Signal Android Beta Has Support for Numberless Accounts

Signal has merged numberless accounts as a feature in the upcoming Android beta 8.26.

Signal is one of the most commonly recommended messengers for privacy. Its double-ratchet encryption was revolutionary when it came out, and the Signal protocol has since been adopted by other encrypted messengers such as WhatsApp.

Signal is also commonly early to implement new improvements such as Post-Quantum Encryption and Automatic Key Verification.

There's been a sticking point for years though that has annoyed privacy advocates and, in my personal experience, caused a roadblock in getting people to switch to Signal: it requires a phone number to sign up.

Phone numbers are sensitive personal information for some people. so it's understandable that many people don't like to hand off their phone number to an app they've never heard of before.

Many other messengers such as SimpleX Chat and Session don't require a phone number on signup. Signal's answer for why they do is for anti-spam purposes, as a phone number has a monetary cost associated with it and there are a limited number of possible phone numbers available at any given time.

Signal CTO Ehren Kret had previously confirmed Signal was looking into account registration with a phone number in a Q and A at the FUTO Don't Be Evil Conference:

that is something we are looking a hopefully for later on this year adding a way to sign up without phone numbers. Uh the main uh downside at the moment and the reason we don't have that yet today is removing accounts who are are spamming people or otherwise engaging in abuse of the service is sort of our our primary way of protecting people from spam and other sort of issues like that that would affect the operational stability of the service.

The proposed solution was to make numberless accounts incur a small fee, making it infeasibly expensive for spammers to create thousands of accounts over and over.

Hints of numberless accounts were spotted on Signal's GitHub previously in the form of several commits referencing numberless accounts.

There's seemingly no mention of the payment feature, but maybe users of the Signal beta can test it out and see if there's new UI elements for it. I'm not sure how the feature would work in a beta, but it would be interesting to see.