Signal Secure Backups

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?

Hi there, Signal dev here. The new backup format is indeed cross-platform. I've successfully restored backups on an iPhone, we're just stabilizing things :)

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.