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My experience matches yours. I was blocked for engaging in constructive discussion where I questioned the reasoning and provided justifications for a few of the design decisions.

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Daniel Micay

@DanielMicay

Jun 30, 2020

Replying to @moxie @RichFelker and 2 others

What's wrong with having it locally in the Signal app and relying on the same encrypted backup / restore feature as everything else? System contacts are also local data with the option to do backup / restore.

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Replying to @moxie @RichFelker and 2 others

Backing up locally via SAF works fine. No need for the deprecated Storage permission. The app can request persistent access to a directory for backups and the user just chooses the backup directory via SAF and the app. Can't something similar be done on iOS via their equivalent?

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Replying to @chrisrohlf @signalapp and @moxie

Hopefully as a toggle so that it's still possible to have a registration lock PIN without contact syncing, as it was before this was introduced. Most people are going to use the defaults so that's what really matters, and a user-generated PIN + SGX is not a secure approach.

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Those 3 tweets led to being blocked. I was disappointed in their response to this controversy as a whole. They responded to legitimate criticism and questions from the community with justifications that didn't hold up to scrutiny. They blamed their design choices on iOS/Android.

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I wrote twitter.com/DanielMicay/st as an overall summary of it after being blocked. Before then, I'd simply left a few replies deep in a thread. Overall, my impression is that they aren't willing to stand behind these design decisions and resort to inaccurate claims + misdirection.

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Daniel Micay

@DanielMicay

Jul 10, 2020

I've been a user and supporter of Signal for years. I've disagreed with various design decisions, but there has always been sensible reasoning behind their decisions based on facts and logic. I only used to disagree on certain priorities and had faith in them. No longer the case.

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Such as blaming it on Android or iOS in a way that users without deep platform knowledge won't know any better. I was already pretty put off by their response to these things before I was blocked for a couple inconvenient, legitimate questions. I still recommend using Signal...

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All I want is for them to stand behind design decisions. It's fine if they disagree with me about the best way to do it. I don't expect them to change it or debate it. I don't think it's fine for them to tell people the OS prevents them from doing something that it doesn't.

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As a user of the feature, I was disappointed to see them claim that the encrypted backup/restore feature on Android won't be possible anymore on Android due to Scoped Storage. The user just has to have control over where backups will go. Seems they want an excuse to remove it...

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... and it's part of the excuse for moving to having a form of remote backup / sync secured via SGX by default rather than a strong key like the prior full encrypted backup/restore feature on Android. That has you write down a high entropy seed you need to restore the backup.

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So, at least on Android you can migrate Signal across phones (or across user profiles) using this and keep all your data including the same safety numbers. It's tucked away in the settings and people don't realize they can do it. Maybe they dislike trusting users to store a seed.

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They could just admit

@RealSexyCyborg

raised a legitimate concern and they changed their mind. Instead it's this mess. I previously brought up the possibility of checking the security patch level and letting users know if their device is known to be insecure. Apps can do this.

3:08 AM · Jan 24, 2021Twitter Web App

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Apps shouldn't be able to do this, though.

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A malicious app can figure it out by checking the code and functionality instead of the property. I don't think there's a point in pretending that the device model, patch level, etc. can be hidden from native apps. They can even just look at the libraries loaded into them, etc.

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