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Comment by NilsIRL | Hacker News Reader

Signal does have this feature. It's just that their mobile clients do not support it (as a "slave" device), from what I understand this is no different than WhatsApp multi device feature

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This article is regarding a new beta feature in which you can have multiple "host" devices connected to the same WhatsApp account. It's not the same as the previous "WhatsApp Web"/"Signal desktop" experience.

This article specifically mentions "nonphone devices" which means it is not much (if at all) different from Signal desktop

But you can now use them even if the phone is turned off, unlike previously where the "web" devices just provided a view of data from the phone.

The Signal desktop client has always continued to work even when the phone was off.

Interesting, I wasn't aware that was supported. Thanks for the information

Yeah, the implementation described in the article seems almost exactly how I understand Signal has been doing it all along. It's purely a client software choice not to allow a phone to be a secondary device. There's a fork which adds this feature to the Android app, though I forget what it's called.

> It's not the same as the previous "WhatsApp Web"/"Signal desktop" experience.

The traditional "WhatsApp Web" and "Signal desktop" are completely different experiences though.

Though the details differ, WhatsApp's new approach, outlined in this article, is much closer to what Signal has always been doing since it introduced Signal Desktop - which, once linked, functions independently of your phone.

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