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Comment by wslack | Hacker News Reader

The provide a fairly clear rationale beyond the ideological concern: users don't know/see who is on SMS and who isn't, and are being hit with high fees, and they are concerned that users may believe they have privacy when they do not.

These are reasonable issues and concerns, so I don't follow why you would question all of the other decisions they make.

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> users don't know/see who is on SMS and who isn't

They could just show the literal word "SMS" in the send button.

I think that would be more obvious than wha they do now (button being grey instead of blue with a minimally changed lock symbol [1]).

[1]: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007318911#an...

Couldn’t they just do something like have the sms messages in a different color than the rest? Similar to how iOS used blue for iMessage and green for texts? Signal could use an annoying red color for sms to make it even more clear.

Not sure if this is a joke given that Signal uses Blue for sms and Red for encrypted...

I am on iOS and have never seen red. Only see blue. Color can be customized though.

I didn't specifically sate "on Android" since on iOS all messages are through Signal.

If only there were a company that had, at some point, demonstrated that you can use indicators such as colour to indicate to users whether their messages were being transported via SMS or an E2E secure transport layer.

I guess that's just a pipe dream though.

There are surely ways around this that don't limit the functionality of the application

As if Signal couldn't change the color of the text bubbles to some shade of, let's just say, green, to indicate when a user is chatting via SMS instead of a Signal secured message.

And then everybody and their dog would accuse them of green-shaming or whatever.

No such thing as bad PR, unless you're removing features. Having people green-shame just means there are other people that are rolling their eyes and still getting their name out there.

so put SMS in different tab and let users turn on/off this feature in settings, done, problem solved, but I understand giving users options nowadays ain't trendy

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