Signal has a new beta version for Android: 7.68. What’s new in this update?
The latest version of Signal for Android includes various bug fixes and other technical improvements. One of the improvements is that Signal has updated the video transcoding, which improves the quality of HDR videos.
To further improve calling on Signal, the app has introduced a call survey. By sharing feedback about your call experience, Signal can continue to enhance the feature.
Optimize on-device storage
The biggest change is for those who use the paid version of Signal Secure Backups. You can now optimize your on-device storage. When you enable this feature, attachments older than 30 days that have been uploaded via your backup will be removed from your device. These optimized media will render via a compressed thumbnail in chats, and when you want to view them in full screen, the original will be retrieved from your backup storage.
You can enable this new feature via Settings > Data and storage > Manage storage > Optimize on-device storage. Since the feature is still in the testing phase, Signal recommends on the community forum to create a local backup first, just to be safe, before enabling this feature.
With this feature, you can save a lot of storage space on your device. In our example below, the storage used was reduced from 4.2 GB to 600 MB — a difference of 3.6 GB.
If you prefer to store all your media on your device again, you can disable the feature at any time. Signal will then restore all media from your Signal Secure Backup.
As mentioned, you can only optimize your device storage with the paid version of Signal Secure Backups. The paid version of Signal Secure Backups costs $ 1.99 per month. The reason this feature is only available in the paid version is that the free backup plan only includes the most recent 45 days of media, meaning you also can’t restore older media.
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