Feature: import existing conversations from app

[lorenzhs]

It would be amazing if the Chrome app could sync the phone's conversations on first start, so you could start with all the history from the phone. I realise this might take a while and might not be desirable for every user, but I'd love to have that functionality.

[qrmn]

Agreed. I don't have any conversations or groups from my phone, and posting from groups doesn't add them to Signal Desktop. Sync's broken.

[lorenzhs]

Uh, that sounds like a bug. New conversations from mobile show up in Signal Desktop for me. This issue is about importing those that happened before installing Signal Desktop. If sync doesn't work, you should file an issue. This is not about that.

[kinghat]

i had the same issue when setting up signal desktop. none of the content of my phones conversations were synced, but the contacts and what i presume are empty conversations. you can see from the image below what im getting at.

[vrabac]

This is what it really would be amazing and for me it should be done like that on initial Chrome App start to sync the phone Signal conversation history. The contact are visible and group to, but starting conversation on Signal Desktop Beta have no history. New incoming stuff in group/conversation are synced fine.

[thvasilo]

Can confirm this as well, what I got was my contacts with empty message histories when I first opened the app.

[difranco]

Let me say I'm also really looking forward to this feature, or at least to some other way to get MMS off an old phone. I've lost all my MMS several times with Signal because it lacks a way to export / sync them, and I am about to again as I change phones once more. This is a core feature that's missing and I have only put up with it because I like what Signal is generally trying to do and am so far willing to overlook what it actually does in this case.

[breznak]

I'm also having the problem of empty conversations on desktop. Just to clarify if we are on the same boat: I didn;t use the previous "Chrome desktop app", so I didn't choose "Import from Chrome" during installation. I'd still expect that the messages get synced after I linked my phone+desktop.

[pde]

Maybe to clarify this feature request a little bit: the various Signal clients could support an "sync history from other Signal instance" action. This should definitely be a sync operation, rather than a pure import.

To illustrate an extreme case of this, a user may have backed up a Signal-for-chrome or Signal-desktop instance with a lot of history, lost their devices, started using Signal again, and then recovered their backups. They now have a really complicated mixture of histories in different places, and a sync operation is the right way to re-merge them.

[tomash]

👍 a feature to import old message history from phone into newly configured signal-desktop would be very useful. I understand that automated sync with current architecture is non-trivial, so having a manual "import history file" option in signal-desktop, accepting history file exported from mobile app, would be enough.

[github-cygwin]

Another potential solution would be to allow importing the backup file from ones mobile device. Since the feature already exists for moving to a new device, why not for importing into signal-desktop, too?

[orangerkater]

Oh, how is this syncing between devices almost three years later still not a thing? Desktop apps could serve as backups as well.

[devonwesley]

Yeah, this would help me out.

[v6]

// , What are the security implications?

[nicosto]

+1, I'd like to be able to have in signal all my old SMS/mms. Not importing is a real limitation.

[Darkdragon84]

I agree, this seems like a severe limitation and indeed a core feature missing to me

[RastaTux]

+1 to fix this and have any possibility to backup and sync data. This is a real downside and makes it hard to move my friends over to Signal.. :(

[HalfWhitt]

I've never used the previous Chrome app, but I just installed the current desktop app and I definitely thought something was wrong when I linked my phone but still couldn't see my message history on the desktop app. This seems like the kind of feature that, if it's not implemented, should be mentioned as such, because with no explanation it feels like a bug.

[scottnonnenberg-signal]

I'm going to lock this - we already have what we need from the community about it. If you'd like to continue to discuss it, please use the forums: https://whispersystems.discoursehosting.net/