Well, I and a lot of the people I'm going to talk to through things like Signal are going to have a state ID regardless as I live in a country where one practically needs to drive a car to function in society.

On top of that so many other things just inherently expect one to have a phone number. It would be somewhat odd to not have a phone number for most of the people I know and talk to through platforms like Signal.

So to your question of which is easier, having the state ID and a phone number is easier because I'll already have that for a multitude of reasons.

If you live in a place where its rare to have a phone number, then yes I agree Signal probably isn't a good choice.

Obtaining your first id is obviously difficult. But so is obtaining your first computer. If you’re on good terms with your government, obtaining the id is easier. That’s really the key. Sure if you focus on hostile states this stuff all makes sense. If you’re insistent on hiding from authorities then many things become much more difficult, by design.

I primarily use a nearly-bottom end android phone that's a few years old and just recently switched to an even older, even lower end android phone that is six years old. Neither has that issue.

Obviously, I'm not really claiming that it's not possible people are experiencing this issue, but it can't possibly be widespread.

I feel like most likely people are using android skins that aggressively kill apps in the background.

nope, iphone here, and quite recent. But it's not just me, all the people i communicate with on this app have the same kind of problems. With a group of friends we even had a totally weird ordering of messages, making the conversation quite absurd.

There's something deeply wrong with the way signal delivers messages...