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from the well-signal-just-pissed-in-my-cornflakes dept.
In a blog post today (12 October 2022), the Signal team announced that they will be removing SMS/MMS send/receive functionality from the Signal Android app.
For many years, the Signal app on Android has supported sending and receiving plaintext SMS and MMS messages in addition to Signal messages. SMS and MMS are standardized communication protocols that allow mobile devices to send and transmit messages, and most people picking up their phone to text or share memes don't really think about them. [...] we continued supporting the sending and receiving of plaintext SMS messages via the Signal interface on Android. We did this because we knew that Signal would be easier for people to use if it could serve as a homebase for most of the messages they were sending or receiving, without having to convince the people they wanted to talk to to switch to Signal first. But this came with a tradeoff: it meant that some messages sent and received via the Signal interface on Android were not protected by Signal's strong privacy guarantees.We have now reached the point where SMS support no longer makes sense. For those of you interested, we walk through our reasoning in more detail below.
In order to enable a more streamlined Signal experience, we are starting to phase out SMS support from the Android app. You will have several months to transition away from SMS in Signal, to export your SMS messages to another app, and to let the people you talk to know that they might want to switch to Signal, or find another channel if not. [...] This change will only affect you if you use Signal as your default SMS app on Android. Meaning that you use Signal on Android to receive and send both Signal and SMS messages from within the Signal interface.
[...] The most important reason for us to remove SMS support from Android is that plaintext SMS messages are inherently insecure. They leak sensitive metadata and place your data in the hands of telecommunications companies. With privacy and security at the heart of what we do, letting a deeply insecure messaging protocol have a place in the Signal interface is inconsistent with our values and with what people expect when they open Signal. [...] We are focused on building secure, intuitive, reliable, and pleasant ways to connect with each other without surveillance, tracking, or targeting. Dropping support for SMS messaging also frees up our capacity to build new features (yes, like usernames) that will ensure Signal is fresh and relevant into the future. After much discussion, we determined that we can no longer continue to invest in accommodating SMS in the Android app while also dedicating the resources we need to make Signal the best messenger out there.
Do many (any?) Soylentils use Signal? What's your use case?
This change will break my primary use case (as the app for SMS and secure messaging on my phone) and will confuse the hell out of the dozens of non-technical folks I've converted to Signal over the years.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by sweettea on Friday October 14 2022, @04:02PM (2 children)
For me, Signal's entire usecase is that I can use it for all synchronous communications. SMS with most people, and when they switch to Signal, that automagically adds security to our conversation. But my big selling point for other people has been that it works just fine as an SMS client so they don't need to change their ways (beyond using Signal). Now, it'll just joining the list of walled gardens I check every week or so, like Discord and Matrix and Zulip, and I'll probably use Facebook Messenger for communication instead (with end-to-end encrypted chats when I would have used Signal before).
The saddest.
(Score: 5, Informative) by bmimatt on Friday October 14 2022, @05:26PM
Zuck is the man in the middle of your end-to-end in FB messenger. At least with Signal no one is snooping/mining/selling your data.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Sjolfr on Friday October 14 2022, @09:50PM
Your use case is not really about security because you are willing to ditch it for convenience. I think it's a good example of what may happen to the user base of signal though; lots of people will stop using it.
Yet, the move to drop regular SMS is a smart one by the signal team, at least IMHO. Their focus is security ... nail that message home. I check signal just as often as regular SMS because I don't expect one app to do it all. Which is very sad when you think about it.
In reality ALL messaging should be encrypted; SMS, MMS, email, IRC, etc. It's not a technical problem to accomplish this, it's a problem with companies wanting to mine the data for virtually free. I hope that signal ports it's app for use by Librem5 and other free, non-corp owned, phone manufacturers.