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by kelnos 2379 days ago
I've written a little Android app that watches the Signal backups directory and uploads new files to Google Drive when they appear. For a new phone, it can download your latest backup and put it where Signal will find it when you first run the app. I want to polish it and put it on the Play Store, but of course the last 20% is 80% of the work.

I'm also reluctant to release it publicly because I'm worried about the support burden, because, while I've made the experience as easy as possible, it's still not a great experience considering how Signal works. I expect to see a lot of angry users who don't realize (despite documentation) that they need to download the backup to their new phone before running the Signal app for the first time. And then I expect people who lose their backup encryption key to blame me that their backups are unrecoverable.

I guess at the very least I could open source it at some point, but the setup is a pain since you need to create a Google Cloud project authorized to use the GDrive APIs.

Signal really needs this built-in. It puzzles me that it hasn't happened yet, since I built this little app in under ten hours (and I hadn't touched Android development in a good 7 years and had no experience with the GDrive APIs).