signal-backup-decode VS Signal-iOS

https://www.yoranbrondsema.com/post/the-guide-to-extracting-statistics-from-your-signal-conversations/ https://www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/irbxii/how_can_i_export_and_save_signal_chats/ https://rado0z.github.io/Decrypt_Android_Database http://jhnet.co.uk/articles/signal_backups https://pypi.org/project/signal2html/ https://www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/kx31hw/signalbackup_a_tool_to_save_your_signal/ https://github.com/manwefm/signal-backup https://github.com/bepaald/signalbackup-tools https://gitlab.com/splatops/cntn-signalbackup-tools https://github.com/xeals/signal-back https://github.com/pajowu/signal-backup-decode https://www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/cyyncx/application_to_open_signal_backups_on_windows/ https://www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/8mfawf/comment/e84rkia/ https://www.incredigeek.com/home/extract-encrypted-signal-backup/ https://www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/n3mwfx/backup_file/ https://www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/fxyowe/decrypting_backup_for_import_to_android_messages/ https://kabanashvili.com/blog/post/backup-and-decrypt-signal_1f91be7ok9jvmqrf

> I'm confused at what is stopping you from doing this?

As far as I know the backup is encrypted.

> Are you not able to import these backups into the desktop client?

No, the desktop client is not standalone, and ONLY syncs with the a phone to get content. Moreover, if you don't use the client for a period (2-3 weeks in my experience?) it de-syncs that desktop client. Re-connecting that desktop to your phone will only sync messages starting as-of the connection, so there's no way to get the desktop app to pull your whole history. (This is another gripe I have about their sacrifice of actual usability for security that only helps a few very specific use-cases.)

You're probably rigth about hacking something together. Someone has created a library [0] allegedly for decoding the backup files. Friday night is D&D night though, so I haven't had the chance. :-)

[0] https://github.com/pajowu/signal-backup-decode

The backups are using protobuf, I use https://github.com/pajowu/signal-backup-decode to decode the backup file. You end up with a sqlite database and some files. Afterwards, I run queries via nodejs against sqlite to produce the HTML, that is a bit quick and dirty at the moment and not open source so far.

You can also try https://github.com/pajowu/signal-backup-decode, the author is active (replied to issues 12 days ago). On the previous repository, the author appears to be inactive (I should have checked, my bad).

https://github.com/pajowu/signal-backup-decode (last updated march 2021)

I use signal-backup-decode to explore my backups, but that's a command line tool that decrypts the backup with the secret key and exports the actual content as a database and a set of files for images, attachments, etc.

I'm not sure I can help, but can you update your post with more info? Does the official backup give you an error? You should be able to back up and then copy the files to your computer and use a tool like this to decode into plain text.

That should work with signal. There are tools to decrypt the backup and access the database. For example this: https://github.com/pajowu/signal-backup-decode

I have to agree here. At least on Android you can extract the database

Does not mean you can not extract the database. Given you have the password for it. Sadly only for Android so far it seems.

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.