I’ll cut straight to the chase: updating the Signal app annoys me and I’d like to know your best practices.
As far as I know, there are three ways of updating Signal:
- From the Play Store. This works quite reliably, yet comes at the cost of trusting and connecting to Google’s servers.
- Via the app’s built-in auto-updater that will, after a while, suggest an update through a notification. However, the frequency of these updates is really lackluster and thus unreliable, and there’s no way to trigger an update check manually.
- Via the APK on Signal’s website. In order for this to work, you need to have done the initial installation of the app from an APK already. Also, as far as I know, this version will not use GCM / Push notifications, but rather deliver notifications through a web socket, which is a huge drain on battery. Also, you’ll have to constantly check for updates yourself or rely on the (unreliable) self-updating mechanism (see 2).
Let me know how you do it, and if there’s something I’ve overlooked.
For a couple of years, I had Signal installed via apk from their site. Messages were sometimes delayed, sometimes not, but the updates seemed to work just fine.
I’ve switched to an install from Google Play by way of Aurora. Messages are arriving much quicker now.