Someone (maybe LindaG?) left a comment a week or two back about how "Signal is removing support for Android". There seems to be some confusion about this, enough so that Signal put up a good blog post that explains what's going on.
Short answer: Signal is still going to support Android, but they are removing the SMS feature from their Android app. This is overall A Good Thing. So keep using Signal on Android.
Longer answer: SMS (Short Message Service, generally called "Text" by everyone normal) is what phone companies use to allow short, text based person-to-person or group chat messages. It's been around for a long time - at least 20 years and probably longer. It was a clever hack to the telephony protocols that allowed short messages to be sent without setting up a circuit (i.e. phone call), so it gave users something they liked without really adding much stress to the phone network's capacity.
The fly in the ointment is that SMS really isn't very secure. We've known about this for a long time; I posted about this probably almost ten years ago (too lazy to chase this down in the almost 14,000 posts here).
Since Signal is all about security, they've finally dropped their SMS support feature. I think this was just used as an add on to their login mechanism - you not only had to enter your password but you had to have a second method of verifying that you are actually you. Signal would send your phone (well, the Signal app on your phone) a text with a secret code that you'd enter to complete your login.
Since SMS is not secure, this isn't a great way to add this second authentication step. So Signal has added their own mechanism where their server sends a (secure) message directly to the Signal app. In general, this is a security improvement over SMS. There's more detail at their blog post, but as I said earlier, from a security perspective this is A Very Good Thing.
So I hope this clears up the confusion. Signal is still there, on Android, and more secure than ever.
3 comments:
Don't think it was me, doesn't sound familiar. But thanks for the information!
Be safe and God bless.
Drat. Now I have to start monitoring texting again for messages from the unwashed hoi polloi.
I get the security point. I really do.
But when half the family uses Signal, and the other half doesn't see the point or doesn't understand the technology, or whatever, but the whole group frequently does group messaging to plan family events and the like, having to use two apps each with only half the conversation, is NOT GOING TO WORK.
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