Beta feedback for the upcoming Android 7.56 release

September 4, 2025, 9:21pm 1

We’re releasing the Signal 7.56 beta soon. If you’re interested in participating, join the beta group here.

Share your feedback on the latest changes:

• Signal Secure Backups! Better release notes coming soon Check out the stuff I’ve written below.

Complete list of new commits since 7.55.0:

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/compare/v7.55.0…main

Thank you for being a beta tester!

It’s been a long time coming, but we finally feel comfortable taking all of our work on the new Signal Secure Backups system to beta!

First off – thank you so much to everyone who helped out during the alpha testing. As always, your feedback was invaluable! I’ll summarize some key points here, but please read the original post, as it’ll have even more detail.

Note that for the initial phase of this beta, it’s going to be Github Releases Only. That means you’ll have to follow the instructions here to get it. We want one last round of testing from you guys before we take it to the broader Play Store beta :) Rest assured, it’s signed with the same key as normal Play Store releases, so you should be able to install over top of a Play Store release without issue.

Ok, with that out of the way – backups! For an overview, I’ll quote from the alpha post:

You can enable backups via Settings > Backups. If you have any detailed questions, I’m happy to answer them!

One thing you may have questions about is that the feature has a little “Beta” label inside the app. This is intentional, and it may take us a while to get out of this phase. What does the label mean? It means that there are still some edge cases we’re working through, some more testing we want to happen, and some more features (like Optimized Storage) that we want to finish before we’re comfortable removing that label. It may take months for us to remove this label, but hopefully it won’t turn into a gmail situation ;)

But the feature works! Over the past 8 or 9 years, I’ve accrued over 500k messages and ~45GiB of media, and I’ve done multiple full backup and restores of my device using the new system without issue. That said, we are gonna use that “Beta” label as a bit of a shield – there may be quirks that we weren’t aware of, and we hope you’ll help us find them :)

Even during the beta, backups do cost money. It’s $2/mo. Storage is expensive, and because Signal doesn’t monetize user data, we have to charge to provide the service. But even with its Beta labeling, we believe the feature is worth the money :)

Again, happy to answer any questions, and enjoy!

History sync across devices was rolled out to production in February:

Thank you for all the amazing work!

Now to the testbeds…

I enabled backups, it ran a backup saying it was processing 16.8MB. Then it indicated the backup was completed. However, surely my last 30 days of media isn’t included in this 16.8MB, right? Is this happening in the background?
There was a message that it might take a long time, but if it is happening in the background, there is no indication to that fact.

I think in the other thread he said what you’d see listed is the compressed size.

Edit: In my alpha build my total backup size when using the paid tier is 300MB. On the free tier, the total is 17KB, so your ~17MB must be the compressed size of the last 30 days.

My beta build cloud backup is 7MB, and that’s almost entirely from one conversation where we trade a ton of GIFs and images on a daily basis.

Edit 2: I just sent six new GIFs and the cloud backup size in my beta build is still the same as before.

It should be! It’s working on my test devices. Looking at your log, it appears that the device doesn’t have access to Google Play Billing? Is that expected? We’re getting back error code 3, which you can see the cause of here: link. Do any of those apply to you?

Your primary device will be responsible for making regular backups. We do have a feature planned down the road to “bootstrap” a primary device via a backup made on a linked device, but that isn’t part of the initial launch.

If your devices have a diverging history, you can delete the linked device and then re-link it, which will seed it with all the data from your primary. If you have data that is exclusive to the linked device, we currently don’t have any way to merge it with another device’s history.

So the whole “30 days of media” is a bit of a fun trick in that you don’t actually need to upload it. We can easily offer 30 days of media because we’re actually already storing it today! If I send you a message with a photo attached, the service needs to keep that photo (encrypted) on a server somewhere so that you can retrieve it later. We don’t know how many times it’ll be downloaded (you could have X linked devices, or send it to a group with Y members), so instead we just pick a time threshold (in this case, 30 days) and hold onto it until then.

So no, the 16.8MB is just your message history + metadata. You have much more media, but it’s already uploaded, and then we just re-download it on restore :)

Yep, see above – it doesn’t make your backup any larger :)

That’s very strange!

The Play Store app on the user’s device is out of date.

Play Store says I’m on the current version when I tap “update Play Store” in the settings.

The user is in an unsupported country.

Not applicable.

The user is an enterprise user, and their enterprise admin has disabled users from making purchases.

Not applicable. My personal phone is a managed device, but this Signal install is outside of the work profile. I bought dinner with Google Pay/Wallet today, and my Signal donation for August processed successfully with Google Pay/Wallet (September donation in a few days).

Google Play is unable to charge the user’s payment method. For example, the user’s credit card might have expired.

The card for my Signal donations is still valid for another four years. I just used it today to pay for dinner, and another unrelated expense.

I’d totally forgotten about this. Thanks!

In the app and your other message here it’s 30 days. Is this still subject to change? Thx!

For me the “save to passwordmanager” button did not work for Proton Pass. But it could be because proton does not support this.

I only have the free option available but I run grapheneOS with sandboxed play services.

https://debuglogs.org/android/7.56.0/36ab919217638c3395f5dd8db5e951b1a3aeb1de6794f67fdd071354d50d0ade

does this mean that there will be no paid option in gapps free devices?