> Signal operates on the idea that anything sent through chat is ephemeral and not worth keeping, which just doesn’t work in practice in my experience.
Why do you think that? Did you lose any messages? 'cause I can scroll back months and still see all my messages there. Never noticed any loss.
> Signal does not care about users and prevents backups on iOS. Lose your device or delete the app due to some issues and reinstall? All your chats are gone!
Switching out devices is something that happens often enough for many users that transferring history should not be an ordeal. Even the most careful users will occasionally break their phones, and sometimes people need to switch platforms for whatever reason.
WhatsApp suffers from this issue too, at least when trying to migrate histories between platforms.
just to add, telegram can NOT transfer or back up E2E encrypted chats either. unencrypted chats transfer because they are saved on the telegram server.
i think deltachat is possibly the only one that can transfer encrypted messages because you can copy the encryption keys and the messages are just mails, easy to copy (and usually stored on your mail server too)
i don't know how matrix handles this, but from the way verification works there, i am not confident.
Why do you think that? Did you lose any messages? 'cause I can scroll back months and still see all my messages there. Never noticed any loss.