> Signal will LOSE ALL YOUR DATA if your phone (iOS) dies
I'm seeing this often on HN.
While it's a pain, it is not impractical. Most people don't care about this. They don't come back in time in the conversations.
If you really care about this. Like, you care that much. Just pair Signal Desktop and make a regular backup of your profile. All your messages and attachments are there. If your Signal ever gets borked, you can always put your machine offline and open Signal-Desktop on this backed-up folder. You can also open the db with sqlcipher and access all you data with it, the scheme is not too complicated to grasp.
Ask me how I know.
And since Signal is open source, you can always read its code in case of doubt. Someone could build a convenient UI to display or export the messages and attachments in a user-friendly format. This can happen after the backup is done and Signal breaks.
All this said, people may expect privacy when using Signal, so make sure your backups are well protected. This is the hard part, actually.
I think you are confirming my point. "without consideration for practical requirements"
I can tell you that my daughter cared about this. She cried for a long time when her phone just suddenly died (while charging, no reason, total loss) and her Signal history wasn't restored. I couldn't explain why Signal was the only app that didn't get backed up.
I can tell you that my friend's parents cared about this. The photos of their grandkids were suddenly gone. My fried couldn't explain the reason for this, all the other data did get backed up.
And sure, between us geeks we will keep saying "well ACTUALLY they SHOULD HAVE kept the photos elsewhere", and we'll say "this is good because it makes us more secure" and we'll say "most people don't care about this". We'll all "well actually" ourselves, while patting ourselves on the backs.
> I think you are confirming my point. "without consideration for practical requirements"
I don't think I am. A practical answer is: "Install Signal Desktop".
And I still think we are few who care about chat history. I'm sure there are people who care. I'm such a person.
It's also only a missing feature for iOS user, so that makes it: "of the few people who care about chat history, the minority of people who use iOS are only covered by installing Signal Desktop". A pain for these users, but they have at least two workable solutions. Using Android or installing Signal Desktop somewhere. (yes, caveat, you need to do that before losing your phone)
By yes, I agree that it would be better to have the backup feature.
> I don't think I am. A practical answer is: "Install Signal Desktop".
IMHO this is not always practical. Signal Desktop can easily get out of sync if you change versions and the only proper way to fix it is to clear all the local data, including your chat/contact database. AFAIK, the only source of truth is your phone.
> A pain for these users, but they have at least two workable solutions. Using Android or installing Signal Desktop somewhere. (yes, caveat, you need to do that before losing your phone)
"These users" don't even have a desktop computer :-)
"These users" will just use WhatsApp. It works it doesn't lose data, and everyone around them uses it anyway.
I'm seeing this often on HN.
While it's a pain, it is not impractical. Most people don't care about this. They don't come back in time in the conversations.
If you really care about this. Like, you care that much. Just pair Signal Desktop and make a regular backup of your profile. All your messages and attachments are there. If your Signal ever gets borked, you can always put your machine offline and open Signal-Desktop on this backed-up folder. You can also open the db with sqlcipher and access all you data with it, the scheme is not too complicated to grasp.
Ask me how I know.
And since Signal is open source, you can always read its code in case of doubt. Someone could build a convenient UI to display or export the messages and attachments in a user-friendly format. This can happen after the backup is done and Signal breaks.
All this said, people may expect privacy when using Signal, so make sure your backups are well protected. This is the hard part, actually.