Assuming you're on Android, this is coming from the OS. It's still possible to save data in an externally-accessible place, but the default is storing things privately for each app. It's annoying for use cases like yours, but it's arguably better for overall security.
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2024
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I thought at least open source ones would do it otherwise considering the freedom they represent.
Looks like it has not reached that point yet.
It's not a matter of freedom, it's a question of desired functionality. If anything, keeping your data in a sandboxed area by default respects your freedom more (that is, freedom from other apps scraping your data).
If it's on Github, you could file a feature request to have that default behavior changed.
The reason Signal does this is that they consider your deivce storage 'unsafe', as it can be more easily accessible by other apps. AFAIK not providing the option to let you do it anyway is purely because the Signal devs don't want to.
Threema for example has an option to save all received media to normal storage, similar to WhatsApp.
Ah, that would be bliss.
On Signal, on iOS
- Open chat
- Click the chat title / name
- Open media
- Use the bulk select button to pick all media you want to save
Does exactly what you’re describing?
Suppose I want to keep a backup and decide later what I want to discard, I will have to keep on doing it manually each time to update the archive.
WhatsApp did it properly before where I could easily backup the whole directory which included all media and chat database locally. But now they are forcing Google backups which I do not like. I was looking for alternatives but they all seem to need this kind of manual saves. Eg. Signal, Twin Me, and the recently tried Jami.
Because they want to keep you in the sandbox.