Wow, maybe as a side effect users will be able to migrate between Android and iOS without losing their message history.
Seriously, why is the migration protocol completely different on the two platforms?
replies(3):
If you're curious, the reason that Android's current local backups aren't cross platform is because it was made a long time ago, and it's literally a dump of all the sqlite statements that can be used to recreate Android's sqlite database (encrypted with a strong, random, local key). So not the most portable!
But this new thing is all cross-platform, and in the near future we'll even be making our local backups cross-platform.
> But secure backups aren’t the end of the road. The technology that underpins this initial version of secure backups will also serve as the foundation for more secure backup options in the near future. Our future plans include letting you save a secure backup archive to the location of your choosing, alongside features that let you transfer your encrypted message history between Android, iOS, and Desktop devices.
iOS has had pretty decent audio format support for a few years now: even though you can't directly import FLAC files to iTunes/Music, they are supported in the OS itself since 2017 and play fine both in Files and in Safari. The other big mainstream formats (WAV, AIFF, MP3, AAC, and ALAC) have been supported for years, and even Opus finally got picked up in 2021.
About the only non-niche audio format that isn't supported natively on Apple platforms at this point is Vorbis, which was fully superseded by Opus well over a decade ago. Even then, I believe it's possible to get Vorbis support in iOS apps using various media libraries, although I'm sure Apple frowns upon it.
I'd really love to know what's causing that incompatibility.
> But this new thing is all cross-platform, and in the near future we'll even be making our local backups cross-platform.
This is excellent news! Will there also be official documentation on the backup format, potentially even official tooling like signalbackup-tools[0] to access/parse backups offline? I'm asking because, having used Signal/TextSecure for 10 years now, my backups are worth a lot to me (obviously) and there have been times when I would have liked to mine & process my backed-up data. (Extract media from conversations in an automated manner, build a more elaborate search, …)
My backups have also reached the point where they are so big (15-20 GB) that it's starting to become difficult to conduct a backup each day and sync it successfully before it gets overridden 48h later. So unless I start using the new "cloud backup" feature[1] (which I'm not sure I want to), at some point I will have to archive my existing Signal conversations somewhere and start from scratch (i.e. reset the app). In that case, it would be nice if there was an officially documented way to merge & read new and old backups offline (on my desktop), similar to what [0] provides right now.
[0]: https://github.com/bepaald/signalbackup-tools
[1]: EDIT: Actually, it seems like the new cloud backup feature doesn't support incremental backups, either? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45175387
There's no reason to keep it secret and no reason why signal won't speak to this point.
Thanks!
Also, as someone else noted, the format is indeed incremental. So while we'll still do the thing where we keep the last two backups on disk, because those two backups will share almost all the same media files, the size on disk will be much much smaller. As someone with a 50 GB backup file, this was very much a goal for me :)
[1] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/main/app/sr...
That would be fantastic! Thanks so much!
> As someone with a 50 GB backup file, this was very much a goal for me :)
Haha, I'm glad I'm not the only one!