I’m trying to use signal on two profiles of my grapheneos phone. I’m already aware signal only allows one device per account, so I’ve been trying to use the Molly fork, which allows me to connect as a linked device. However, when I switch profiles and try to link it just doesn’t work. Does anyone have any solutions? This is really important to me.
EDIT: for anyone interested this is the only possible solution without rooting. Since grapheneos resets your internet after every profile switch it’s not possible to do this with internet. You must have a sim card with cell data. Once you toggle off your wifi and vpn, the whole process should work fine. (You still need another device to take a photo of the qr code with). Also the qr code expires so be quick. Also official signal app doesn’t seem to work, so I would use Molly.
I currently have Signal set up in all my user profiles on GrapheneOS. I use Molly though so slightly different, but I think its needed for this to work. here’s what i did:
Molly is set up in my owner profile. open the app, go to settings, link a device, select the camera option so you can scan a QR code. This just speeds up the process of linking, you’ll see later. Exit the app and switch profiles. Download Molly onto desired secondary profile, if its already installed just proceed reading. Make sure “allow running in background” is allowed for that user profile and that Molly has unrestricted battery access on both profiles before you try to link accounts. On secondary profile, open Molly and tell it to link a device. Tell it to use QR code to link accounts. You should still be on secondary profile at this point.
With another device, take a photo of the QR code that was generated from your secondary profile. Right after that, as quickly as you can, switch to your owner profile and scan the photo of the QR code that you took a photo of. The QR code expires after a certain time after its generated, so the faster you can scan, the better. Since we opened the camera for QR scanning before switching profiles, as soon as you open Molly on your owner profile, the app will open straight into the camera. It might fail to scan the first time. I scanned the QR code repeatedly until it asked me to confirm linking the account, to which you can say yes. It can only port over the last 45 days worth of messages so don’t expect to have it be a mirror copy of your owner profile. But any messages from then on out will save and will be so much more convenient instead of switching user profiles to respond to a text.
As others have mentioned, local backups wont work across profiles, so be weary of that. I think backups will only work on your owner profile. I would just re-link my profiles again and accept that Im going to lose old messages on my secondary profiles if I needed to use one of my local signal backups. Like I said this is just a more convenient method of being able to use signal across profiles. Like for me, I have a completely isolated user profile that has google maps and android auto installed, and before i figured this out, i couldnt respond to signal messages or calls while on a long road trip for example, which was inconvenient beyond belief especially when trying to plan things with my group while navigating. Yes I would get cross-profile notifs so I knew when I was being reached, but I dont have to switch profiles and interrupt my map directions anymore when I respond.
Also, enable “exploit protection compatibility mode” on all instances of Molly to save on battery. Before I enabled this, Molly was using so much battery that I could have a screen time of less than an hour all day, and still hit a low battery notification every day. I’m talking, when I look at my battery stats by the hour, Molly will have consumed 39 percent of my battery for that hour, and after enabling the compatibility mode, its down between 1 and 5 percent and my phone actually lasts all day again. I wanted to bring this up because especially if you’re running Molly on multiple profiles, if you let those user profiles run in background, your battery life will suffer majorly unless you have exploit protections on.
Hope this helps. If anyone has critiques for my setup let me know. Besides the obvious that I probably have slightly less security or whatever
Edit: added extra detail
In my experience the qr thing doesn’t work on WiFi. Maybe that’s just my device I don’t know. Also local backups worked for me, because I used a usb flash drive
Well that’s cool that local backups worked. I also bsck up to a USB flash drive so good to know. So you still haven’t been able to link your profiles? That’s so weird
Why are you using a CIA honeypot?
Share evidence of anything whatsoever untoward from Signal (raw speculation about real imperfections is not evidence, to be clear) - or you’re the enemy of privacy.
Talked like a true CIA drone: “enemy of privacy”. You’re overplaying there.
Liar.
This Signal FUD is trash and none of y’all ever have a damn thing to back it up. Go fuck yourself.
AFAIK you can’t be in two profiles at once (in GOS). I would use a 2nd device that I keep online, easy solution?
If the primary signal account is on a different device you can use molly on each profile. I used this to have access in all my profiles before I switched to private spaces
Ah, they just opened up the ability to connect devices to an account. I have it on my tablet and phone simultaneously. The tablet only fetches messages when I open the app though. Not sure if that’s intended, or something about my device, and I actually prefer it to notifications on both anyway; which other messagers do on the same devices.
I’m not sure how it would work on separate profiles on the same device though. If it’s one account, it would seem strange if it did work fully since they’re both linked to the same number/account. Two accounts might work, I dunno
If you have two seperate profiles on GrapheneOS, any apps inside the profile would generally assume it’s running on a completely seperate device. If the app was malicious it could technically tell that it’s installed on the same phone, but Signal is not. Using Signal across two profiles would be effectively the same as using Signal across two different phones.
So it should work like it does with my tablet and phone. One being the primary the main profile/phone and the other being secondary side profile/tablet.
You punctuated your reply as a statement but phrased it as a question… but yes, it should just function as any other secondary device.
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Signal allows just 1 device at a time, and you need to register by phone number. Unless you use their tablet mode which stores data on server… Maybe check out other projects without such requirement?
Even with rooting (to the dismay of GrapheneOS PR team, so sad), Signal will not backup or restore properly since it uses Strongbox, so you cannot clone it amongst profiles or users. Thank the Titan chip for that. Legit a good thing, except it your case.
Just don’t use Signal.
Bad advice. Signal has its drawbacks, and yet you managed to avoid listing all but one of them. Impressive.
Signal has released an update recently that allows multiple devices (up to 10 I believe). Yes you still need a phone number, but newer commits suggest that is soon to change. Signal has local backups on android, and I haven’t heard of any issues restoring from them. Signal is far from perfect, but they are very trusted, battle tested, and overall a better service than what most people are using anyways. By all means, if you have a better service that works for you, go for it, but advising against using signal outright with no alternative is kinda weird.
Restoring a local Signal backup doesn’t let you use the same profile on multiple accounts, it forces older profiles to deregister. Try it.
Because you can’t run multiple accounts at once? Either I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying, or you’re missing the point of a signal backup.
OP is referring to the GrapheneOS feature, well really the android feature heavily enhanced by GrapheneOS, that allows you to run the OS as another user with their own apps and files. OP is asking for help running signal (Molly) in both profile A and profile B as one account. This is technically possible but realistically infeasible because of the way profile switching works on android. I explained why in a different comment.
I just tried with the official signal client, and I don’t think there’s a way to do it without transferring the account to another device. The second app must remain open while the first app scans the code, so while it’s possible in a private space, I think profiles are too isolated to run both at once. I’d be happy to be proven otherwise, but from what I can tell, it’s not possible on one device alone.
