Honestly, the one and only feature I'm missing in Signal that would let me use it and recommend it to everyone without reservations (rather than exclusively for ephemeral-only communication) is the ability to keep identity and full message history when moving to a new device.
Today, on iOS, you can't move your Signal history to a new device, and on Android you can only do so by manually making an encrypted backup file and writing down a 30-digit passcode, completely separate from the normal Android process of moving to a new device.
People keep long histories of messages, going back a decade, containing pictures and memories that aren't stored anywhere else. Message history is valuable data.
This doesn't seem like a "new cryptographic research" problem, this seems like a "well-established crypto (encrypted files) plus integration with standard device backup/migration" problem.
I really like Signal, I think they're doing things very well, and I wish I could use it without being constantly at risk of data loss. And this doesn't seem like an uncommon request, from what I've found.
Is there something I'm missing that makes this a hard problem? Or is it just a problem that nobody has prioritized?
Today, on iOS, you can't move your Signal history to a new device, and on Android you can only do so by manually making an encrypted backup file and writing down a 30-digit passcode, completely separate from the normal Android process of moving to a new device.
People keep long histories of messages, going back a decade, containing pictures and memories that aren't stored anywhere else. Message history is valuable data.
This doesn't seem like a "new cryptographic research" problem, this seems like a "well-established crypto (encrypted files) plus integration with standard device backup/migration" problem.
I really like Signal, I think they're doing things very well, and I wish I could use it without being constantly at risk of data loss. And this doesn't seem like an uncommon request, from what I've found.
Is there something I'm missing that makes this a hard problem? Or is it just a problem that nobody has prioritized?