Comment by w-m | Hacker News Reader

Comment by w-m | Hacker News Reader

I'm happy to give my 5$/month, as I'm using Signal daily. When moving away from WhatsApp it seemed like the best option for me and my circle of friends. I can only hope that some of the money would be used to hire a developer to fix some of the issues I'm experiencing, some of which are quite annoying:

- Signal killing the whole iPad and iPhone battery in a matter of hours while running in the background, on some days

- terribly slow synchronization between phone and Desktop, catching up on a few hundred messages takes minutes

- awful UX in video calls: microphone button and camera button work in opposite ways (graying out turns one on, the other off)

- awful UX in video calls: if you have multiple people, the camera views are cut into comically wrong letterboxes, often you wont see the person at all anymore

- no giphy on the Desktop client (really, why?)

What would be the best place to voice that these issues are important to me, GitHub issues?

> - terribly slow synchronization between phone and Desktop, catching up on a few hundred messages takes minutes

I agree with everything you wrote. In principle, I'd like to support Signal but their UX is terrible for such things. Tried using it for a group and it was so painful. My phone was constantly warning me about it chewing up battery, and message sync between the desktop app was like it was using a 14.4K modem from 1994. I simply could not use it meaningfully for group messaging. Ultimately we went back to Whatsapp. But hey, at least they fixed the Fisher Price background colours for group messages.

Here in India, everyone uses Whatsapp. There was a brief time during the Whatsapp terms of service brouhaha that a bunch of people I know said they'd move to Signal, and they've all slowly moved back to Whatsapp because that's what everyone in the country uses. Seriously, it's practically infrastructure here.

Add to the list the inability to effectively "mute" busy chats in a way where they don't continuously bubble up to the top. At least on Android, you can only pin 4 chats, I would really like to be able to pin as many as I want, effectively defining my own order of chats regardless of chronology.

Making the colors of buttons consistent seems like something that could be done as a pull request. I think all of their code is open source?

No, not all their code is open source; they're claiming it is for spam protection

Assuming this is a client side feature, those can be contributed to afaik: https://github.com/signalapp

thats why i turned off background refresh option on iOS. Works well with notification instead.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com