It's there for a reason. You can't easily create a spam waves if you need a phone number to create an account. And they added usernames now, so you don't need to share your phone number with people you want to talk to. It's just there to create an account and can be hidden after that.
There is Session, that uses UUIDs for names with no phone number requirement, which is basically a fork of Signal with decentralized Loki on top of it.
It's there for a reason. You can't easily create a spam waves if you need a phone number to create an account. And they added usernames now, so you don't need to share your phone number with people you want to talk to. It's just there to create an account and can be hidden after that.
There is Session, that uses UUIDs for names with no phone number requirement, which is basically a fork of Signal with decentralized Loki on top of it.