Comment by gdmka | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gdmka | Hacker News Reader

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I love Signal. I've convinced a multitude of people to switch and some use it day to day currently, but mostly to talk to me. So i feel my contacts do it out of respect and `compatibility` of communication.

What baffles me is the the incompatible feature matrix.

First of all, for some reason iOS users get the updates faster than the Android. I was exploring emoji reactions yesterday while my Android contact admitted the feature was not yet available for his device. I had to double check with Play Store to confirm.

I've found peace with the sync issues for the desktop client though, it got much more stable compare to 8 months ago. What still feels like a massive UX problem is inability to forward messages on the desktop. Given, i have lots of people coming from different places that do not know each other but share same interests it's just painstaking to copy/paste the same URL five time in a row.

And at the same time, there's no support for the Android tablets as secondary devices.

For a person deep in Apple ecosystem it felt weird to learn that Android users don't share the same experiences i do. That makes the sales pitch to try Signal way less appealing for the Android folk.

Never tried Signal, but from what you're telling, it seems that they redevelop the core functionalities for each platform.

That's interesting, because i've been looking for a way to share core logic code across platform (mobile & desktop at least), and still haven't found something really user friendly. From my brief lookup (rust & gomobile are the ones i've looked at), it seems that most dev environment seem to support some kind of C-style interfacing, but it becomes much more clumsy as soon as you're trying to have it run on java.

Has anyone found a solution that he's comfortable with and would recommend ?

Honestly there are no perfect solutions to this. There are cross platform frameworks (React Native, Xamarin etc) that you can try but you'll definitely hit the wall when trying to access low level native APIs. Kotlin Multiplatform seems to be the step in the right direction. It has first party support on Android and works seamlessly for Android apps, but it's too early to tell for the other platforms. In an ideal scenario, you can share the core business logic using Kotlin Multiplatform and then implement UI and platform specific stuff using native APIs (or something like Flutter (again, not production ready)).

I’ve heard of people running all the logic in a self-contained local http server (developped in whatever language) then rely on local socket connection + protobuf for communicating between the native and the cross-platform codes.

i had hoped some people here would chime in with this trick, but it doesn’t seem like it

iOS may get updates faster than Android and have emojis, but iOS can't backup or transfer your messages to a new phone. This basic feature has been an open request for nearly 3 years.

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/issues/2542

The inconsistent features between iOS and Android are annoying.

Actually iOS can transfer message history to a new iPhone https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Ba...

Not having a backup is seen as a disadvantage by many but i literally feel it's for the best. There's plenty of scenarios when parties benefit from it.

Purchasing a new phone is only a small subset of the scenarios where a backup is useful, for example, in the last two years Apple support has requested that I reset my phone and reinstall iOS twice. Having to buy a second phone to temporarily store my data is not a viable alternative.

Or losing your phone.

Or accidentally breaking it.

Or having it stolen.

A backup protects my data in these situations where a transfer utility does not.

Backups disabled by default would be a sensible approach, but is very much being childish not to let users access their own data.

There were mentions of multi-device coming later on Twitter. While it's not the desired backup feature but a mean to duplicate data at least and backup with Android.

> I was exploring emoji reactions yesterday while my Android contact admitted the feature was not yet available for his device.

That's weird? Do you mean this feature: https://signal.org/blog/reactions/?

I'm on Android, and it's been available to me for ages...

The extended emoji reactions were rolled out couple of days ago.

Does that mean being able to react with more than the six emoji's I can currently use?

Correct.

Cool, thanks for the update. Hoping that comes to Android and Desktop soon indeed.

According to Google Play it’s out[0]

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.thoughtcri...

Ha, you're right - I'd only checked on Desktop, but indeed I can select more reactions on mobile now. Cool!

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