I forgot to post this earlier. I do not expect to get any reply, nor @WestQuester to take this personally.
I strongly feel this should be available for everyone. Food for thought, if you will.
WestQuester By far the majority of my contacts never switched and never will.
Same here. They are no longer my contacts.
Is it practical? No.
Is it a logical thing to do? Perhaps.
WestQuester Years later some of my friends tell me I'm the only one who communicates with them on Signal.
Those never understood. That's the hardest part. While you can make somebody do something, you cannot force them to understand the reasoning behind that.
WestQuester Why would they install a special app just for their one weird friend?
Because that's what friends do. They care. They take an interest in you as a human. They want to understand you.
After all, it's just an app which can be left alone after initial setup. It only does what it should, unlike other social apps - it's just safe to have. They don't have to learn anything, not to mention self-hosting. They will never be let down by it or forced to accept something they otherwise wouldn't.
If you were vegetarian, would you like to have a friend who doesn't consider your choices valid and still orders just a bunch of pepperoni pizzas to every party they invite you to? A "friend" who strips you out of the freedom to choose, merely because they can't be bothered? If so, how would you compare them to a friend who always gets "something else" to eat, just because YOU are going to be there? Which kind of people would you rather have in your life?
WestQuester Why would they bother trying to switch their hundreds of contacts?
No need to. Signal is an app that empowers people to communicate securely without giving up the convenience traditional (legacy) phone numbers provide. If they understand its benefits, they are free to spread the word. If they don't, they stick to whatever they "know" better and merely have Signal as a fallback in case Meta screws up again.
WestQuester Most people do not care about privacy. Period. They care about convenience.
How about other values that I have written about? Many people in the privacy community tend to echo the same stuff over and over again. The issue is much more complex and it should be approached in various ways.
For crying out loud, if Apple decided to sponsor and replace their messaging app with Signal and Android vendors would preinstall it (like some of them do with whatsapp), it would suddenly become the most user-friendly communication service in history.
WestQuester I use Signal with those who care but the vast majority of people I know, don't. So I work around them rather than forcing the world to work around me.
That's the correct way to proceed, regarding things in life that cannot be worked around. Like getting a degree and making both ends meet.
However, when it comes to personal matters, I believe it should be different. My goal is not to "force the world to work around me", my goal is to help shift the paradigm.
void0 Guys the thread isn't about signal vs x, as I wrote in the title I just wanted to shed some light on a project to run iMessage on android.
Which you did. Thank You very much. I am myself interested in this topic. It's just that buying a rather expensive physical device from Apple, learning all of that, only to be able to use iMessage via a not officially supported method... Doesn't convince me it's the right thing to do. I had to chime in.