My Signal experience: ex gf in college asks what app I’m using to text. Tell her it’s Signal, E2EE, messages are only stored on her phone and nobody else can read them. She says cool and downloads the app. Four months later her phone breaks.
“Hey subjectsigma I got my new phone today. Where are all my messages?”
“… Do you have your old phone? That’s the only place they are.”
“No? Last time I got a new phone WhatsApp moved my messages over, and WA is E2EE so I thought it worked the same way.”
“Nope if you don’t have a backup or your old phone they’re gone. Sorry.”
“This is bullshit. Why does anyone use Signal. I can’t believe it deleted all my messages. I’m uninstalling it. Etc etc.”
It only works for WhatsApp if you have Backup to Google activated[1]. I once tried to work with backuped files from my old phone and it didn't work. (Older tutorials indicated that it once worked, though.)
[1] There was a time WhatsApp had a nag-screen if you hadn't Backup to Google activated. So I guess most people would have eventually caved.
That nag-screen is still there, it pops up roughly every three months for me (though not on my primary phone, Whatsapp won't get anywhere near that one).
I don’t understand why people need old messages so badly. If they disappeared it would be fine with me. I set my iPhone messages to auto delete after a few months to save space and it works fine. A text is ephemeral, if I need to save something I use email.
I thought they recorded the metadata - who talks to who and when. (For the uninitiated, that is as valuable or more valuable than the message contents.)
It isn't a viewpoint. It's a fact. I'm using signal for almost a decade now and only managed to get a dozen or so people to use it in any capacity. Most keep using whatsapp as their primary method of communication anyway.
Maybe you should? It might help improve your reading comprehension. The person you're responding to said that most normal people don't care enough to switch to a vastly less popular app, which is obviously true.
