93
Signal will finally let you register without a phone number, for a price
(www.androidauthority.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2026
93 points (97.9% liked)
Android
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Oh hey great, I don't need a phone number anymore, I just need a...Google account and a credit card? That's so much worse...
A Google account is required?? Well that's just dumb..
This is a red flag.
Signal is a paid contractor for Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and others since many years.
They openly talk about this on their own blog: https://signal.org/blog/allo/
While this may be true, I don't understand what this has to do with a tool that peaches privacy requiring a tool that violates all aspects of privacy.
EDIT: ah I believe you are saying that I never should have expected such purism in the first place.
Hey, at least their clients are open source so you know that their chats are actually encrypted.
Well yes and no. You can compile a client yourself but you can't use it with the official server, you have to use the binaries they put out for that. So there's a bit of a gap there.
Their clients are but they sell proprietary licenses, so when they proclaim that There is no WhatsApp 'backdoor', you have to take their word for it.
It doesn't matter how many back doors they have on the server side. As long as the clients are open source (and end-to-end encrypted), the only thing they can tell is that two people communicated.
That's not how it works when you have a messaging platform where the server provider can secretly pair additional devices. Send PGP encrypted mails if you want it differently.
What I'm saying is that Signal have a conflict of interest when it comes to Google and other customers.
Just for the moment
Agreed. They should not have tied it into a Google account, literally ruins the whole point of being anonymous on there. I get they needed to implement some sort of easy payment method, but this isn't it.
Only thing I could think to do is create a burner Google account, buy a Google play card in cash, and add those funds to your burner account to pay the 3 dollars.
This plus their longstanding refusal to implement things like an official FDroid client or UnifiedPush notifications leads me to believe they're not committed to privacy.
Those are also my two biggest gripes about Signal as well. At least the Molly fork solves both of those issues, that's what I use.
molly is no longer maintained properly. It's worse than signal as last molly version is from Jul 31 and last signal is from Sept 11.
i would think twice about using molly as the only benefit over signal is db encryption.
I'm aware they lag behind in updates, only reason I chose to use Molly was because if I recall correctly they use Google Firebase for notifications, and I use grapheneOS and don't have Google play service installed. So not sure if I would get notifications in my setup if I used signal witn no play services.
Correct me if I'm wrong though
Yeah, I've been considering trying to move friends and family to an XMPP server, but there are a couple older folks who will probably make that difficult.