You can still communicate with your SMS-using friends via the normal means… IMO mixing totally secure and totally insecure communications in the same app (the same list view even!) was always a poor idea.
From an outsider/non-user's perspective, there are two angles to this: dropping the ability to use Signal as your default SMS handler does make the program much more secure, but it also means the barrier for getting new, casual users to onboard much harder. When it functions as an SMS app, you can get friends/family/whoever to install it and set it as default, and it will opportunistically use E2EE when available.
It seems to me like this improves OPSEC for very privacy focused Signal users, but increases the barrier to entry for "casual" users who may not care enough to use a separate app for certain people, but may be convinced to use Signal for SMS.
All that said, I'm not sure how any of that actually plays out in the real world, or if there were that many actual users doing just that.
I have never had any problem distinguishing between encrypted and unencrypted communication sin signal because they put a giant padlock icon next to the name of the contact. Now I have to use 2 different apps to handle messaging and set up a different color scheme or something to provide a visual cue about which is which if I respond to a notification in a hurry.
It's fine if you don't use SMS in the Signal app much. But a lot of us only downloaded Signal because it could replace the built-in Android SMS app. By dropping the SMS feature, we now have to use N+1 apps just to receive the occasional shipping notification or 2FA message.
I'm glad that dropping SMS means nothing to you. But "i don't see how you can known signal in anyway" for dropping a feature sounds disingenuous.
I mean thats a slight inconvenience at the cost of not letting people be confused that they are not actually having an encrypted conversation. I still stand by my original statement and don’t understand how people are so mad about that. Sure “it sucks” you need another app now but the comments about this in the threat are treating it like signal is doing something malicious
