Signal can finally move your chat history from an iPhone to an Android

Signal spent years telling people it could not bring their chat history to a new phone. As of 30 September that excuse is gone.

Version 8.30 adds encrypted on-device backups to iPhone and to the desktop apps on Windows, macOS and Linux for the first time. Android had them already, and Signal rebuilt that version to use the same format, so a backup made on one platform restores on another. Moving from an iPhone to an Android phone with your messages intact is the specific thing Signal flatly could not do until now.

There are two places to keep a backup. Signal can hold it for you, which on the free tier means all your text messages plus the last 45 days of photos and video, with a 128 KB ceiling per message, or up to 100 GB on a paid plan. Or you keep the file yourself, on an external drive or a box on your home network, with no size limit at all. Media now sits separately from the main archive and duplicate files are stored only once, so repeated backups stop ballooning.

The catch is the recovery key. It is the only thing that decrypts a backup, Signal does not hold a copy, and losing it turns the file into a brick. Put it in your password manager the moment it appears, and never hand it to anyone, including someone claiming to be Signal support. If you take the on-device route and park the file on your PC, remember it then needs backing up like everything else: Tendvane's one-click backup covers Documents, Pictures and Desktop, so save it somewhere that pass actually reaches.