I wish I could keep recommending Signal to my friends. For an app as famous as theirs, the applications and tooling don’t feel mature at all. Their MacOS desktop app insists on updating multiple times a day. Indeed, every time I have it open, it starts bugging me for updates. I can’t have conversations anymore because the app insists on restarting signal. These hourly demands for updates has caused me to ignore them entirely - devaluing the core value add in the process. Was the latest 5pm update a security update that I desperately need? Well, I don’t know and at this point no longer care because I’d like to use the app to talk to people instead.

The app also doesn’t work if you have multiple phones or a tablet. I can have signal either on my iPad or my phone. Not both. Why? I don’t know. But Signal insists that it is more secure.

It’s a problem with these security focused applications. They often sacrifice usability on the altar of best case security; making applications that are hard to use for anyone but the most ardent of folks.

I want to love this app, but their bad UX makes it really really hard.

I've been switching people to Matrix recently, mainly because they have a solution for losing your chat history (you don't, at least not with the new key backup system) and there's a lot of other features like bridging and federation. Matrix is far from perfect at the moment but I feel that it will end up being a much more complete solution than Signal (the new seven-word key verification system is really cool and much better than how verification works for Signal).

> Not both. Why? I don’t know. But Signal insists that it is more secure.

It's because the provisioning support is only implemented in the JavaScript "SDK" (in scare-quotes because we all know Moxie is very hostile to users using apps other than the one they publish).

Not only that, there were PRs that implemented the core functionality required and Moxie effectively said that the author was too inexperienced for the patch to even be worth reviewing[1]. There are third-party signal clients[2] which use that patch to allow for you to create "virtual devices" in your shell and thus (in theory) script signal chats or create Matrix bridges (I hope to do the latter at some point).

[1]: https://github.com/signalapp/libsignal-service-java/pull/21 [2]: https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli