[Sidnicious]

I've had an issue with my phone for the past few months that could be solved by erasing it and restoring from backup, but I use Signal a bunch and I'm not currently feeling risky or motivated enough to migrate my whole Signal state to a spare phone and do it.

Lack of backups is not a retention/deletion policy. Signal chats can, in fact, have a deletion policy set. Instead it directly ties retention to "how long can I last without losing or erasing my phone", which is not a useful proxy.

Anyone sufficiently motivated to keep messages forever can (a) set up the desktop client and back up its data store or (b) set up signal-cli and save everything that comes out of it.

No backups doesn't defeat this, it just makes life harder for everyone who relies on scrollback. Imagine if email worked this way.

[lxgr]

> Anyone sufficiently motivated to keep messages forever can [...]

Sure, but defaults matter.

[simfree]

Backups exist on Signal Android.

[lxgr]

Indeed they do, as I just learned today. That really doesn't make any sense then – I vaguely remember Moxie stating that the lack of backups was intentional, but now having them on Android but not iOS makes no sense at all.