I have been regular, everyday user of Signal for over four years. Myself and my friends use it as our primary communication method. In the last two or so years, it has been what I can only describe as "complete and utter shite".
When I send an image to a friend, it can take hours to send a half-megabyte image despite my internet connection being fine. When this happens, none of the consequent messages send. If I close my phone, messages stop sending. So I must violate my privacy by keeping my phone open for sometimes, hours at a time, just to send a stupid little image.
Despite the fact that sending an image will cause consequent messages to be delayed by hours, messages have started, in the last 6 to 12 months, to be sent out of order. This can be disasterous, as a fair number of my friends have depression and other problems, which means (as an example) my "haha" responses can sometimes be seen to be responding to /other/ messages (And yes, I can use the quote function, but sometimes that interrupts the flow of messaging).
This, plus stupid little problems like, backups not being tested to be forward-compatible (something that is ridiculously easy to test, but that they could not be bothered to do), mean that relying on signal is a fool's game at this point.
Signal has some serious problems and I'm glad other people out there are talking about this, too.
I ended up stopping using Signal (except for a few holdouts) because of the message delivery problems; it caused way too many social problems.
I mostly use Telegram now, and it's been great. The worst part about it is everyone saying "but it's russian spyware!!" whenever I suggest it. It isn't, folks, and I'm well apprised of the theoretical vulnerabilities. They're just a compromise I'm more than happy to make, when the alternative is a chat tool that fails at chatting even 5% of the time.
I've had the same issues and a similar experience after using Signal the past few years. It took so much effort to convince my closest friends to install Signal and the single most frustrating thing it would do is force us back to SMS because sending of encrypted messages would continuously fail.
What really sucks is that there's no hope of me convincing them to switch again if a better messenger were to come along.
Using Signal for years also. I don't have any of these problems except during group messages. Group messages for whatever reason are inconsistent, don't send, or sometimes break apart into single messages and then join again into the group. There was one group message between me and my two cousins that broke for hours. I didn't get any texts or couldn't send anything and signal was constantly trying to download images.
I'm a heavy signal user for about 5 years, never had any of the issues you're describing. Regularly sending 3-4 minute videos it all goes through fine. Exported/imported my chat history 4 times now when changing phones, never had an issue. Never seen messages to be sent out of order either. I really wonder if we're using the same app!
This is amusing. I am not "Signal bashing", I am talking about problems I (and many other people) have experienced.
The fact that you have it good, and have never had problems, does not contradict the fact that I and other people have had problems. Talking about these problems is not 'Signal bashing', just like talking about traffic problems is not 'car-bashing'.
1:1 chats have worked fairly well for me, but groups have been utter chaos with messages being delivered only to random subsets of the group and things like that.
I don't think that post is accurate, perhaps because (based on the RSS feed) it is from 2015.
> Telegram’s source code is not an SDK or a library. [--] But to be fair, the messaging app doesn’t state they have an SDK. All they did is put their source code in the open.
