why do you think they have you sign up with a phone number in the first place?

Again, spam & abuse prevention. We’ve been over this.

I’m sorry that not everyone thinks Signal is a god app worthy of worship. its a message app, and its not the only one. it does stuff some people don’t like. including me.

I’m not saying that Signal is a god app worthy of worship, I’m saying it’s detrimental for them to include SMS functionality, since that’s fundamentally insecure. That’s literally why they removed it. Is that so hard to understand?

Spam isn’t a binary issue, where it either exists or doesn’t. It could very well be the case that, without requiring a phone number, there’d be far more spam (since it’d be far easier to automatically create new accounts).

Again, do you have a better suggestion for spam & abuse prevention?

And still, aside from that - it doesn’t really make sense to expect Signal to offer SMS integration just because it requires a phone number for spam prevention, when offering this integration would be detrimental towards the mission of Signal (offering secure messages).

Do you have a better approach to prevent spam in mind? Without a barrier of entry it becomes a serious issue.

What? You use a secure messenger to send secure messages. It doesn’t make sense for a secure messenger to offer sending insecure messages (SMS).

Edit: oh, you’re probably referring to why it requires a phone number. This seems to be due to abuse/spam prevention, as otherwise creating new accounts to spam people with is basically free.

It’s arguably a very bad idea for a secure messenger to also provide an SMS interface, since those are basically cleartext