Functionality: 9/10

This app is really easy to use, and it gives the user a lot more control over aestetics, privacy, and communication. It lets you basically choose all of the colour and image aspects of your private chats, which I really like. You can choose the colour of the chat bubbles, and an image for the backround, which is nice because it can really make it pop, and customise it to the person you are messaging! You can also send images that can only be veiwed once, though I’ve never used that feature.

My favourite feature is Note to Self, it’s basically sending a message to yourself. You just use it like a normal chat basically but without a response, and I found it useful when I was perfecting a recipe, becuase I could take notes on the changes. I really like that with chatrooms, you can see who has seen your message, because you can’t do that with Imessage groupchats. It has functionality without being addictive, can help you create chatrooms that aren’t dependant on what phone you have, and is good quality all round.

I don’t use the stories feature much, but that’s just because I only communicate with family on Signal, though I wish my friends had it too. You can take photo’s and videos in the app, and you can control whether your stories are private (just to you), friends (to your signal friends), or public (to all signal users). Another great feature is, it notifies you if one of your contacts has joined signal, which is so useful.

The ONE thing I wish would be that the developers make the app APPLE WATCH FRIENDLY!!! Please please pretty please? You can respond to messages, or mark them as read, but you can’t send messages, which would be so useful! So if anyone has connections, make this a reccomendation please, do it not for yourself, but for the APPLE WATCH COMMUNITY!!! (Other smart watches too I guess)

My Age Rating: 10+

I say 10+ because it is the easiest thing to control how your kid uses this app. I’ve been messaged by a stranger once before in the 4-6 ish years I’ve been using the app, and the app warned me that it was a stranger, and had a block button pop up. The reason why it’s so hard for strangers to slide into your DM’s is because you have to put in the phone number for the person, and you can’t search by name, unless they are already a contact. So it’s a lot more secure than other messaging apps such as Snapchat, Facebook, or Instagram, but those apps have more features. As a messaging app, it is easy to use, and I love it very much. I highly reccomend to larger families who have members with different phones, because it can make communication so much easier when everyone is on the same platform.