How to Setup & Use Signal on Mac or Windows PC

How to Setup & Use Signal on Mac or Windows PC

Signal is the popular encrypted messaging app that lets you send and receive encrypted messages across platforms, including Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, and iOS. This makes Signal an excellent choice if youre a Mac user or iPhone user that also wants to instantly communicate in a secure manner with someone else on a Mac, PC, Android, iPad, or iPhone. Signal also supports encrypted voice-over-IP for voice calls, image and media messaging, and a variety of other nice features for communication, and for maintaining some security, like auto-deleting messages. If youre on a Mac, or Windows PC, and you want to setup Signal on your computer to communicate with other Signal users, the walkthrough below will detail the process. To get started you will need an iPhone or Android with a valid and active cell phone number, the Signal client for that cell phone, and the Signal client for the desktop. Of course youll need internet access on those devices too. The rest is easy. This will walk through setting up Signal messenger on the Mac, but the setup process is basically exactly the same for Windows PC and Linux as well, so if you want to set up the messaging client on another platform you dont need to change much. Here are the appropriate steps: Now youre ready to use Signal on the Mac! Or a Windows PC, or whatever else you set it up on. Of course Signal is only useful if you have other people that are using it too, so if you like the idea of an encrypted messaging app for private or secure communications, then youll want to be sure you have colleagues, friends, family, or anyone else also sign up to use the Signal service. Signal is not able to send SMS text messages or iMessages, or use any other messaging protocol for that matter, it can only communicate with other Signal users, as any other messaging service would break the end-to-end encryption which is one of the benefits of using Signal in the first place. * When setting up Signal in iOS (and probably Android), it will ask for permission to access your contacts and other information, but this is not necessary to grant permission if it is undesired, as you can manually add phone numbers and contacts to communicate with yourself. ** You may need to bypass Gatekeepers warning message depending on . Signal is said to be very secure with end-to-end encryption, though if youre more of the trust, but verify type, and you happen to be a programmer, youll be pleased to know Signal is Open Source software and thus you can if you feel like checking it out. If this interests you, you might also appreciate and to .