Signal is asking Android beta testers to try something the app has never let anyone do before: create an account without entering a phone number. The option showed up in a beta feedback thread posted by Signal staff engineer Greyson Parrelli on the Signal Community forum, announcing the upcoming 8.28 release and asking testers to weigh in specifically on the new phone-numberless signup flow.

Screenshot of the Signal Community beta feedback post describing optional registration without a phone number
The beta feedback post, which describes the new phone-numberless flow and its one-time fee.

Per the post, registering this way requires a small one-time in-app purchase, which Signal says exists specifically to prevent spam and is "never directly associated with the new Signal account."

A Year in the Making

This isn't a sudden addition. Signal CTO Ehren Kret said as far back as August that the organization was hoping to ship a way to sign up without a phone number, and named preventing spam and abuse as the reason it hadn't happened already. Commits referencing an internal project called "Signal Login" began surfacing in Signal's public source code shortly after, and by early September the feature had been merged into the Android 8.26 beta's code, though it stayed switched off for everyone at the time. The 8.28 beta feedback thread is the first point where testers can actually flip it on and use it.

Why a phone number was ever required: Signal has said a real phone number carries a built-in cost and a limited supply, which makes it a cheap way to slow down mass account creation. Competing messengers like Session and SimpleX Chat skip phone numbers entirely, but Signal has held out for years, citing the same anti-spam logic Kret repeated in August. A one-time fee is Signal's substitute for that built-in cost once the phone number requirement is gone.

The Detail Worth Watching

The most notable line in Parrelli's post isn't that a fee exists that's been expected since the source-code references to "Signal Login" first surfaced it's the claim that the purchase is never directly tied to the resulting account. Payment information is its own form of identifying data, and privacy researchers flagged exactly this concern back when the feature was first spotted in the source code: an account that skips a phone number only to be linkable through a payment method would undercut much of the point. Signal hasn't published technical detail yet on how that separation is enforced, and the beta thread doesn't go further than the one-line assurance quoted above.

Also still unknown: the actual fee amount. Earlier reporting on the feature noted that pricing referenced in Signal's source code was placeholder data, not a final number, and neither the 8.28 beta post nor Signal's public channels have confirmed pricing as of publication.

Who Can Test It

The feature is live in the Android 8.28 beta channel only, gated behind joining Signal's Android beta group. As with any staged rollout, Signal is explicitly soliciting feedback before deciding whether and how the flow reaches the stable release, so testers running into bugs or edge cases are meant to report them in the same thread rather than assume the current implementation is final.

Sources

This article was written by DigitalEscapeTools based on Signal's beta feedback thread and publicly available information at the time of publication.