Signal - Private Messenger 12+

My new default communication app

The front end of Signal, and its user interface, is absolutely wonderful. It is as smooth and pleasant to use as iMessage for sure. Knowing that my messages and calls are end to end encrypted brings a great peace of mind to one’s day to day conversations. But it’s not just pretty and functional on the front end, the technical details and workings of the back end as revealed in Signal’s documentation really shows, in my humble opinion, that this app does what it’s makers say it does, and that the developers do not make false or exaggerated claims about their work.

Most importantly, again in my humble opinion, it shows that the beautiful and functional front end, the technically impressive back end, and the resulting full stack of this app was developed by engineers that really care for, and have passion for, the privacy and security of their end users as well as privacy and security overall. It is a rare thing indeed, in this day and age, for a business to back up and follow through on their promises regarding their product. I will use Signal until the day I die unless things somehow dramatically change for the worse. I’m not normally a review writer, and when I do I could never be described as being verbose in what I have to say about something I’m reviewing but Signal and the developers behind it deserve all the praise we can muster! Thank you for the fruits of your labor enhancing my quality of life and peace of mind :)

Problem Retrieving Data

*WARNING* Do not download, install, and use this app! The app developers are responsible for not warning users ahead of time that there will be data loss if you run out of storage space. GitHub is rife with stories of the “Problem Retrieving Data” bug, and there still isn’t a fix. Also they have the signing keys to your data, so your data is not really yours. What’s the point of all that security? I’ve been waiting since October for a bug fix, but there isn’t one, and I have a feeling that there isn’t going to be one. I’m using WhatsApp now, and I love it!! I can’t tell you how many times my phone has ran out of storage space and of course I have gotten the “Storage is full” message from WhatsApp, but as soon as I have freed up even just a little bit of space, I’ve been able to get back into WhatsApp every single time, no problem! And I haven’t even been able to make a chat backup in a long time. This is not the case with Signal. It took just one time of running out of storage space for me to get the “Problem Retrieving Data” popup, saying that some of my “message history may be corrupted.” Unbelievable. What a waste of time. Years of memories wasted. If I would’ve known this years in advance, I would’ve NEVER used this app!! Guys, don’t waste your time, save yourself the trouble and the stress of investing your time and energy in using an app that could possibly cost you major data loss!!

Nightmare editing messages on my iPhone XR

I don’t know if this disfunction is related to the particular phone (iPhone XR) that I am using Signal on now or if it is the same on other phones, but the “cursor” control on Signal is a disaster now. It is a nightmare trying to move the cursor to where you want it, or to highlight a specific section of your message. I am completely unable to move the cursor more than a couple lines away from its current location at a time (and the text window doesn’t extend to more than 4 lines tall), so i have to scroll a couple lines away, click somewhere to move the cursor in the direction of where i want it to go, and repeat over and over again until it finally gets there. If i try to move it further than that, the window just jumps back to the area where it is currently located and moves it to some random location nearby.
Highlighting a portion of your message is impossible; it jumps from one end of the message to the other and will not allow you to scroll slowly to where you want to stop highlighting. It is so stupid ~ I recommend typing messages in another app and then pasting it into signal when you are done.
Also, FYI, if you want to copy text from a signal message, hold your finger on the message and then click on the little icon at the bottom of the screen that looks like two pieces of paper - nothing will ever appear that says “copy”.

Developer Response ,

This bug is resolved in the most recent version of the application.