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Ask HN: Why are encrypted native SMS clients not a bigger thing?

5 points by asidiali ↗ HN
What’s preventing people from using a third party sms client (or even just a keyboard) that auto-encrypts the contents of the sms as it goes back and forth?

I get that a separate channel is more profitable, more controllable, but is that the only reason this concept hasn’t already taken off?

I see a few tools on the app stores that do this, but clearly no big players yet (afaik)

3 comments

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Jarwain
Signal used to do this, back when it was called "TextSecure". Their blog post talking about removing SMS can be found here: https://signal.org/blog/goodbye-encrypted-sms/

That said, it looks like there's a fork of TextSecure with SMS encryption https://git.silence.dev/Silence/Silence-Android/

asidiali
Great link, just the type of thing I was curious about, thanks.

In regards to the content:

Point 1 is a bit exaggerative, maybe more so in 2021 when everyone is familiar with the concept of “adding a friend”.

Point 2 is no longer an issue due to iOS allowing third party keyboards now, which could potentially be used as a workaround to “programmatically send messages” AKA automatically alter the content of the message before it’s sent or delivered.

Point 3 is valid, SMS and MMS generally suck.

Point 4 is just a recap of the other 3 point and therefore not convincing.

So, would Signal - or TextSecure - take the same approach in 2021? I’m not sure.

Also, I’m not convinced Signal’s reasoning from moving away from a public protocol is exactly pure in nature. Like I said before, of course the private channel is more controllable, more profitable - so Signal was incentivized from the get go to make that change.

Jarwain
That's fair, although I'm not quite sure how they could monetize the channel as a non-profit without selling or compromising on privacy