Signal Enables Phone Number-less Registration in Beta

Signal has officially announced signups without phone numbers on their community forum for the Android 8.28 beta version of the app.

"Phonenumberless registration" has been a requested feature in Signal for many years. As one of the most highly-recommended private messengers, requiring a phone number was a pain point for many people.

A lot of countries have Know Your Customer (KYC) laws that require you to identify yourself when you sign up for a phone number. Even if you live somewhere where you don't have to give your identity in order to buy a phone number, most people use their phone number for multiple very personal things like communicating with their doctor and personal friends and family, so giving it away can still be uncomfortable.

Signal previously released a feature that allows you to chat with people under a username and prevent people you're chatting with from seeing your phone number, but Signal itself still asks for your number on signup.

Phonenumberless registration will close a big complaint that Signal users have had for many years, and that other messengers like Session, SimpleX Chat, and Threema don't suffer from since they don't require any personal information in order to use them.

The registration is only available on Android for now and costs a one-time fee of $2.99. The fee is meant to make it financially infeasible for spammers to create thousands of accounts and ruin Signal's network.

The payment is currently only offered through Play Services, but more payment methods are planned for the future. This means that users who don't have Play Services, such as people running GrapheneOS without Sandboxed Google Play, won't be able to try the feature out just yet.

The payment uses the same zero-knowledge proofs as Signal's donation system, so they won't be able to correlate your payment info to you.

Interestingly, the username is still optional, and if you don't set one, the account will be "completely unreachable" and the only chats you can participate in are ones you start yourself.

Your account will be secured using a new Account ID and Account Key, sort of like a traditional username and password, which you can save in your password manager. You can also enable TOTP 2FA to further secure your account, and they say passkey support is coming in the future.

You also won't be able to remove your number from an already-existing account, and they say they're still "thinking through the implications."