ButtholeBlackhole I mean not only did it not shrink, the number of users nearly doubled since they dropped SMS support in early 2023. Also, saying it would be easier to switch people over if there was still SMS support, completely contradicts what has actually happened. Their user base has expanded enormously as their reputation has grown and as global political circumstances have caused people to value privacy and security more. SMS support was never the driving factor behind Signal's userbase.
For Signal, it may have made sense to include SMS support when the app was not widely used and barely known. By the time they made the decision to drop SMS support, at the end of 2022, they had tens of millions of users and a reputation as the gold standard for private end-to-end encrypted communications. The situation changed significantly.
At the end of the day, keeping SMS support to get more users, at the expense of giving people a false sense of security and inadvertently causing people to send messages they believe are secure, but are not, would have been backwards thinking. The primary purpose of the app is security and privacy, not to grow its number of users at all costs. It seems like sacrificing privacy and security and misleading novice users would go against everything Signal stands for.
Also, Signal never offered SMS support in iOS. It was a legacy feature from the days when Signal/TextSecure was an Android only app. By the time the expanded to iOS, it made even less to offer the feature on one platform, but not the other. They wanted a consistent experience across platforms.
You can read Signal's own explanation of their decision here: https://signal.org/blog/sms-removal-android/
I understand that some people liked the feature. But being unable to accept that it made sense to drop it seems like taking a very narrow view of things.