Signal Finally Lets You Skip the Phone Number, but Now Google Is Involved

Signal has started testing a way to join the encrypted messenger without handing the app a phone number. The feature, branded Signal Login, is in the Android 8.28 beta and is slated for an eventual iOS release.

On a fresh install, the registration screen now includes an option to sign up without a number. Choose it, and Signal asks for a one-time in-app purchase, listed at launch as $2.99, or €3.49 including VAT . Prices can vary by country. Phone-number registration remains the default, free path.

After the payment clears, Signal issues an Account ID and a recovery key. Lead Android developer Greyson Parrelli told testers to treat those like a username and password and to store them in a password manager. “If you lose them, your account is gone,” Parrelli wrote. “There is no other recovery mechanism.”

The existence of a username at all is entirely optional. “If you choose not to add a username, your account will be completely unreachable,” Parrelli wrote. “The only chats you will be able to participate in are the ones you start yourself.”

"Good news! You don't need a phone number to use Signal anymore! Now just pay for an ID using your KYC fiat…" https://t.co/AhF3zTTC7X

Parrelli said the fee exists because a free, numberless signup would be a gift to spammers. “If it was free, spammers would acquire massive numbers of these accounts and ruin our network,” he wrote. “This was the most reasonable way we could think of to prevent spammers. Hopefully we chose the right price, but if these accounts somehow become a spam vector, we may have to increase the price in the future.”

The purchase uses the same zero-knowledge proofs Signal already applies to donations, so Signal’s servers can confirm that someone paid without tying that payment to the account that gets created.

This is a different problem from the one Signal tried to fix in 2024, when it added usernames so people could start a chat without showing their number to the other person. That change did not stop Signal from collecting the number during the initial signup process, which is the issue Signal Login is intended to solve.

Existing Signal accounts still cannot drop the number they already gave the service. “Not right now, but possibly in the future,” Parrelli wrote. “We’re thinking through the implications still.”

You can skip handing Signal a phone number, but you cannot skip the Google-powered checkout process. On Android, the only way to buy a Signal Login is through Google Play’s billing system, which requires Play Services and a Google account with a payment method on file.

While Google does not always require a phone number to check out, it does require a Google account and a way to pay. That is enough to attach an email address and a payment record to the purchase, and many of those accounts already have a number on file anyway.

Signal can honestly say it does not learn which payment created which account; however, Google still learns that a particular Google account bought a Signal Login product at a specific time.