I seem to remember something like that was discussed at some point in Signal Community and one of the big arguments contra was that the normies and even some advanced people who use Signal just don’t “get” UX warnings any more: you could have put all the red tabs, cross signs and unlocked padlocks on the screen you wanted, they were still gonna complain openly on the internet and discredit Signal for not actually “securing muh messages”. It’s actually part of the same argument why they don’t let you export your own messages.

Besides, having to use the same engine (tab and all) in the same app for two things with vastly different reaches of security was murder on the dev team. There were things they were not able to keep testing because of clashing against SMS compat. It is one of the reasons why I think the smart thing to have done would have to keep the “original” app as the Signal SMS.

Dropping SMS alas was necessary (and not just for Signal, but for messengers-with-SMS as well) because of the general play Google is doing with SMS → RCS. IMO, Signal held the idiot ball quite strongly by not just picking TextSecure from their old archives, tuning it up and releasing it as an updated, separate “Signal SMS” app.

The weather as well.

undefined> , maybe not as a social media platform, but surely as a public service/news platform it has some merit.

If the distribution of some emergency news and public service news is so important that you have to have it during emergencies, then it’s Too Big To Fail and must not be held by a corporation, but implemented by the government. Every service such as police, firefighters, etc, should have a public RSS or Atom service announcement.