Thank you. I should have read to the end, and I'm glad they're planning to support backups stored on their users' media.

Where does it say that?

> Our future plans include letting you save a secure backup archive to the location of your choosing, [...]

I also missed this on my first skim of the article though.

“Our future plans include letting you save a secure backup archive to the location of your choosing”.

Their first cut at "working on it" is to require that we pay Signal to store our backups for us (45 days of media and 100MiB total is not a useful free tier; I have more than 1 GiB of messages/media spanning years), when that's an entirely unnecessary restriction.

I don't know what you do for a living but it's very common when writing and releasing software to do it in phases. Earlier phases have a restricted feature set and feedback from the field/customers/users experiencing earlier phases informs choices in later phases.

Unless you have direct insights into their dev process, your claim that the restriction be "entitely unnecessary" seems overly strong.