Yeah, whoever pushes this is way more annoying than whoever makes the bubbles green. Just one group chat I'm in uses Signal for some reason. People often miss messages cause it silently deprecates old versions. And nobody has verified each others' secret numbers anyway, so after all that work someone did to secure our bar plans, we might be mitm'd anyway.
E2EE apps have inherent UX problems. It's possible to do multi-device messaging with synchronized message history and a way to get in if you lose your codes, but it requires trusting the service and/or your cell carrier in some capacity. Something has to give if you want E2EE, usually it's the chat history or multi-device support.
WhatsApp didn't have multi-device support until mid 2023. I'd have to see exactly how it works now, cause it raises more questions. If you can rely on users remembering passphrases (no recovery mechanism), it makes chat history easier, even then I wonder if it knows how to merge divergent chat histories if one device misses messages. iCloud/GDrive storage is another moving part but also nice in case you want to download/copy it. Would be neat also if contacts could be stored that way, cause I ain't sending them to WhatsApp.
The only major app I've seen handle everything 100% reliably is FB Messenger, since the start, which was easy because there was no e2ee. Just a server-side master with simple web and mobile clients using it.
SMS is bad, but at least I can send/receive it on my Mac without my iPhone being online, idk how.
> WhatsApp didn't have multi-device support until mid 2023.
I think it was 2020, but in any case, it was very late. To be fair, it is quite hard to do securely and without compromising too much on usability with end-to-end encryption.
> even then I wonder if it knows how to merge divergent chat histories if one device misses messages.
There's one primary device (I think it has to be a phone) that maintains the "source of truth" message database and also does the backups, I believe.
> SMS is bad, but at least I can send/receive it on my Mac without my iPhone being online, idk how.
Are you sure? Does this work with the iPhone completely off (i.e. not just on mobile data, because it does proxy SMS to iMessage in that case)?
I didn't think that was possible. Only very few operators even allow voice calls via FaceTime (without proxying the audio data through the iPhone via local Wi-Fi), but maybe they extended that to SMS over IMS recently. I can't test it with mine in any case, since my provider/plan is not on that short list.
I think 2020 was the beta. They announced the full feature in 2023, and I see a 2022 article about enabling the beta. Primary device SoT makes sense, but that has its caveats, and yeah it all goes back to the privacy guarantees.
> Are you sure?
Nope, I was wrong. I must've been thinking about how the SMS forwarding will work even without cell service, provided the iPhone is on wifi, which was a new feature at some point and requires carrier support (AT&T was early).
"To automatically forward SMS/MMS messages to one or more of your other devices, the other device must be signed in with the same Apple ID as your iPhone, and your iPhone must be connected to a Wi-Fi or cellular network."
E2EE apps have inherent UX problems. It's possible to do multi-device messaging with synchronized message history and a way to get in if you lose your codes, but it requires trusting the service and/or your cell carrier in some capacity. Something has to give if you want E2EE, usually it's the chat history or multi-device support.