[claudedopplr]

Being such a small operation, I think they're making a great decision by focusing on what matters most. "Most startups die by lack of focus". I very much believe this is their first public step towards breaking up with phone number based identity.

[cabbagesauce]

>Being such a small operation, I think they're making a great decision by focusing on what matters most.

Currently, it looks like they are focusing on social networking features: stories, emoji stuff, better link previews. Basically everything that competition already did. The roadmap is not public, so I wouldn't take guesses as what may come next. But...

..."dropping support of X as a feature" is some kind of new transcendent approach to product development incomprehensible to common earthlings.

[claudoppl]

You seem very frustrated personally for the lack of SMS support on Signal.

I don't agree with your take or arguments, and you seem to keep branching off pejorative comments on their organization and product instead of actually discussing the points. I think the conversation would be more productive if we focus on the same point, i.e.:

  * Focusing on what matters most is a good idea, as nobody serious about secure messaging uses SMS

    * Your argument: irony-covered "dropping features is not a good product development approach". 

      * My counter-argument: it **is** a valid approach, why support a feature that was useful in the past, but it is now dying/not aligned with your core value proposition?

    * Your other argument: their focus is on social networking, and some disdainful comment that "the competition already did it". 

      * My argument: how is catching up with well-established user behaviors across other messaging platforms a bad thing?

I remember when I didn't have a smart phone (I don't come from a privileged background, and this was 2009) and I used twitter over SMS. I really wouldn't care if they dropped support for it now, but back then, I would have churned.

(edited for formatting)

[cabbagesauce]

I'm not frustrated personally, but I know a lot of people who lost their faith in what the organization does.

No one is branching off, but a pretext that your personal take on things must comply with some sort of argumentation protocol that is the only valid blueprint for discussion isn't convincing. Moreover you've managed to somehow unwrap you single comment into a fully fledged dialog while ignoring that their roadmap (the big picture) is not exposed to the public. Given we can only judge isolated decisions, they seem what they are — rather not aligned with the expectations of the userbase.

Personally, I see a pattern of Signal making news in rather negative connotation rather than positive lately.

When it got traction, I felt like it's a new day and the future is bright. But since then, they went with a series of rather ambiguous decisions that sidetracked from previous claims.

EOS for SMS is again one of controversial decisions, I mean, we're in a thread started by a person that went above to clarify reasoning behind the press release. And before it was a year of server side repos without any commits, and then the public got a feature no one asked for — MobileCoin integration. And echoes of intent about it are still heard across the table.