The popular secure chat app Signal has made a number of updates recently, including the long-awaited feature that now allows users to change their registered phone number without losing current chats.
Conversations on Signal are encrypted from end-to-end and because of that, chats are linked to the user’s phone number – which means they are not synchronized to the cloud for privacy reasons. This meant that previously, users who changed their phone number would lose all of their conversations.
In order to change the phone number to which your Signal account is registered, you must have access to both the old and new phone number. The old number needs to be enabled on Signal before the account can be updated. Your contacts on Signal will be notified of your change in phone number.
Signal’s popularity soared in 2021, after WhatsApp made a controversial change to its privacy policy, which resulted in lots of people abandoning the app and moving to alternative platforms such as Signal and Telegram.
Since then, things have been getting bigger and better for Signal, which recently announced it would be changing its CEO.
