I installed the version that doesn’t need google services but it is not functional on SailfishOS:
It seems that Whatsapp had a better support from Jolla on this (if I trust Nuuksio release notes), why not Signal?
Signal changed its contact retrieving method which makes it incompatible with SailfishOS.
You can still enter phone numbers that should correspondent to your contacts.
There are allot of people using signal and SailfishOS. And all of them have the same problem with the contacts.
For example:
https://together.jolla.com/question/222746/signal-messenger-only-show-phone-numbers-on-sfos-32112/
Signal is a great messenger. SailfishOS is a great OS. But they are not working together.
Is there any progress? It´s such a pity.
@leszek Where you have this information from?
From the code itself. I was maintaining the Sailfish Edition of LibreSignal and know when the access to contacts changed and made it impossible to access contacts on SailfishOS.
There will be no signal client for SailfishOS from Open Whisper Systems, as seen in the post below.
But how it is possible, that the SailfishOS Android layer (Dalvik) is incompatible to an Android app?? It sounds like a bug in Dalvik. Is it possible to fix this somehow there?
The question is where is it possible to fix the bug, or how a workaround can look like.
well, there are many android apps, which are incompatible with Alien Dalvik. All apps, which use BT or apps which need additional services. so alien dalvik give you absolutely no warranty, that all android apps will run ot it…
if you app run on alien dalvik - you are lucky, if not? well than you need another app or true android phone…
There is some hope for all SailfishOS user. rubdos is working on a new version 0.6.0 of whisperfish:
It looks like there is some development in progress. He asks for feedback. So give whisperfish a try…
The official Signal application doesn’t work that well on SFOS, and Wisperfish is new and still in active development. I guess we have to pick between those, and the lacking contacts support tip the scale over to Wisperfish side for me… A native client is great in its own right, too!
Do you know whether this is fixable (or workaround) in the android layer by Jollla? or up to Signal to modify?
This is something that needs fixing in the Android Layer of Alien Dalvik. So basically a thing Jolla needs to fix as Signal itself just uses a newer API call for getting access to the contacts.
whisperfish: it seems i can login, it seems i can send messages. only nobody receives them
Thanks. I’ll wait for the next 4.0 release, and if that’s still not working, I’ll raise it during one of the future irc meetings.
I remember back when XA2 support was released, Jolla spend much time and did incredible job to make sure WhatsApp was working fine for most users. Hopefully the same for signal.
I’m using Signal official Android version. I add contacts via phone numbers - Signal finds people with phone numbers, after that it works very well in my humble opinion.
(XA2 3.4.0.22)
Hey @pawel.spoon , bounced on this by accident. I have had the exact same response from someone else three days ago.
Can you ask one of your contacts to follow this procedure? https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1350631024351346689 Even if they have not had “bad encrypted messages”.
I’ll try to have the button for session reset on Whisperfish asap now, given that this is the second time I encounter this.
It happened to me that I installed the new version of Whisperfish by @rubos after I tired the original version several months again. Later on I also tried the official Android version and registered my number there. Android’s version worked alright (with the exception that my contacts are not listed).
So I deleted all my user setttings for Whisperfish on .local/share/harbour-whisperfish and .config/harbour-whisperfish an reregistered my number in Whisperfish. Now I was told in Android version that my number is already registered in another client. It seems that you can use only one client per number.
I guess Whisperfish doesn’t verify if the registration is successful and fails silently. So I’d suggest to delete you local settings and try again.
Hmm, normally we do verify success of registration. You can indeed only have one “main” client per number. There’s a draft (very much WIP, not usable yet) to have Whisperfish as “secondary” device instead of primary. That way, you can keep the Android registration and use Whisperfish in parallel.
That said: if Whisperfish says the registration was successful, it definitely was successful. If you have issues afterwards, something else went terribly wrong.
Deleting those directories and re-registering should resolve most things indeed, but that means you lose your messages. Feel free to get in touch to debug whatever is going wrong; I don’t have any troubles myself currently.
…and yet still works, this makes it much better than Whatsapp (that doensn’t work unless you give Android access to all your contacts). A plus to me, thanks 
If that means spend engineer time, IMHO it would be better invested in getting a telepathy-signal working. Which would mean we could get signal integration into the messages app. This is how the n900 had skype integration, and this was the best integration i’ve seen on any device. I hope the same goes for signal integration (and it could be shared with other open source phone projects which use telepathy).
Don’t get me wrong: I’m happy that whisperfish exists, and thankful to its authors. However i think it is the wrong approach. I hope that for something official, this gets done the right way.
Hi rubdos!
It also seems to me, that only telephonenumbers with i.e. +43699…work when you initiate a chat for the first time. If your contact is stored as 0699… (when you live for example in Austria) or 0043699… then the other side has to make the start. After you´ve received the first message from the “other side” the number format in your phone book does not matter. Well you made it possible to chose the country code within the settings but if someone does not see this entry, he gets the message something like “incompatible” contact (I can´t remember the exact words) except the number is +43…
I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment, but Telepathy connection managers are apparently extremely complex to develop, so unless Jolla suddenly becomes a software giant able to hire a dozen developers to work exclusively on Telepathy, it’s quite unlikely to happen.