Just use Signal

Signal's sub-par desktop app and "you can't restore more than five days of history and if you want more you're wrong" approach, together with the complete inability to use the normal app on more than one device (phone + tablet, for instance), makes for a pretty terrible user experience.

The protocol and the service behind it are state-of-the-art, but it's a tough sell if you're coming from something that just works on every device, like iMessage or WhatsApp.

It’s fine for ephemeral chats. But one of the pissoffs of restoring the phone is losing all of my signal messages each time. I threw it on Android device today since it was getting annoying explaining to my active signal contacts each time my identity changed and I will have at least another restore ahead of me still.