Signal-iOS VS ish

Fortunately, they did foresee this! The push notification only contains enough information to tell the phone that it should fetch the actual notification content from Signal's servers.

Here's a Signal dev talking about it on the Signal-Android GitHub: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/12961#iss...

And similarly for Signal-iOS: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/issues/962#issuecomm...

This was a nice, detailed read. I was happy to note this about employee compensation since paying them well is a good thing apart from their personal motivation to work on this (even at a comparatively lower pay than in other companies/projects):

> When benefits, HR services, taxes, recruiting, and salaries are included, this translates to around $19 million dollars per year.

> We are proud to pay people well. Our goal is to compensate our staff at as close to industry wages as possible within the boundaries of a nonprofit organization.

That said, I really dislike Signal for a few reasons. The first is what many people have already talked about very often — forcing to use a phone number to register. Since the SMS or call costs are quite high, Signal could adopt the iMessage approach to verification, which is having the user send an SMS to the service (this will cost the user some money depending on which country the SMS is sent to). This could be decided based on the country code so that the current SMS OTP model can coexist.

Signal is obstinate on a few aspects on user experience, more so on iOS/iPadOS. Firstly, it refuses to provide a data backup mechanism for iOS/iPadOS. If someone loses their devices, there is no way to restore older messages. Even setting up a new device requires the old device to be in physical proximity to transfer the data. Signal does integrate with CallKit (to act like a phone app) and with Apple’s notification services, but refuses to allow the user to backup the data with a password to encrypt it.

Secondly, I found this paragraph in this post to be disingenuous:

> Such practices are often accompanied by “growth hacking” and engagement maximization techniques that leverage dark patterns to keep people glued to feeds and notifications. While Signal is also free to use, we reject this kind of manipulation, focusing instead on creating a straightforward interpersonal communications app. We also reject business models that incentivize such practices.

Signal on iOS/iPadOS wants the user to enable notifications and to share contacts. If notifications are disallowed and if contacts upload is disallowed, it will pester every few days about it. One might think this is a silly mistake that Signal isn’t aware of. But it was reported some years ago and Signal responded that it will not fix it because it believes this is the only way. [1] Not even an option where this is a toggle for those who want no notifications or don’t want to share contacts (Signal does have a toggle for contact joining notifications).

Signal is also not that reliable in delivering messages in a timely manner compared to other apps (the GitHub repo has many repetitive issues on this topic over all these years).

Finally, since Signal has poorer UX in general, which isn’t an easy or cheap thing to handle, I use it only with less than a handful of people who I know and who use it.

I’d donate occasionally so that Signal can continue to exist, but I don’t feel like supporting it every month with all these issues, some of which look like Signal showing me the middle finger.

[1]: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/issues/4590#issue-72...

I also use both extensively and I agree, Telegram has the best UX of any messaging app. The desktop app is QT I think so it feels very snappy compared to Signal's electron app.

Signal's iOS app is a native Swift/UIKit app and open source however, so I'd encourage you to report any bugs or issues you find: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS

Yeah I was able to find a few tasks that might be similar to your issue, though I don't know the exact details how the app behaves in your case, as in if you get error message or something like in this issue, or if it just closes on open like in this issue comment. Regardless, the generated crash report from the phone itself is probably good to add in your email to support (which is different from the debug log, just to specify in case you have been sending only that, here's a link for more details).

My bet is on "object-oriented obfuscation" and bloat caused by "modern" coding styles. Looking through the Signal source you linked to, I see tons of the former. There is an absolutely insane amount of boilerplate-looking code in here, for example: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/tree/main/Signal/src...

I don't know Swift or the iOS UI API, but a lot of that code seems to be manually creating and positioning UI elements and otherwise implementing UI functionality that I'd expect the OS to handle. It's a lot of code that should really be data (arrays, structures).

To offer a huge contrast, a long time ago I wrote an MSNP chat client in pure Win32, and it was around 2kloc. The binary was 24KB. Of course it only supported contacts, presence, and text messaging, but I still can't see features like audio/video or the crypto that Signal has needing 100x more, especially if they use OS functionality for much of them.

iSH

They don't "allow" it, but most apps that need background execution just ask permission for geolocation tracking and pretend to use it, for example iSH[1]. There are a few activities that the app can do to prevent itself from being suspended when it goes out of focus, like playing sound, geolocation etc.

[1] https://github.com/ish-app/ish/issues/249#issuecomment-54433...

Android: install termux, `pkg install openssh`, and preferably run `termux-setup-storage` to give it access to storage folders.

iOS: I think https://ish.app/ ?

This of course hasn't been true for years, eg: http://omz-software.com/pythonista/index.html

And you can run a C compiler (or anything) inside https://ish.app/ too.

False. iSH is an x86 "bytecode" emulator.

"Possibly the most interesting thing I wrote as part of iSH is the JIT. It's not actually a JIT since it doesn't target machine code. Instead it generates an array of pointers to functions called gadgets, and each gadget ends with a tailcall to the next function; like the threaded code technique used by some Forth interpreters."

https://github.com/ish-app/ish

There is an x86 virtual machkne running Linux available on the App Store now.

https://ish.app/

Now would Apple allow a full blown Windows VM is a different question

There are plenty of solutions for running Python in an IDE on the iPad. There is an even an x86 emulator and a Linux terminal built on top of it in the App Store.

https://ish.app/

It can run anything that you can run on an x86 in user mode. I downloaded the AWS CLI (which requires Python) to run some tests

By the way, you were completely wrong about VSCode being written in .Net.

> That's just compiling the code to a native binary, which you would then have to go submit through Apple's store. How does that help for an IDE expected to allow you to test (i.e. execute) and debug the code you've just written ten seconds ago?

There is an existence proof that it could be done. If you ran iSH with remote VNC you could have a full IDE on a Mac.

> We can see right there some examples of what isn't allowed:

Not making any statement regarding the mentioned workflow issues (I mostly agree with them), I really like iSH [1] for this sort thing.

It’s a “good enough” solution for the “I just quickly need to do something in a terminal” problems.

And because it’s an x86 Alpine Linux it can even run simple binaries if needed.

But for me it still couldn’t replace a dedicated laptop for proper tasks.

[1]: https://github.com/ish-app/ish