Signal is the uber secure messenger with the same features as WhatsApp but without Meta casting its long shadow over your phone. But Signal is so secure, it doesn’t even provide iPhone users with a backup and restore option. This means that when moving to a new iPhone, keeping all your Signal messages could be your biggest challenge.
It doesn’t matter how you transfer data to your new iPhone, whether via an iCloud backup or directly from your iPhone. Those Signal messages do not come across.
Instead, you need to open and register Signal on the new phone and select an iOS transfer. Then you use a QR code to connect the old and new iPhones and a transfer will begin. Be warned — that transfer can take many hours and often fails.
You won’t know it’s failed until you realize it has frozen. That could be at 0% or 100% or any point in between. No one seems to know why this is so painful — but it is.
Signal’s iPhone users take to Reddit and other online forums (1,2,3,4) to complain about transfers that take hours or fail, and many give up and start afresh. Advice includes placing one iPhone on top of the other, or moving them closer but not too close.
Here’s the answer. Ignore the official advice and use a cable instead. The process is the same, but before you start disable WiFi, Bluetooth and AirDrop (which will be disabled at this point anyway). Connect a USB-C to USB-C cable between the two iPhones. And then open the new Signal app, register the app, and initiate the transfer.
In my experience this takes minutes not hours, and does not fail. Something in Apple’s secure wireless data transfer protocol as utilized by Signal is failing, and it’s too haphazard to use reliably. It’s simply not worth the pain.
Not only do these wireless updates fail or take forever to complete, you can’t use your phone while they’re ongoing. There’s no need to go through all this or risk losing your message history. Just skip the wireless advice and use a cable instead.
If you’re in Europe, you may not need to do any of this. There’s a very real risk that Signal will withdraw from the continent if the EU’s ridiculous chat control goes ahead as feared. This is client-side screening to overcome the restrictions end-to-end encryption places on the apparatus of a surveillance state.
