overactive noise cancellation makes speakerphone mode unusable

[AntiSol]

Guidelines

• I have searched searched open and closed issues for duplicates
• I am submitting a bug report for existing functionality that does not work as intended
• This isn't a feature request or a discussion topic

Bug description

This appears to be the same issue as:
signalapp/Signal-iOS#5553

But I'm seeing it between android devices - when talking to someone on a Motorola G13 I am unable to hear anything they say because their speech is cut out the vast majority of the time. If I make them repeat themselves it usually works, but sometimes they need to repeat themselves 3-4 times before I am able to hear them.

Screenshots

No response

Device

motorol g13

Android version

13

Signal version

whatever you auto-upgraded me to

Link to debug log

I'm still waiting to hear back on a question I have repeatedly asked Max Stirner at signal support about debug logs. If he deigns to respond to the question I've asked maybe I could get you a debug log.

[jim-signal]

@AntiSol If you can provide logs that would be really helpful. More information about them can be found here.

[AntiSol]

@jim-signal Yeah before I submit any more logs to signal I'll need Max Stirner in your support team to respond to the question I've repeatedly asked about logs.

I sent him email on 21/nov/2024 asking a question about logs but he made no attempt to address the question I asked.

I have since sent emails on 15/jan/2025, 18/jan/2025, 22/jan/2025, 25/jan/2025, and 6/feb/2025 trying to follow up to get a response to my question, but I've had no response at all to my emails.

I'll be happy to get you some logs, but given that nothing was done with the last set of logs I sent in, and Max refuses to respond to questions about this, I'd rather not waste my time retrieving more logs that will never be read.

Maybe you're able to find out why Max hasn't responded, and hasn't responded to my emails asking why he hasn't responded?

[cazzoo]

I confirm that I have the exact same problem when I call some of my family members. They run either iOS or android. I am running android on my phone and I have been experiencing it since I started using signal audio/video calls.
I changed my phone also and am still experiencing the issue. I truly believe the noise reduction algorithm is wrongly set or should have further implementation iterations.
Please consider this seriously. This is really easy to reproduce

[AntiSol]

I just wanted to say again for the record that I'm super happy to assist in any way I can, such as sharing a debug log, just as soon as I get a response to the question I have repeatedly asked Max Stirner.

[cody-signal]

@AntiSol can you email me directly your questions or concerns so I can try to address them? Without logs we can't do much, and my guess is your logs/questions were misplaced along the way.

You can reach me cody at singal dot org.

[AntiSol]

@cody-signal Thank you! email sent.
(I assumed you meant signal dot org and not singal ;) )

[AntiSol]

@cody-signal it's been almost a week and I don't see any response to my email. I double-checked my junk folder but don't see anything.

I'm still keen to see a response so that I'm able to provide the information your team has requested.

In case there was some problem with your email (seems like maybe issues using this 30yo tech are widespread in the signal team), I'll just post the full text of my email below.

FYI I have now pretty much stopped using signal for calls, I've reverted back to mostly using the phone, since I'm basically unable to hear the person at the other end when my microphone is not muted. Looks like I might have to start checking out alternatives to signal soon.

Feel free to respond to my outstanding-for-three-months, repeatedly-asked-via-multiple-channels questions-that-have-simple-answers at any time and I'll be happy to get you that debug log.

---

Date: Wed, 12 Mar 2025 02:17:09 +1100
To: cody@signal.org

Hi Cody,

AntiSol from github here.

First, thanks very much for your response on the github ticket offering to follow up on my unaddressed questions (#13931 (comment)).

I'd be very keen to see this issue investigated as it has been a problem for a while and has not gotten any better.

Here's the background to my question:

• In November, I sent an email to the support email address (this was before I found the github account) reporting an issue with signal (extremely long [up to about 1 minute!] delays between pressing "send" and anything happening). I provided video evidence of the issue.

• Max Stirner responded, specifically asking me to email a debug log.

• Capturing this was fairly difficult for me since the issue seems to happen intermittently. It took some time and effort for me to get. Max knew that.

• After some time I managed to collect a log, and emailed the log in as requested.

• Max's response was to tell me that I needed to submit the log via the online log submission tool built into the app.

• This wasn't possible because I had restarted the app in the intervening time.

• When I asked why he couldn't forward the log to the appropriate people, like email clients have been able to do for 30+ years (I was more polite than that) he made no attempt to address the question I had asked, simply asserting that the debug log "needs" to be submitted from the app, with no attempt at an explanation why.

• There has been no response of any kind to my numerous follow-ups. See the dates I posted on github. I find your assumption that "your logs/questions were misplaced along the way" extremely unlikely - it seems pretty clear that max is intentionally and repeatedly ignoring me, for reasons I do not understand.

So, my question is a three-parter:

a) Assuming that Max was being truthful, why is signal's team unable to internally share a log file, when you could presumably share the video files I sent through (or were the videos simply ignored and thus a waste of my time collecting?).

And b) if Max was unable to forward the log for some legitimate reason, then why did Max ask me to email the log initially?

Finally max's behaviour has lead me to ask c) Why does max think it's appropriate to repeatedly rudely ignore my question and follow-up emails? Is his goal to ensure I don't donate or recommend signal to people anymore?

The ticket number in your CRM system for the conversation is: 3MLVLP-Z1ZEK

If you don't have access to the ticketing system Max is using, maybe you can email him and get him to forward you the details and files I have sent.

Alternatively, If you or max can provide an adequate explanation as to why a high-tier software development team working on a high-stakes security-related product like signal is unable to forward an email, I suppose I could send them again.

Thanks very much for your time.

Kind Regards,

[cody-signal]

Your email got flagged as spam, will respond.

[AntiSol]

Hi Cody,

I thought I'd just reply on github rather than email. I feel like having this conversation in a public place is probably for the best.

Thanks (genuinely!) for your timely response.

And thanks for saying that you took the time to look and get back to me.

Of course, since you've given no information at all to back up that assertion, I guess I'll have to just take you at your word that you did any more than nothing at all.

Because, again, you've also made no attempt to address the questions I asked.

What happened to the debug log and videos I submitted via email in november?

What is the status of the investigation into that issue?

Assuming that your assertions are true, why could the debug log I sent in november not be forwarded? What part of 30yo email attachment technology does signal find challenging or difficult?

Assuming forwarding email is too complex or infeasible for some legitimate reason that signal has repeatedly refused to even attempt to explain, does the signal team not have access to a shared file storage solution? in 2025?

Assuming all the above, how exactly does signal go about sharing e.g videos demonstrating issues with the software that are sent in as email attachments, such as the ones I took the time to capture and send to you in november? Are these videos simply ignored and lost into a black hole, thus making them a complete waste of my time to collect? Or is whatever technology that you use to share an .mp4 video unable to share a text file for some reason? Please provide an excruciatingly detailed and technical explanation as to the reasons for this limitation if this is the case.

Why was I ignored for 3+ months?

You asked me not to assume malice behind your actions. But what evidence can you offer that your team has acted in good faith, given the repeated refusal (by multiple people now) to even attempt to answer very simple questions that have simple and definite answers which have been put to you repeatedly?

When you say you "confirmed a few things", please be more specific. What "things" did you confirm? What insights did you gain from these confirmations? What are the answers to the questions I have repeatedly asked?

Until you provide some level of detail that is an improvement on "none at all", I am left with no option but to assume that these are just more weasel words which, as per the MO of signal people I've spoken to so far, and have given signal many chances to rectify, make no attempt to address the questions I've asked. repeatedly. Ad nauseum.

It would have been far, far, far simpler for everyone if your team would simply answer the questions put to you - you've now almost certainly put more time into avoiding answering my questions than it would have taken to simply answer my questions honestly.

I'm sure it's very unfortunate for you that you "don't appreciate the tone and condescending nature of [my] emails and github posts".

But I wonder whether you appreciate my sarcastically derisive tone more or less than I appreciate being rudely completely ignored, repeatedly, over a period of months.

And I wonder whether you appreciate my tone more or less than I appreciate that when a second person finally pays notice to my repeated inquiries and "investigates", they also chooses to provide absolutely zero detail or new information, and also make no attempt to address the questions I've asked.

I'm going to go ahead and bet that you find my tone less offensive than the extreme level of offensiveness and rudeness that I associate with not bothering to reply at all to repeated inquiries, particularly when it's a very simple and straightforward set of questions you have been asked. Repeatedly, ad nauseum.

I wonder whether you appreciate that my tone is entirely of signal's making and brought about by the behaviour of the signal team. I suspect not, since you don't mention that part while you're acting faux-offended in order to weasel out of responding to my questions.

You say that you "understand being frustrated", yet despite my making multiple good-faith efforts to report issues to your organisation and offering many chances to do so, signal has made no attempt to explain or rectify the behaviour which caused this frustration and the tone that accompanies it, other than a very vague and perfunctory "sorry this has been lost so many times". Why and how was it "lost"? If you do understand being frustrated, why have you taken no steps at all to alleviate that frustration by simply answering the questions put to you repeatedly?

You mention that my tone "makes folks like [you] less inclined to interact with [me]".

Since you understand being frustrated, I'm sure you must also understand just how inclined I am now to interact with the signal team, providing helpful services like submitting bug reports and debug logs, which helps you to improve the software, recommending signal to friends, and donating (something I have considered many times and almost certainly would have gotten around to doing eventually, but now there is basically a 0% chance of that ever happening), after having the information I previously sent in seemingly lost and then my repeated enquiries as to why and how it was lost completely ignored for 3+ months by multiple people.

Perhaps if you and other signal team members bothered to respond to questions asked of you, rather than trying to make users jump through hoops whilst refusing to provide relevant contextual information in blatant disregard for our time and goodwill, and then feigning hurt feelings when you're called out for your bullshit, you wouldn't have had to deal with any "tone" or "condescending nature" in the first place - Can you provide a single example of an inappropriate or condescending tone before I was asked to jump through hoops with no explanation and then repeatedly ignored? Please post all your examples here and I'll be all too happy to address and apologise for each of them individually. But I don't think you'll find any, because the tone that you claim hurts your feelings so is 100% in response to signal's lack of response and the accompanying total lack of respect for my time.

Due to all this, I'm sure that you'll also understand that when you say that you understand, this comes off as a hollow, meaningless platitude of the kind routinely generated by LLMs rather than a genuine attempt to actually address the situation in a constructive manner, which I have always and only been attempting to do. Despite what you seem to consider to be an inappropriate tone, I think I've been far far more polite than signal deserves.

But we can definitely and very easily and quickly resolve the whole situation with regard to my tone and the condescending nature of my correspondence:

All you need to do is answer the questions I've asked repeatedly and then I'll be happy to apologise for the tone that you "don't appreciate"

Alternatively, if repeatedly and rudely refusing to answer simple questions is how you want to approach inadequacies in your team's workflow and/or tech stack, that's fine, not going to stop you. Just makes folks like me less inclined to be polite to you, and to not give the debug logs you want, and to not donate to signal, and to investigate alternatives, and to share my experience and this correspondence publicly and with my friends, and recommend that they don't donate to signal either, and to take them with me when I migrate away to a platform where the maintainers are competent enough that they're capable of using 30yo tech that a child can use easily, and not so arrogant and condescending that they refuse to answer simple questions.

To respond to your first email:

First, It's interesting that you claim that google flagged my email as spam, but you didn't respond when I noted on the ticket that I had sent an email. Did the github notification also get flagged as spam? Also, please forward me a copy of the bug report you filed with google reporting their incorrect categorisation of my email as spam. Thanks so much.

debuglogs span multiple days, you don't have to take one right
after an event. As long as it's within a couple days it should
still be covered in the logs. For example, if it happened
yesterday, getting a log today would still be immensely helpful.

This is super helpful information and makes things much easier with regard to collecting a debug log. Thank You. I'm sure that I'll be able to easily collect those logs now, if anybody ever deigns to answer my questions.

But it also raises a new question: why was I not told this 3+ months ago?

They get 100s of new tickets a day so not each and every request
gets an individualized response. We're a small team of folks serving
millions.

If I take you at your word and assume this is accurate, then one very simple way to radically improve your user service experience and not erode all goodwill towards signal would be to have an automated response advising people of these facts. Why do you not have that already? I could write that code for you in less than half a day if you like - assuming your CRM doesn't already have that option (which, hey, it seems like it might not have a "forward" option, so I guess that's possible)

Secondly, it's curious and seems like a weird coincidence that Max replied to multiple emails, always within a day or two, and then suddenly couldn't respond further at the exact moment that doing so would have involved responding to questions highlighting his incompetence and/or the inadequacies of your software and/or workflow.

I'm sure that since you're so understanding, you'll understand that this sounds a lot like a bullshit but intentionally unfalsifiable excuse for not bothering to respond to questions which are very simple to answer but which might have been vaguely uncomfortable, instead wasting a bunch of everybody's time and exponentially increasing the level of animosity by not responding at all.

Despite your incredibly lacklustre and almost-information-free response and signal's repeated insistence on offensively ignoring questions put to you, I retain hope that my questions might be answered and we might be able to work together to track down and resolve these issues I've reported. But not very much hope, because let's be honest, the chance that you even bothered to read this is pretty low IMO. But I might be pleasantly surprised and proven wrong about that. There's a first time for everything. I guess we'll see.

Kind regards,
Dale

On 19/3/25 03:40, Cody Henthorne wrote:

HI Dale,

I checked with User Voice and confirmed a few things from our end. If you
can get a new log after causing the speaker phone issue again, great, feel
free to send it directly to me here. if you don't want to, also fine as you
seem to have moved on. But yes, we do need a new log you can collect
directly in the app from the Settings->Help screen->Debuglogs->Submit and
then get the link from the app and send it to me.

Also, I understand being frustrated, but I don't personally appreciate the
tone and condescending nature of your emails and github posts. If that's
how you want to approach problems, that's fine, not going to stop you. Just
makes folks like me less inclined to interact with you.

Thanks,
Cody

On Tue, Mar 18, 2025 at 8:57 AM Cody Henthorne cody@signal.org wrote:

Thanks, sorry this has been lost so many times. Google flagging your
emails as spam has not likely helped the situation.

First, debuglogs span multiple days, you don't have to take one right
after an event. As long as it's within a couple days it should still be
covered in the logs. For example, if it happened yesterday, getting a log
today would still be immensely helpful.

Thanks for the ticket number, I'll follow up with User Voice and get back
to you. They get 100s of new tickets a day so not each and every request
gets an individualized response. We're a small team of folks serving
millions. Please do not assume malice behind our actions as the tone of
your email suggests.

Cody

[AntiSol]

I was thinking about this whole situation a bit more, and it has occurred to me that perhaps I wasn't steelmanning the position of the signal team enough when I sarcastically suggested that perhaps there's a legitimate reason why you are unable to forward an email, and why in 2025 you seem to be claiming that you have no shared file storage capabilities that can store a 971kb tarball or a 17mb text file.

While I do find these possibilities to be unlikely and unusual in the extreme, bordering on the ridiculous for a software development team, perhaps you do indeed have a good reason why it is so.

Perhaps some reason like security, and not trusting cloud providers WRT their encryption, or something like that. That might actually be a very good reason that I hadn't considered why you're unable to share files internally (though it would seem to be very likely to be an impediment to the efficient operation of your team, and maybe you should look into working on a secure shared file storage solution of the type I've been using to collaborate with my teams for literally decades).

But yes, I concede that maybe your current situation is that you actually don't have any mechanism to share a file internally, and maybe there is legitimatelly a good reason for that.

And perhaps there's even a good reason to repeatedly refuse to tell me that when questioned about this seemingly-alarming-and-absurd lack of capability (security through obscurity is totally a thing that works, after all, right? Yeah I'm pretty sure I read something to that effect once)

On 18/jan in one of my numerous follow-up emails that the signal team couldn't be bothered responding to at all, I sarcastically asked why "you can't simply forward my email to the engineers. Or upload it yourself to the server. Or attach it to your ticketing system. Or upload it to your company file storage. Or decompress it yourself and copy/paste it into an email as text. Or use a utility to render it as an image file and attach that to an email, or to your ticketing system. Or sign up for a company mega/google-drive/whatever account and upload it there. Or put it on a usb stick and fedex it to the engineers. Or any of about 10 million other possibilities".

I said: "It seems to me that a software company should be able to manage to transfer and open a text file, no? If signal can't transfer a simple file to its engineers, then why would I put trust in your implementation of something complicated like encrypted chat?" (incidentally, this question also remains outstanding, along with all the other questions which you've repeatedly refused to make any attempt to respond to)

I don't know, because Max never bothered to respond to these questions at all, but in the interest of being fair and steelmanning your position as much as possible, I hereby concede that perhaps it's possible that you do have a very good reason, for example perhaps you have strong procedures in place that prevent you from storing such highly secure files as debug logs on any of the listed cloud storage services because of teh securitah.

Maybe it's for my own good, and not a technical reason, that you implicitly claim to be unable to do something that I could do on my amiga in 1992.

If this is the case, then today is your lucky day! Because I totally have a solution for this problem for you, and best of all it's totally free! And totally secure, too!

See, there's this piece of software that claims very loudly to be totally secure - the developers just love to boast about how secure it is. It's open-source, so you and your security team can even audit it yourself if you like and verify it!

It's an IM client which also allows sending files, and everything is end-to-end encrypted and even encrypted at rest (or so I've read - I assume the team behind it is not filled with malicious liars or massive incompetence). I've read stuff where the devs claim to not even have access to the data you transfer via their software, which is a great security practice. I have personally used it to transfer both tarballs, text files, mp4 videos*#, and also files over 17Mb. It would seem to be perfect for your needs!

Maybe you have heard of it? It's called "signal".

For vague reasons that I can't quite put my finger on, I feel like you can probably even get permission from your management and securitah teams to install this "signal" software on your computers, even if you're in a super-locked-down environment with harsh and stringent security policies.

There's even a desktop client which runs on all of the major operating systems: Windows, Mac, and Linux are all first-class citizens%. You can even download an APK and install the android version without having google play services/store on your device, though it will give you a fearmongering security-theatre warning about how this is a bad idea, but you can just click the "I'm not a moron child" button and it'll let you download the apk if you insist on it.

(Of course, the "desktop client" is hot garbage, because it's an electron app, and suuuuuuuper slow, with literally-10-minute startup times not being uncommon and literally-45-second delays between pressing "Enter" and seeing your message appear in the chat being a somewhat-regular occurrence, but it does mostly work when you want to transfer a file and have it be encrypted in transit, as long as you're patient, and who knows - maybe if you email the devs and file bugs and send in debug logs with information about the extreme slowness and jankiness of said desktop client, they might not even rudely totally ignore your bug reports!)

(* note: if you want to be able to actually play mp4 videos within the client, you'll need to make sure they're in an appropriately shitty video codec, because the horrible electron desktop client is literally just chromium, some images, and a bunch of badly-written javascript and css, so it only supports video codecs supported by (a somewhat old version of) chromium, and comes with all the foibles and lack of uniform support browsers do WRT video (e.g being dependant on the codecs available on mobile devices for decoding). Luckily the trusty old x264/aac/mp4 combination is getting pretty old these days, so it's supported uqiquitously enough to be a pretty solid choice in the large majority of circumstances. It's just a pity it's too shitty to add in support x265, which is exponentially better, but i digress. And if you prefer x265 that's fine, you just need to download the file and play them in a video player that isn't a piece of trash duct-taped to a dumpster fire.)

(# luckily, the mp4 files I emailled to you were aac/x264, so they should play in the trashpile player just fine without any conversion.)

(% well, I say "first class", what I actually mean is "third-class", because they're far more interested in the mobile versions than any desktop OS, hence the abysmal, godawful performance reminiscent of trying to run a large language model on a 386 with no math coprocessor)

So, just to spell it out clearly, here's how you could solve your little file transfer problem and get up to feature parity with my amiga circa 1992:

1. Get your engineer to install this "signal" app (and hey, who knows, maybe your engineers might already have it installed for some reason?)

2. You install it too. I'm sure you can find their website and installation instructions if you do a web search.

3. In your terrible CRM that can't forward email attachments, click on my email sent on 21/11/24, and go to the attachments, and choose the 'save as' option. Save the files somewhere in a temporary directory (where your temp dir is, is operating-system specific, so you'll have to look that up, sorry)

4. Then open this "signal" app and add your engineer as a contact, and then start a chat with them and click on the little paperclip icon to attach a file, and navigate to the debug log you saved in step 3, and click OK and press the send icon next to the text entry. You might also want to include some other info like "debug log for ticket 3MLVLP-Z1ZEK" before you hit send. This will send the debug log that you claim you're unable to forward via any other means to your engineer.

4a. For bonus points, this "signal" app actually allows you to send multiple files! So you could actually attach the debug log and also both of the videos I captured - IN THE SAME SIGNAL MESSAGE! I know right?!? that's super-futuristic and very 1996! This "signal" team make a piece of software which, while dogshit and about as performant as a 4K raytracing engine written in qbasic, certainly does have some nice features which I've found very useful over the years. Hopefully if we work together we can file some bug reports and send them some logs so they can examine why the performance of their software is so horrendously godawful. I for one would love to see it improved, and I'm sure many other users are in the same basket but less-well-equipped to adequately describe and debug problems than technical people like you and I. Cooperation and collaboration (built on actually responding to the things peope say to you) really is the beauty of the open-source model :)

5. Then your engineer can open the debug log, and look at it, and debug the problem, just like you insist you need.

And the best part is that even if you have really tough security policies, this "signal" is allegedly totally secure and encrypts everything, so it's totally safe!

(assuming, of course, that the people developing this software aren't totally incompetent fools, or malicious liars. I'll go ahead and give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they're not)

I know, right? It's ok, I'll say it for you: I'm a god damn genius: I've gone and solved your little problem for you. I realise that as a result of this you're going to want to hire me on a fat consulting contract as a senior vice president consulting managment engineer in charge of global security policy and feature parity with AmigaOS 3, but I really don't feel the need for such recognition or accolades, and I'm happy to distribute my wisdom for free in this instance, because I'm such a nice guy. Just a simple thank you will do.

Please accept my humblest apologies if any of this comes across as condescending or dripping with sarcastic, cynical mockery and derision written in response to a succession of steaming piles of complete bullshit, meaningless platitudes, zero information, and faux-outrage, or is in a tone that you don't appreciate - that's not the intention here at all, despite the signal team's continuing, massively rude and offensive, repeated insistence on failing to respond to questions asked, it's certainly not my intention to offend - I'd much prefer that you had sufficient intelligence, introspective capabilities, and self-awareness that you were chuckling while reading this.

(I'll refrain from going into a longwinded explanation of how such an emotional response to such low-key mockery would IMO suggest a level of fragility which indicates you're not suited to a user-facing role and should thus not be attempting to fill one, and how as a senior managing consulting global vice president I'd probably move you into a more junior position such as "drone in charge of redundantly fedexing usb sticks in case a file transfer with the 'signal' app fails for some reason which we are unable to debug").

I realise now that I may have jumped the gun when I assumed massive and continuing incompetence and/or malice when the cause could merely be total ignorance of the existence of this "signal" app, which absolutely definitely 100% solves the problem you are claiming to be having with transferring a text file to a remote person, something which I am again compelled to point out that I was able to do on my amiga in 1992, and which I am only about 99.99995% sure that in ~30 years I have never seen an email client lacking that functionality.

Thanks so much for your time and good luck with getting the file transfers working in this "signal" app I've alerted you to, I hope that works out and is the beginning of a new era of collaboration within your organisation. I'm sure that once you adjust to this new and exciting paradigm you'll find this groundbreaking new ability to easily share arbitrary files within your team useful for much more than just debug logs and screenshots - you'll likely find it endlessly useful in much the same way I did when I discovered that IRC cients included the ability to do DCC transfers circa 1995. I sometimes even use this "signal" app to send funny memes, much like I used to do via email or skype circa 2006.

(BTW should you ever manage to catch up to 2006 your mind will be just totally blown by some of the technical capabilities you uncover, like tabbed browsing and unicode. But let's just stick to one thing at a time, I wouldn't want to burden you with too much hard stuff all at once)

Please do let me know if you encounter any difficulties with this "signal" app, and I'll be happy to put you in touch with their support drones, who sometimes even respond with useless requests for information which they then refuse to action, and who only seem to rudely totally ignore people asking questions "most of the time".

[major-mayer]

I hope for your own good, that some AI generated this for your... Dude 🥴

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.