In addition to his role at AP, Arol is also a staff writer for sister site MakeUseOf, where he writes mostly about computing. You'll normally find him covering news, although he has also written the occasional deal, buyer's guide, how-to post, and round-up.

While he's a technology lover at heart, he holds Android phones, and smartphones in general, close to heart. Arol brings half a decade of writing experience, and the occasional hot take, to his writings. He transitioned to a news and feature writer role at XDA Developers that same year, where he worked until 2021 before making the jump to AP. Years later, in 2017, he got his true start in tech journalism working for a small Google-focused site called Pixel Spot. He first began writing online for the short-lived portal of Spanish-language gaming forum Emudesc in 2013. That might be true to a certain extent, but we'd argue Signal ultimately made the right call.Īrol is a tech journalist and contributor at Android Police. A lot of Twitter users have left angry replies to Signal's announcement tweet, saying that the fact that Signal was a one-stop shop for SMS and end-to-end encrypted messages was a selling point that boosted adoption of the app. Many people, however, have different opinions on the matter. The blog post also says that the removal of SMS will allow for the addition of other features down the road, such as usernames - you might be able to finally use a username on Signal rather than having to hand everyone your phone number. Finally, it's a move that ultimately helps Signal streamline its user experience.

SMS are plain-text messages sent as-is, leaking metadata left and right in transit all while leaving records at your mobile network provider, Signal explains.Īmong other reasons the company is citing, Signal also reports that people can get unknowingly billed for SMS messages if they're not aware they're messaging someone using SMS texts rather than Signal messages.

Basically, the app has no way of protecting SMS messages the same way it protects Signal messages, which are end-to-end encrypted. Signal published a detailed blog post outlining its plans to phase out SMS support from its Android app, as well as the reason why it's doing that.

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