I’ve seen a few techlore videos as well as others both suggesting people use signal and people use multiple phone numbers for different aspects of their lives. Signal doesn’t currently support multiple accounts/numbers on one phone. Is there anyone who does these two things and have a convenient work around?
EDIT: Also unrelated - Does anyone here use Silent Link? If so, how are data speeds? I’m aware of the privacy benefits, but is it 5G for example? How’s browsing, internet browsing, and such? Just curious as there’s not a lot of info out there.
Yes, Signal doesn’t currently support multiple accounts/numbers but you can still do that via some workarounds :
If you are on GrapheneOS or Stock Android, you can create multiple profiles for each Signal account/number and so that way you can use Signal with multiple accounts.
If you are on a phone like Samsung, OPPO or OnePlus, these types of phones doesn’t have this “profile” feature but you can use an app like Shelter that will create a work profile separated from your own main profile. The major issue with this is that you are limited to only one profile so if you have 3 or 4 Signal accounts/numbers to manage, this isn’t for you.
If you are speaking about Shelter, yes you don’t have to. If you are speaking about GrapheneOS/Stock Android, I don’t know. If there’s someone using GrapheneOS/Stock Android on this forum, this person can help you.
Here is video from Side of Burritos that I share when I see a question related to profiles.
A work around for myself related to notifications is using a Signal Desktop. I have my Admin/Owner Signal app going 99% of the time. I have my User Profile Signal set up on a Laptop all the time. This user profile is used very little in comparison to my Admin/Owner profile. When I do get a notification on the Desktop, I will choose to either reply from the Desktop or swap profiles.
With grapheneOS you can get notifications in one user profile from another user profile, but you can’t see message content, only the app that sent the notification. On stock android you cannot get notifications across user profiles.
You could look at molly, a signal fork, for another phone number for signal. It still only lets you have one number but you could use it for 2 of your more important numbers and then put both signal and molly on another user/work profile and get 2 more, less accessable numbers. Just an idea, never tried it
Both of these seem doable! Honestly, as long as I know I’m getting a message at all, it seems like a tolerable trade off to open the profile to see the contents!
Using forks makes me nervous, but there are likely things I can do to mitigate that risk
