Millions of people use Signal every day for free and instantaneous communication anywhere in the world. Send and receive high-fidelity messages, participate in HD voice/video calls, and explore a growing set of new features that help you stay connected. Signal’s advanced privacy-preserving technology is always enabled, so you can focus on sharing the moments that matter with the people who matter to you.
• Say anything – State-of-the-art end-to-end encryption (powered by the open source Signal Protocol™) keeps your conversations secure. Privacy isn’t an optional mode — it’s just the way that Signal works. Every message, every call, every time.
• Go fast – Messages are delivered quickly and reliably, even on slow networks. Signal is optimized to operate in the most constrained environment possible.
• Feel free – Signal is a completely independent 501c3 nonprofit. Development is supported by users like you. No advertisements. No trackers. No kidding.
• Be yourself – You can use your existing phone number and address book to securely communicate with your friends.
• Speak up – Whether they live across town or across the ocean, Signal’s enhanced audio and video quality will make your friends and family feel closer.
• Whisper in the shadows – Switch to the dark theme if you refuse to see the light.
• Sound familiar – Choose custom alerts for each contact, or disable noises completely. Simon & Garfunkel wrote a hit song about it in 1964, and you can experience the sound of silence whenever you want by choosing “None” as your notification ringtone.
• Picture this – Use the built-in image editing features to sketch, crop, and flip your outgoing photos. There’s even a text tool so that you can add more words to the 1,000 that your picture is already worth.
For support, questions, or more information, please visit:
https://support.signal.org
Source code:
https://github.com/signalapp
Follow us on Twitter (@signalapp) and Instagram (@signal_app) for all of the latest updates and announcements.
I really like Signal. It’s a shame that for four years, after reinstalling multiple times, asking signal for help with no rssponse, searching the web and applying all troubleshooting tips, and asking friends, I’ve found no way to get Signal to notify me of a call or message unless I manually open the app. Great mystery is that most people seem to resolve it with simple changes to permissions, none of wgich work for me.
My only complaint is that voice messages (clips) are treated like call audio in the way that your screen turns off and only plays audio at a reduced volume through the earpiece when you put something too close to the top of your screen. There’s a bug I’ve been dealing with where voice messages cycle from playing normally, playing as call audio, then stopping. My friends report this as well.
Noooo! You can’t remove SMS support! The thing that makes this app so great is that all my texts appear in one place! When I convince friends to join Signal it’s seamless! About 70% of my messages are encrypted, in part because it’s so easy to bring people over! If you take away the SMS then the quiet integration of encryption is lost. That’s a big loss! Signal doesn’t need “stories” or other social media features, but it does need SMS.
Solid and brilliant app. It handles sending photos and vids extremely well. It makes great decisions about compression. Its extremely stable and constanly underbdevelopment. There are a few behaviors that new users may not love, but these are due to the app respecring your privacy and providing top notch security. I dont even notice them anymore, but if you’re just coming from a place that consolidates all your information onto a central server, you might notice a delay for a second or two.
I enjoy a lot about this app. However, I’ve missed multiple work messages because of it. I’m on android so I made Signal my primary messaging app and I loved having everything go to the same place, but in the past few months it has had trouble sending and receiving messages from people not on signal. I get messages days late and multiple times it’s been for work. So, I just switched back to my default messaging app. Signal is used only with my family now, which is fine. Just an inconvenience.
It’s great software, but the removal (WHY?) of SMS text message support is a huge step backward for Signal. Now, instead of managing all my messages in one convenient location, I have to juggle two apps – one for the 10% of my contacts who value privacy, and another for the remaining 90% of the world who either don’t care, or who use something other than Signal. What a bone-headed move. Cutting off SMS only means that Signal users will fall back to whatever app supports the most contacts.
This was a fantastic app until the decision to remove SMS support. The unified SMS and encrypted message experience was FANTASTIC for managing messages and helped convert many people in my circle to using it. No one (myself included) is going to deal with multiple text messaging apps. What a terrible user experience. Signal has been great historically, but it’s time to move on to something else.
I like that I can send end-to-end encrypted messages, but I don’t appreciate the somewhat recent decision regarding SMS . I understand the logic, but I disagree. I would rather Signal have made UI changes to *really* flag/highlight conversations that are not encrypted. It’s hard enough to sell X to people when they are used to Y. I also am not a fan of the decision to add stories to the application. Let’s not make the app bloated and potentially increase the attack surface.
Excellent app lots of useful features. I am very disappointed to see SMS support discontinued. Although many of my contacts have Signal, many do not. The convenience of having a “one stop shop” for all of my messaging needs was fantastic. Unfortunately I think this decision will be very detrimental to the future of the Signal project. Granted SMS is inherently an unsecure protocol, most users are aware of this and will ensure sensitive communications are to a recipient with the app.
I have really liked signal so far. I switch from WhatsApp because of their changing privacy conditions. Signal is much more private. The quality of the app isn’t much different from WhatsApp. The only reason I’m not giving it 5 stars is because I have downloaded pictures from signal to my phone a few times and the only way to do it is 1 at time. It’s really frustrating that you can’t just select multiple pictures to download. Also, video quality is poor when you video call someone.
I love the fact that this message app is much more flexible. For example, without having to have certain phones, emojis are available to use for all. Another example is that I can delete messages if I didn’t express properly or found typos. I just wish an editing feature was available instead of having to delete the entire message for whatever reason. Overall, this is my preferred method of communication next to Telegram app where all things I appreciate are available.
One of the best video messaging apps I have seen, and I have tested a lot of them – both as a professional Product / Project Manager and for my own personal ‘gaming’ interests. This is very nearly the perfect solution for every use case, and that is saying a lot. Increadibly flexible set of features and controls. I don’t give many 5 star ratings, because there is always room for improvement- but this one is very near perfect.
Signal is pretty great both as a standard messaging/chat app and as a secure communications tool. I’ve had mixed success trying to get folks off iMessage or SMS, but those that have switched have been happy with the experience. That said, recent decisions like adding payments and “Stories” are a little concerning. I’m sure both can be done while respecting privacy and they are intended to increase appeal, but they feel like bloat and a bad direction for the app.
Signal’s decision to discontinue SMS support is upsetting. I will not juggle multiple messaging apps. I refuse. I cannot convince my entire contact list to change to signal. I LOVE this app as is and cannot justify multiple messaging apps. I dont even use multiple social media platforms. I’m genuinely sad this is happening. I love as much privacy as I can get but unfortunately convenience and ease of use is extremely important. Signal met all of the criteria until now. Disappointed.
This messenger is decent. However you cannot edit messages, and they just took away the ability to delete an image a while after it’s been sent. Now in order for messages to disappear you have to set up an automatic timer and you cannot delete images you’ve sent manually after a few hours. This decision doesn’t make any sense. Normally I’d probably give the app a solid 4 stars, but until this ability that already existed is restored I can’t recommend it.
The main reason I downloaded this is to have more security, privacy, & break away from everything Meta! I like the simplicity of the app. I do wish that we had more color options for the chat bubbles. It would be nice to have a darker chat bubble option, especially in the spectrum. For someone who has a light sensitivity, darkness is my friend. So maybe perhaps on the next update you guys could give us a more robust color option. Other than that it’s wonderful! The ability to edit would be nice!
Signal is an excellent app. The only thing I don’t like about it is that the other party whom you are communicating with can set messages to auto delete/expire. You can change it back to never expire, but they can always change it again. So it becomes a “tug of war” as to who gets their way. This is problematic for me as I don’t always remember what my friends and I were taking about. It would be nice if Signal had a way to temporarily expire messages and both parties would have to agree.
Photos send faster than with my phone’s Messages app. I would like to be able to further customize chats, i.e., colors for background and chat boxes (including the other person’s). I just switched to another phone and used SmartSwitch, which transferred my Signal chats in their entirety; I also used it to transfer my Messages chats, but only my side of the conversations were transferred. All-in-all, I really like this app and wish more of my contacts would use it.
Bummed about the removal of SMS and addition of stories. To me, Signal is a communication app, not a social network. I do not intend to use stories and have turned them off. Conversely, I have contacts leaving Signal because they depended on the SMS integration to not have to figure out which app to message a contact with. The issues mentioned on the blog could have been resolved with better UI. As a techie, I do understand the challenges, but feel this change will ultimately hurt Signal.
Dropped support for SMS. If I wanted 10 different apps to communicate with people I wouldn’t have opted for Signal. Signal let me communication with those who cared about privacy AND those who did not. Those who cared were far and few between and the same few are now faced with the same dilemma. Do I/they really want to continue using Signal to communicate with the few who will likely drop the app altogether because of the inconvenience? People leaving further dwindles my need for Signal.
It was nice to use to start off with, but as time goes on, it’s getting worse. Messages won’t send at random. Can’t message people that don’t use signal, especially if it is set as my default texting app. I like some of the features, but it’s a messaging app. If it won’t send simple texts, there is no point in using it. Edit: still doing it. I’m so done with this app
Biggest feature is encryption. But the rest of the app works better than all other messaging apps. Edit: Starting nov. 22, 2022, signal keeps crashing and stopped working. I restored from backup twice. First time it started working then crashed again after 2 days. Second time, it crashed as soon as i restored. Both times, it crashed while making a new backup. I’m still giving 5 stars, but just letting everyone know, if your backup is more than 6GB, this might happen.
Stories. Bad idea. Don’t need the garbage. And now it’s crashed. Top marks for doing what they are doing. Not sure anyone would tell Signal if they’ve broken the codes but presumably there are plenty of independants out there that would love the publicity. The most important part for me is the privacy and efficient data use. Not worried about stickers etc but I’m sure many people are. As long as things aren’t there by default and we always have the ability to remove features we don’t use…
Signal was perfect until they removed sms support. I was using it as my default messaging app, but I can no longer do that. It’s extremely disappointing they’ve chosen not to continue with the support. I literally cannot convince everyone I know to switch to signal, a big selling point was to have it replace your main messaging app and they’ve gotten rid of that. Unfortunately, I’m going to remove it as go back to messages.
Follow-up: after removing the option to use this as an sms fallback we have to migrate all family chats off of signal as Grandma cannot juggle 2 apps. It’s really frustrating that it wasn’t offered as an optional backup. Initially it was a bit rough and buggy but now it’s pretty excellent. Wish I didn’t have to tie a phone number to the account though.
I only know I have had a video or text message attempt after I open Signal. I have battery optimise off and have the app locked to keep it open in the background. This makes Signal useless!! From within the Signal app I try to get help but it says there is no app to complete the message,what about the Signal app??? Oh wait, that’s right, it doesn’t work propperly. And to think I donated $ to them. Waste of time.
The encryption stuff takes some getting used to, as it’s much harder (sometimes impossible) to sync across devices and recover from a lost/broken device – but it’s one of those things, user friendliness usually means easy-to-hack. I use other messaging apps for normal SMS and then I do all of my most important conversations (wife, closest friends, etc.) here, and that’s worked well for me.
Signal is excellent. In many many ways. Their focus on secure zero access architecture is second to none. But USING their app, they have also made great strides in it’s usability, and presentation. The project is visibly under active development, and improvements happen frequently. I am proud to use this app and support the team behind it that makes such a functional product, and that then also works to polish said product. The one drawback: you have to recruit your friends.
Signal is really good, and kind of has an iMessage feel to it for those who are looking for something similar. unfortunately, it’s video quality is the weakest feature it has. I’m not expecting 1080p, maybe something a little less than 720p… but nay, it’s MAYBE 540p at best but it’ll quickly fizzle and go to 360/240p. hope that gets addressed soon, but again, still a beast of an app, 4 stars. with better video quality it’s definitely a 5/5.
Signal is an excellent messaging app. I greatly appreciate the high level of security and even though it can be a pain in the butt when you have to recover the app from an old phone, it is well worth the increase security. Be sure to do regular backups, and you say password manager to make sure to store your PIN for when you need to transfer to a different device.
Like the app. I appreciate the idea, but don’t appreciate that the person receiving the message needs to be a ‘member.’ That still requires that I use two separate apps – too complicated when I don’t have that many messages that need to be so secure. I also find that setting up group texts is difficult and not intuitive.
Please add scheduled messages and editing messages. Format of wallpaper needs some adjustments after you’ve selected a picture is zooms in and looks of bad quality. Great app and better alternative to WhatsApp and Google Chat. So far the features are pretty standard. You can send decent quality video/photos. No 4k HDR like iPhone but it’s a step in the right direction. Please donate!!! No this isn’t sponsored 🤘🏾
Still a great and important app, but… Gotta dock a few stars for ceasing SMS functionality. I used to have ALL my friends and family sending encrypted messages. But then they stopped supporting SMS, and much of my family didn’t see the point in having two different “texting” apps. Due to this I hardly ever get the chance to open it, except to message a select few people. Real shame.
While I understand the idea behind it, the decision to remove SMS support means it’s pretty much impossible for me to convince anyone to start using signal. Without SMS functionality, signal it’s just one of a plethora of closed-ecosystems with secure messaging. I was waiting to stop using signal hoping they will reverse this decision, when I saw they added a “Stories” feature. I don’t need social media shoehorned into every app I use. I will not be returning to Signal.
Camera doesn’t auto rotate, so it’s always incorrect if you try to shoot landscape images. This is a new problem with the latest update. Gone down another star because of this bug. Uses a TON of storage. When playing videos, the screen overlay (rewind, play, fast forward etc) and the top banner stay on the screen, covering 1/3 of the video. Usually the overlay disappears after a few seconds or after touching the screen
Amazing app, has allowed me to bring several friends that aren’t as concerned with privacy into a secure environment. However with the recent decision to drop sms, most of those friends will certainly be dropping the app and I may as well. The usp of signal used to be a single messaging app where e2e encryption is avalible cross platform. The app serves little to no purpose if I only have 1 or 2 contacts on it as there are plenty of channels where this protected communication can happen. Sorry
Update: Added support for stories as if this is a social media platform, but SMS support is being removed making this another app that requires 2 apps for SMS and encrypted chat. This reduces convenience. Also, the team still uses some obscure crypto as an in so payment form. Original: Great on the Android due to text/SMS integration, but kind of sucks on iPhone. On both, accessing photos is weird. Love the secure features and desktop client, but text/SMS doesn’t go thru the desktop client.
It works as described on my phone and has quickly become my go-to app for private communications One star off because I need to fiddle with my volume controls to hear playback of recorded audio. This is only a minor inconvenience and if I could take off only half or one third of a star that would be my rating. Thank you for this great app!
I like Signal. It’s intuitive to use. I’d give it five stars if it had better integration of notes to self, one tap button record (The slide feature is awkward and not precise), and if the developers shifted phone number sign in to regular account sign in, to easily log into your personal account on any device including any phone numbers…. It’s just super silly to have issues accessing one’s account on another phone. They do need to make proper improvements, and this app could get five stars.
The decision to drop SMS support is absolutely unacceptable, especially given the decision to add stories. You’ve replaced a feature that I used every day with one that I will never use. I don’t buy for a second that it was to focus on encrypted messaging, you added useless garbage. Yes, I realize that my SMS conversations were not encrypted, but it was beyond convenient to have everything in one application. Formerly five stars, it was a good run.