this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
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[–] Poutinetown@lemmy.ca 46 points 1 year ago (14 children)

The cost of these registration services for verifying phone numbers when people first install Signal, or when they re-register on a new device, currently averages around $6 million dollars per year.

That's pretty crazy. Wonder which third party providers they are using. Maybe the identity verification methods we have today is due for some significant changes?

[–] verysoft@kbin.social 41 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah, I wasn't expecting that to be the bulk of their spending. Maybe they should remove the need for phone numbers now they removed SMS.

[–] Poutinetown@lemmy.ca 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

SMS is dead, so they will need to move on eventually. Most carriers are moving towards high data plans now. I mainly use it for verification, although I'd rather use more secure methods.

[–] u_tamtam@programming.dev 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well, if SMS is dead then RCS is what we get instead, and there's no difference to us (and probably higher costs for Signal & al.)

And there are wayyyy too many things that depend on SMS for it to be dead any time soon, too :)

[–] smileyhead@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 1 year ago

Also Signal cannot add RCS support, because Google Jibe servers won't allow other app than Google Messages... And you must use them because native RCS support for Android is halted for years... And you cannot install some module with RCS support yourself because of anti-Unix monolitic Android userspace architecture...

Man, there are so many things done wrong.

[–] tja@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] u_tamtam@programming.dev 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No, I think they are merely working on user ids no longer mandating to be your phone number (so that it can be pseudonymous, e.g. tja@signal instead of +xx0123456@signal), I don't believe they hope to drop SMS verification at this point because of the spam issue getting worse otherwise

[–] tja@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

Ah yes, good point! 👍

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