This seems to be an unfortunate case where a feature has a misleading name.

You already had secure and encrypted backups on your phone, which you could copy and restore, if you remembered to copy them, and write down a very long password.

The new feature is apparently a way for signal to sell cloud services.

I do think cloud based backups are very useful for less technical people. But it does not really matter if your (properly encrypted) signal backup lives on a google drive/apple cloud, or on a cloud service managed by Signal.

The encrypted backups do work, but Signal is really, really bad at indicating when and how to make them to use them for restoration. Most non-technical people I know are just resigned to wiping out their Signal history every time they get a new iPhone (and I know two people who abandoned Signal and went back to iMessage because of this), and even I've lost it a couple times.

It leaves sort of a gross taste in my mouth that a paid service is the fix for their unhelpful UX.

> You already had secure and encrypted backups on your phone, which you could copy and restore, if you remembered to copy them, and write down a very long password.

Did I? Where? on iOS I don't.

Edit: there is a transfer to a new phone thing, but that only works if the old phone still works. Which makes it not a backup (it's a transfer).

> if you remembered to copy them, and write down a very long password

All that BEFORE your phone was stolen/damaged.

Come on, $2/month is nothing, and doubtful would raise much of “revenue “. That’s a coffee a month.

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