this is the most bewildering notification I've ever gotten

like what are you talking about what do you mean I MAY have new messages

and I literally didn't, for the record. what the fuck

@sierra whatsapp also does this

@sierra i thought it was a whole thing because notifications are handled by google cloud messaging and some phones that are degoogled don’t have it so they have their own implementations that work.

but if your phone is normal then that shouldn’t happen 😭

@sierra signal thought it'd give you some hope of actually having friends, how nice of them :)

@sierra there is a possibility that you could have new messages. perhaps. no guarantee.

@autumn @sierra
afaik Signal does not actually send message contents through GCM, receiving a notification causes Signal to look for new messages and then send a “proper” one. If that fails, you see this message.

@privateger @sierra yeah i think WhatsApp actually has the same mechanism to fall back on if GCM doesn’t exist

@sierra while I don’t remember the details, afaik signal uses some google api to tell the app to check the server for new messages (because waking the app constantly to check is bad for battery and this way google also doesn’t know about the details of the message). I think this notification may be related to that process.

@autumn @sierra signal (and i guess whatsapp) only use google could messaging to wake the app up so that it checks for new messages

if it can't connect, it sends that cryptic notification

@sierra schrödinger’s messages

@sierra In theory your counterpart could have deleted them.

@sierra well Signal is all about privacy, with this someone looking at your lock screen wouldn't be able to see whether you actually got messages or not.

idk I'm just making this up it's really silly :v

@sierra whatsapp does this too i think