Headline:

Signal is working on registration without a phone number. But what form will it take?

30 July 2026 10:30 CEST

Signal is working on a way to optionally sign up without a phone number. The feature has not yet been officially confirmed, and it is not yet known whether it will be available to all users or in what form.

I've always said it. Best form to prevent spam is to have allow list as a default. You should only be able to receive messages from pre-approved people.

I have allow listed my email for ages and it's great.

But obviously advertisers and business hate it because then they need your true consent to send you shit.

Another W for Signal

Sooo instead you will be required to pay by card and thus have your identity proven by financial institutions behind? Big ooof.

I'll be happy if it happens but I need to see it. It would be significant to use Signal without phone number but one option they are considering to combat scam is to use bank card payment... Signal's issue still remains the centralisaion

Ten years too late.

This could have had a far greater impact when whatsapp exodus or controversy happend in 2021. I bet they have reached a stall in the number of new accounts and donations are drying out.

I have also read rumors about them thinking about tying this to a one time payment to prevent bot registration

They say they need to figure out how to counter/avoid spam/abuse first. And that makes a lot of sense to me. I mean, just look at Telegram (which is ironically going the opposite route nowadays).

They already lost users in authoritarian countries like Russia or China, where Signal is blocked and you can't get an SMS via a VPN, so registration or logging in with 2FA becomes impossible.

This is the main reason I don't use Signal, so depending on if and how it gets implemented, I may finally use it. Getting other people on board will be its own fight of course.

It would be good if true, for a privacy first chat, asking for your phone number is the first and biggest red flag.

Someone knows how Delta Chat handles the spam problem? Or spam is only a problem that comes with wider adoption?

Considering I've been sending everyone to Session instead, since I refuse to put a phone number linked to my name, address, and payment information in to a "privacy focused" messenger...

We had an encrypted chat for a bit before I realized it was completely pointless with literally everyone in it but one or two having entirely stock phones with in-built Ai and tracking mechanisms. We used XMPP.

Since it was for a Jellyfin server, it basically meant anyone on an unmodified Google or Apple phone was basically a door to a seach of that data from either company for the text logged into each chatroom by each user, and displayed. Unless everyone is secure, no one is.

Will this allow people to install it on multiple devices? Right now I can't have it on my phone AND tablet and it sucks...

My biggest issue with Signal is that it doesn’t reliably work. I’ll message back and forth with a friend on there and then receive a text message a week later asking why I’m not responding on Signal. And it’s because I didn’t receive the messages.

Haven’t they been working on this for months? I could have sworn I heard of this well over a year ago.