[Cryptography] Signal planning to support for plaintext SMS

[John Denker]

Hi --

Signal has announced that they plan to remove the feature
that allows the app to send and receive plaintext SMS messages
alongside encrypted messages. I have read their announcement
   https://Signal.org/blog/sms-removal-android/

and their reasoning makes no sense to me. Even if they are
in the narrowest sense right that the change would make the
Signal app more secure, it would not make any particular
user more secure, because the insecure SMS messages will
still be there; they will just be in some other app. What's
worse, it will make the world less secure, by creating a
barrier to the adoption of Signal.

If they think they can exert monopoly power and the network
effect to shift more traffic onto the encrypted Signal
channel, they are diametrically wrong about that. I betcha
traffic will shift the other way.

Is their plan really as foolish as it seems, or am I missing
something?