88
Signal will finally let you register without a phone number, for a price
(www.androidauthority.com)
Signal has always been shady. Never trusted them
this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2026
88 points (97.8% liked)
Android
22134 readers
54 users here now
The new home of /r/Android on Lemmy and the Fediverse!
Android news, reviews, tips, and discussions about rooting, tutorials, and apps.
πUniversal Link: !android@lemdro.id
π‘Content Philosophy:
Content which benefits the community (news, rumours, and discussions) is generally allowed and is valued over content which benefits only the individual (technical questions, help buying/selling, rants, self-promotion, etc.) which will be removed if it's in violation of the rules.
Support, technical, or app related questions belong in: !askandroid@lemdro.id
For fresh communities, lemmy apps, and instance updates: !lemdroid@lemdro.id
π¬Matrix Chat
π°Our communities below
Rules
-
Stay on topic: All posts should be related to the Android OS or ecosystem.
-
No support questions, recommendation requests, rants, or bug reports: Posts must benefit the community rather than the individual. Please post to !askandroid@lemdro.id.
-
Describe images/videos, no memes: Please include a text description when sharing images or videos. Post memes to !androidmemes@lemdro.id.
-
No self-promotion spam: Active community members can post their apps if they answer any questions in the comments. Please do not post links to your own website, YouTube, blog content, or communities.
-
No reposts or rehosted content: Share only the original source of an article, unless it's not available in English or requires logging in (like Twitter). Avoid reposting the same topic from other sources.
-
No editorializing titles: You can add the author or website's name if helpful, but keep article titles unchanged.
-
No piracy or unverified APKs: Do not share links or direct people to pirated content or unverified APKs, which may contain malicious code.
-
No unauthorized polls, bots, or giveaways: Do not create polls, use bots, or organize giveaways without first contacting mods for approval.
-
No offensive or low-effort content: Don't post offensive or unhelpful content. Keep it civil and friendly!
-
No affiliate links: Posting affiliate links is not allowed.
Quick Links
Our Communities
- !askandroid@lemdro.id
- !androidmemes@lemdro.id
- !techkit@lemdro.id
- !google@lemdro.id
- !nothing@lemdro.id
- !googlepixel@lemdro.id
- !xiaomi@lemdro.id
- !sony@lemdro.id
- !samsung@lemdro.id
- !galaxywatch@lemdro.id
- !oneplus@lemdro.id
- !motorola@lemdro.id
- !meta@lemdro.id
- !apple@lemdro.id
- !microsoft@lemdro.id
- !chatgpt@lemdro.id
- !bing@lemdro.id
- !reddit@lemdro.id
Lemmy App List
Chat and More
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Is there no better way of doing this for Signal?!
So $3 and Google is to "prevent spam"
But yet I can pay less then 0.25$ for an SMS and get 4x the accounts.
I don't think its going to prevent spam, I think its going to eventually lead to someone getting got for linking a gmail to a signal account.
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.
Just for the moment
Can I buy an account on a device that has no Play Services?
Not yet. We have plans to add more payment methods, but currently only offer Play Store in-app payments, which requires Play Services.
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.
I believe you are saying that I never should have expected such purism in the first place.
What I'm saying is that Signal have a conflict of interest when it comes to Google and other customers.
Hey, at least their clients are open source so you know that their chats are actually encrypted.
their clients are open source
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.
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.
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.
If youβre worried about the payment being tied to your account, Parrelli also explains that the app will use the same zero-knowledge proofs Signal uses for its donation system.
Trust me bro.
This is just a quicker way of de-anonymizing than having to track down how you paid for a phone number. At least you can get a phone number with crypto.
This trust is also needed for sealed sender. It's fundamentally impossible to make such a system actually anonymous
Parrelli explains that Signal is instituting the $3 fee to prevent scammers from creating multiple accounts and flooding the network.
$3 does not seem like nearly enough to prevent this
I don't think the same credit card can be used for multiple accounts.
So it is not about money but hoops one needs to jump through to pay that money.
You can only reach a few people before an account is banned due to reports.
And most people won't fall for scams.
And you also wanna pay the remaining operation not spend most returns on signal accounts.
Because of that there's a massive difference in the kind of spam you get when it costs cents vs a few bucks per account.
I definitely get more spam on discord than signal for example.
3 bucks is also a lot more than it takes in some places to get numbers, so maybe long-term signal will try to also limit those number spaces with a fee? Either way this is enough to keep numbers as the weak link not numberless signups.
You also need to factor in the cost of getting a new phone number. If creating an account without a phone number is significantly more expensive than just buying a burner SIM, it defeats the entire purpose.
Here in Austria, I've seen SIM cards for as low as β¬2.
Aren't they free? I would think any carrier would jump at the occasion to get you on their network. Besides you'll have to purchase service anyway so charging for the SIM seems like a dick move. Unless you meant that the 2β¬ includes some form of service.
I just checked again, the offer is now β¬4 and includes 100 minutes/sms/megabyte.
simplex folks. use simplex.
Simplex have different design and does not cover the same use case. For me I just want a middle ground between the two.
fair enough.
Why Simplex over Molly?
simplex requires zero identifiable information.
you have to add users to the trust to get access to the channel/dm.
the relay is self-hosted, meaning you have control over where your messages are handled. this means you could run it entirely on an intranet or pipe it through a lora-wan.
personally I run a local instance within my LAN, and another instance in the cloud. both terminate with the same DNS. this means I can have quick very secure chats with family while at home that never leaves my network and when we're out messages are still going through my infrastructure.
definitely a comparative turd to use in my. expernce and mine just sh! the bed and froze solid, losing everything with a decryption error, while attempting to do that most boring of things, a backup
were you trying to backup a relay or your chatlog?
Looks like before it gets out of beta it will be available in ~~fucking~~ whatsapp.
Fucking