Ask HN: Signal dropping support for my (very much working) iPhone 6: what now?

2 points by rosetremiere 3 years ago | 9 comments

I recall already having to use an iphone 6 instead of an iphone 4 to be able to use signal at all a few years ago. Now I got a banner telling me that support will be dropped in mid August.

I feel this is a very stupid move: it is probably true security is harder to guarantee with old devices, but whatsapp/telegram support them without problem, and the "durability" aspect should count for something in their decision-process…

What do people around here recommend doing? Taking the networking effect into account, pushing people to something like matrix will probably be quite hard…

gregjor 3 years ago |

Either get a new phone or don't use Signal. You already know the answer. Of course it would be nice if companies supported old hardware, operating systems, and applications forever, but that's not the world we live in. Neither Apple nor Signal will give any attention to the desires of a tiny niche they aren't profiting from.

kstenerud 3 years ago |

The last update for iphone 6 was ios 12.5.7 in January. ios 12 is now an unsupported operating system as far as Apple is concerned.

What wouldn't make sense would be to spend resources to continue supporting an unsupported operating system with an imperceptible market share.

The iphone 6 had a good run (2014-2023), but it's time to upgrade.

rosetremiere 3 years ago | |

Hard disagree:

I understand it's maybe a bit of an uphill battle to support a software stack that the OS/hardware vendor itself doesn't support, but:

1. telegram/whatsapp do, so it's definitely possible.

2. The point is not to add new features, but just to leave the current version be without deprecating it. There is probably a bit of a development burden in keeping old versions up, but I don't think it's that big: they could even let the community take care of that…

3. But most importantly, "the iphone 6 had a good run", so the natural continuation to that sentence is "so let's discard all those working devices" ? wtf? I think that from a company that defends "public interests", some more thought should be given to not wasting energy, time and money forcing people to upgrade working smartphones…

kstenerud 3 years ago | | |

You can disagree all you like, but they lay out their policy here: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/5109141421850-S...

My guess would be that they want to dump the messy and easy-to-screw-up CommonCrypto code and switch fully to CryptoKit, which was introduced in ios 13.

If you don't like their way of running their project, you have other options.

gregjor 3 years ago | | |

I think you have an idealistic interpretation of Apple's PR. No one is forced to upgrade, your phone presumably still works as a phone and as a camera, music player, etc. Apple has nothing to do with Signal. They do offer a trade-in program, though an iPhone 6 won't get much.

hayst4ck 3 years ago |

Part of being in Apple's ecosystem is being subject to their deprecation schedule. Apple is a luxury product, they market themselves as a luxury product, and not supporting old devices allows them to focus on what makes them a luxury product (innovation) rather than what doesn't (supporting older models).

I think the idea that matrix will solve your problems is not very well thought out. If anything supporting effectively deprecated devices is a poor security stance. Matrix, from what I can tell, is complicated and complexity is the opposite of security.

I know I am not going to make you feel unreasonable by saying this, but I think you are being unreasonable.

mPReDiToR 3 years ago |

I dumped Signal when they dropped SMS. It no longer meets my use case.

Upgrade your phone, get an Android, stop using Signal. I think that covers your options.

pcvarmint 3 years ago | |

SMS is insecure, and Signal's use-case is secure end-to-end encryption. Why would you want to use SMS?

rosetremiere 3 years ago | |

Yeah, i'm thinking of getting a oneplus 6 since it's kind of the best supported by pmOS, and I can also just install some privacy friendly android rom in the meantime.