Signal Desktop

FIRST-HAND READS

What people reported, in their own words. Every line links to where it was said.

• “very bad user experience "To use the Signal desktop app, Signal must first be installed on your phone."”

  NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-04-10

• “Signal desktop outright stops working if you don't constantly pull updates from them.”

  NEGATIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2026-04-03

• “We couldn't update some software that required us to be on the latest version of MacOS (Signal desktop), so the laptop became prematurely obsolete.”

  NEGATIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2026-03-22

• “the Signal desktop app, all suck UI-wise compared to actual native Mac apps”

  NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-02-14

• “you can't restore your messages if you lose your phone even if you have logged-in Signal Desktop”

  NEGATIVE · features · Hacker News · 2025-12-28

• “the Signal desktop app reports that my internet connection is down. As in: We cannot fathom anything also being the issue :)”

  NEGATIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2025-10-20

• “non-trivial because in recent versions of the desktop the decrypt key is also encrypted and store in keychain. I had to install sqlcipher, find my encrypted key stored locally, find the decrypt key in apple's keychain, decrypt it using Signal's format, etc. This took a lot of trial and error”

  NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2025-09-08

• “We live in a fallen world. I find myself using Signal Desktop”

  NEGATIVE · Hacker News · 2025-09-04

• “Signal Desktop is 400+ MB, so The network is always down, the disk is always slow, and the OS never schedules your threads”

  NEGATIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2025-08-04

• “there's also this stupid time component so you get logged out on your computer if you haven't used the Signal desktop app for some weeks”

  NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2024-09-29