as secondary devices with extra hassle. I'll try it if they address that.
Really? The only problem I've had on desktop is the very frequent updates
My main problem is that they wouldn't allow registration without having a smartphone first. At first I used signal-cli, which was inconvenient because there was no message history even. Now I use it in Waydroid, but why should one bother like that? And last time I tried it, the only way to bind a different device was by scanning a QR, which is not doable by Waydroid and iirc kinda hard in a VM.
That's great news - but more importantly... is there a way to backup my messages yet?
You can backup your messages on Android at least
Yeah that's Android only. If you drop your iPhone in a toilet, or if you need to factory reset it for any reason, everything in signal is gone. Even if you backup your device with the system backup feature, Signal sets a flag on all the files it writs to disk so they are excluded from all backups.
It's been the number one feature request on their iPhone community support channel for six years, and the official response is "We will probably never add that feature. We understand that's frustrating. Stop wasting our time by asking for it". Meanwhile every day someone, somewhere, loses all of their message history.
Another reason to switch to Signal if you don't already use it.
