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The biggest issue I can see with using two separate apps is checking who's on Signal and who isn't. That means opening up Signal to see if they're on there and then switching to SMS if they aren't. I much prefer having both types of contacts in the same UI and it's been obvious to me which messages are secure. Also, when someone then joins Signal, subsequent messages to them automatically get upgraded to being secure with no effort on my part.

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Yes... Unless it's able to somehow alert you that you're texting someone with Signal, it seems like Signal will be phased out because everyone will default to SMS, unless they have a reason to use Signal for a conversation, which hurts the entire privacy ecosystem.

People often complain about the alert that you get when one of your contacts joins Signal but this is exactly what that attempts to solve

There was a time when contacts that use Signal were listed above contacts that are only reachable through SMS.

Those two groups of contacts then got mixed making it much harder to see who's on Signal and who isn't.

Back then I thought that was deliberate. It would be surprising to me, if the desire to avoid that self-inflicted confusion would have contributed to the decision to discontinue SMS support.

If I click the new message button I only see Signal contacts.

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