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The SMS/RCS/iMessage/blue bubble-green bubble debate is almost entirely exclusive to the strange market of the US. Almost everywhere else in the world, users h

The SMS/RCS/iMessage/blue bubble-green bubble debate is almost entirely exclusive to the strange market of the US. Almost everywhere else in the world, users have simply adopted a variety of 3rd-party messaging apps that use the phone's Internet rather than GSM connection, like WhatsApp, Telegram, Messenger, Signal, WeChat, etc. EDIT: While I understand the need for a 'universal E2EE messaging standard', we don't have one right now, and all three (SMS, RCS, iMessage) are poor stop-gaps. People need to send their texts, images, videos, and files to people without pain; that's all the average layperson cares about. What does fill this need are said 3rd-party apps, which claim to have E2EE messaging. Whether this is really true remains to be seen.

elashri 4y ago
Part of reason in for many places outside US. There are no unlimited messages plan. edit: people seems to miss that I said that this is only part of the reason not the reason. I also said many places outside the US (not all). So do people down vote because they think that there are only US and EU in the world? I am missing that point.
- dailykoder 4y ago
  Atleast in germany (almost?) every plan has unlimited messages nowadays. Even the cheapest prepaid plan. People still use WhatsApp, Signal, etc., because of media sharing and easy group conversations
  - Semaphor 4y ago
    > Even the cheapest prepaid plan. My 3.99€/month plan includes 100 SMS. Not that I ever use all of those, all of my 100 minutes, or all of my 1 GB of data.
  - preisschild 4y ago
    Not in austria
- angio 4y ago
  That's not true, unlimited SMS have been a thing for at least 15 years in Europe, well before WhatsApp became popular. In my experience, people switched to WhatsApp because of group chats and images (MMS were expensive).
  - The_Colonel 4y ago
    Depends on the country. In Czechia, unlimited SMS plans used to be expensive. That changed, but e.g. with my pre-paid plan I still pay 12 cents per SMS. Historically there was also a problem that unlimited SMS plans worked only within a country. Now it's a bit better being EU-wide, but still not worry free.
  - elashri 4y ago
    So you don't think that there no other places outside except Europe?
- donkeyd 4y ago
  This may have caused WhatsApp to get big in much of the EU, but by now many European countries also have unlimited text, so it's not the case any longer.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    I thought high costs for international SMS and MMS is what caused WhatsApp to explode. I remember it being the first app with great UX for sending and receiving pics/video/contacts, and then they added group messaging which worked great as well. No spam because you needed SMS text verification, no ads, no login to remember, just all around amazing app at the right place at the right time.
    - maw 4y ago
      Yep, all this. The only thing I'll add is that, ca 2012 which is when whatsapp started really taking off where I live, intercarrier SMS was slow and unreliable. WhatsApp was fast and reliable.
- minimaul 4y ago
  FWIW, most monthly contract plans in the UK have unlimited calls & SMS. The main differentiator is the size of the data cap. There are charges for MMS etc though. Even the cheapest of plans from the main networks (3, vodafone, EE, o2) - as low as £4/mo have unlimited calls & SMS now. edit: this has been the case for quite a few years now, too.
  - candiodari 4y ago
    RCS is the successor/replacement of MMS. Carriers will charge for it and that will be the end of the protocol. It is explicitly designed to give carriers back control of messaging. Why am I even saying this? We all remember how much fun carriers control over SMS was. It killed sms. There were never any new features. Cost made lots of stuff, such as multi party chats effectively impossible for teenagers ... It was always very unclear how much everything cost. There were "traps" with premium services, often not advertised as such. Now there's fraud with international SMSes. And things have gotten worse' several states made clear they use phones to find abortions ... And RCS is designed to bring this back. No. Just. NO.
agluszak 4y ago
Now, the question is: is that a good thing? SMS is like e-mail - you can have many clients for the same protocol. Don't like your built-in SMS app? Install another one. You can't do that with 3rd-party proprietary siloed communication platforms.
- delta_p_delta_x 4y ago
  > You can't do that with 3rd-party proprietary siloed communication platforms I agree, and this is unfortunate. However, they're not going away at all, and the free alternatives (IRC?) are relegated to niche developer groups. For work communications, we have Slack, Discord, Teams, Zoom; for normal messaging, the apps I mentioned above (and more; Instagram/TikTok/etc have their own DM platforms). It will take real concerted effort to fix this, and somehow I don't see it happening.
ale42 4y ago
I really hope that interoperability between (some of) these platforms, mandated by EU, will actually come true. Thing is, SMS is ancient technology, but it does work everywhere, on any kind of device, even on the dumbest one. All the other 3-rd party apps are (a) requiring an Internet connection to work, which most people have, but some don't, having limited data plans or prepaid accounts where data is way too expensive to use, and (b) they can only communicate with their own users, exactly like iMessage.
- threeseed 4y ago
  > but some don't The proportion of people with phone-only plans is very small and getting smaller by the year. Let's just have an interoperability standard that is data based, encrypted and independent of carriers.
- klabb3 4y ago
  > SMS is ancient technology, but it does work everywhere Nowhere near true. As soon as you cross a geo boundary (ie travel) SMS is Russian roulette. It often doesn't go through at all. In the US, I've also seen carriers remove non-ascii characters.
minimaul 4y ago
The fragmentation of these third party apps gets frustrating very fast though. I'm in the UK and my work uses Slack and also wants me to use WhatsApp for OOH contact. My friends are mostly on Discord. My family is mostly only available via iMessage. A few of the more privacy conscious use Telegram or Signal. A few of the more OSS conscious use Matrix. Some chat is still on IRC (actually I like that...). Users relying on third party apps over the top has strong network effects for keeping people using services from Facebook et al, and I'm not too fond of that. I'm vaguely optimistic about the EU's idea of forcing these apps to be able to federate in at least a basic sense, but we'll see.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  > forcing these apps to be able to federate I predict it'll 'work' so that the companies aren't fined by the EU, but the service will be atrocious. You'll probably have to jump through a lot of hoops to make it work, and even then you'll probably have to wait 5 minutes for messages to be delivered, have to deal with bugs galore, and have most of the features not work. "Warning: Sending an animated emoji will eject all non-iMessage users out of this group conversation".
  - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
    > You'll probably have to jump through a lot of hoops to make it work, and even then you'll probably have to wait 5 minutes for messages to be delivered, have to deal with bugs galore, and have most of the features not work. Traditionally the EU is not amused by companies trying to cleverly work around its competition laws. I fully expect long trials with significant fines following the introduction of this law and hopefully things should settle for the better in a couple of years.
    - vineyardmike 4y ago
      Traditionally, the EU is eroding their market and terrible at writing laws. You can’t legislate product decisions. That’s not what people actually want. As Facebook and their suits illustrate, you can’t always run an international and feature-full service with their laws. The requirements for federation will probably devolve to an email or SMS fallback or just a lack of service offered. Big companies that don’t want to retreat at the risk of market share will totally provide lip service to the rules and implement the exact letter of the law and nothing more. I expect that the EU taking this and other action will be a lot like the GDPR: solving a problem and providing a few solutions but basically none of the vision. The GDPR mandates data-exporting out of a service with the idea of portability. Except no one offers imports so there’s no real portability gained, just auditability (which is nice). I do agree that I expect long trials and significant fines. The EU will look good politically for taking a stand to those big American companies. Those big American companies will maybe write a big check but certainly appeal for a decade.
Nextgrid 4y ago
Nitpick - iMessage is also Internet-based. The phone number is only checked once when you first install the phone (by Apple sending an SMS that the OS intercepts) and is then registered with Apple so that other Apple phones with iMessage enabled know that this number can receive iMessage. The carrier is no longer involved beyond the initial verification step. You can also use iMessage with an Apple ID, including to contact those who only have a phone number (and the reverse also works). This works on non-cellular devices as well such as iPod/iPad/Mac.
riggsdk 4y ago
I get the feeling that it is highly subjective how widely adopted people seem to believe these are. It would be interesting to see some actual research on this. While many may have a whole bunch of those apps installed it says nothing about their actual usage. My own personal view (Denmark based, age: mid thirties): In my group of extended friends and family almost everyone uses SMS/iMessage. SMS has been (basically) free to use here for many many years (or so many included in your basic plan you would never reach the limit). I believe this has slowed the adoption of the various chat apps here significantly - at least for people my age. Most of my friends share the same habit of calling each other if you want to know something that is time sensitive. If you don't need an answer right away you can text. New acquaintances are first added on Facebook/Messenger since you can find people by their name and then if you actually communicate with them on a regular basis you eventually get their phone number to make it easier if you for example need to call them. Almost nobody I know use Messenger's voice calls. My family (and some friends) has resorted to sending SnapChat images instead. Sharing something without it ending up in a "permanent" chat history seems to be getting more common as it is somewhat informal. I never watch people's "stories/reels" in whatever format they might take as they are not sent directly to me and they seem to expire after a short while. I hate that pressure to constantly check in not to miss anything so now I ignore it completely and I'm happier for it. If anything I have a lot more to talk about with people when I finally meet them than if I already knew everything they had been doing. I have a few WhatsApp groups going with my international friends and various local volunteer-based organizations.
quitit 4y ago
The blue bubble/green bubble thing is Google's iPhone is just "round corner" argument. They're very good at pushing the "our competitor is evil" style messages rather than being honest about the genuine reasons why others aren't embracing their various platforms. Google have repeatedly failed at making legitimate competitors to popular chat services such as Whatsapp, so Google is trying to sneak around the competition in their attempt to force Apple to bundle their technology with every device. The real hesitation by Apple is obvious, RCS is half baked: it's not a true E2EE solution and in some scenarios encryption is simply not available at all. It is demonstrably worse than other chat technologies, doesn't solve the problems it sets out to fix and the only benefit to its existence is that it gives Google a way to control a competitor's platform. Apple have already made the right kinds of concessions for chat apps on their platforms. All apps are able to hook into the native video/voice call, Contacts and instant-notification reply interfaces. Not only does this make each 3rd party app have the same feeling and level footing as Messages. It has the run on benefit of extending support for these services into devices where there isn't even an app available. E.g. one can reply to chat messages from their car or apple watch, even if there is no app on those platforms - this really goes a long way to helping 3rd parties establish themselves without having to build an app for every single one of Apple's hardware endeavours. Google could go this route with an RCS app, but it's clear that there is no end-user benefit here, especially when Whatsapp and others did the hard work in carving out the critical mass needed to exist as a standalone chat app.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  iMessage is non-interoperable by design. RCS is at least a standard, and better than the existing SMS standard. So it's progress, even if E2EE isn't there yet.
  - hendersoon 4y ago
    That's a facile argument because nobody uses RCS. RCS failed to gain acceptance, so Google took RCS and built their own app with centralized servers and that's what everybody actually uses on Android. It's basically the same as iMessage, except it requires a phone number.
amyjess 4y ago
I use Messenger and Discord to talk to all of my friends. The only people I use SMS to talk to are my parents, who are too non-technical to install any apps that didn't come with their phones.
qubex 4y ago
I’ve often hoped that Apple would adapt the iMessages app to accept ‘plugins’ that would implement the various protocols (WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram, Signal, & cetera) so that all messaging were located in a single location à la Blackberry circa 2008.

elashri 4y ago

Part of reason in for many places outside US. There are no unlimited messages plan. edit: people seems to miss that I said that this is only part of the reason not the reason. I also said many places outside the US (not all). So do people down vote because they think that there are only US and EU in the world? I am missing that point.

dailykoder 4y ago
Atleast in germany (almost?) every plan has unlimited messages nowadays. Even the cheapest prepaid plan. People still use WhatsApp, Signal, etc., because of media sharing and easy group conversations
- Semaphor 4y ago
  > Even the cheapest prepaid plan. My 3.99€/month plan includes 100 SMS. Not that I ever use all of those, all of my 100 minutes, or all of my 1 GB of data.
- preisschild 4y ago
  Not in austria
angio 4y ago
That's not true, unlimited SMS have been a thing for at least 15 years in Europe, well before WhatsApp became popular. In my experience, people switched to WhatsApp because of group chats and images (MMS were expensive).
- The_Colonel 4y ago
  Depends on the country. In Czechia, unlimited SMS plans used to be expensive. That changed, but e.g. with my pre-paid plan I still pay 12 cents per SMS. Historically there was also a problem that unlimited SMS plans worked only within a country. Now it's a bit better being EU-wide, but still not worry free.
- elashri 4y ago
  So you don't think that there no other places outside except Europe?
donkeyd 4y ago
This may have caused WhatsApp to get big in much of the EU, but by now many European countries also have unlimited text, so it's not the case any longer.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  I thought high costs for international SMS and MMS is what caused WhatsApp to explode. I remember it being the first app with great UX for sending and receiving pics/video/contacts, and then they added group messaging which worked great as well. No spam because you needed SMS text verification, no ads, no login to remember, just all around amazing app at the right place at the right time.
  - maw 4y ago
    Yep, all this. The only thing I'll add is that, ca 2012 which is when whatsapp started really taking off where I live, intercarrier SMS was slow and unreliable. WhatsApp was fast and reliable.
minimaul 4y ago
FWIW, most monthly contract plans in the UK have unlimited calls & SMS. The main differentiator is the size of the data cap. There are charges for MMS etc though. Even the cheapest of plans from the main networks (3, vodafone, EE, o2) - as low as £4/mo have unlimited calls & SMS now. edit: this has been the case for quite a few years now, too.
- candiodari 4y ago
  RCS is the successor/replacement of MMS. Carriers will charge for it and that will be the end of the protocol. It is explicitly designed to give carriers back control of messaging. Why am I even saying this? We all remember how much fun carriers control over SMS was. It killed sms. There were never any new features. Cost made lots of stuff, such as multi party chats effectively impossible for teenagers ... It was always very unclear how much everything cost. There were "traps" with premium services, often not advertised as such. Now there's fraud with international SMSes. And things have gotten worse' several states made clear they use phones to find abortions ... And RCS is designed to bring this back. No. Just. NO.

agluszak 4y ago

Now, the question is: is that a good thing? SMS is like e-mail - you can have many clients for the same protocol. Don't like your built-in SMS app? Install another one. You can't do that with 3rd-party proprietary siloed communication platforms.

delta_p_delta_x 4y ago
> You can't do that with 3rd-party proprietary siloed communication platforms I agree, and this is unfortunate. However, they're not going away at all, and the free alternatives (IRC?) are relegated to niche developer groups. For work communications, we have Slack, Discord, Teams, Zoom; for normal messaging, the apps I mentioned above (and more; Instagram/TikTok/etc have their own DM platforms). It will take real concerted effort to fix this, and somehow I don't see it happening.

ale42 4y ago

I really hope that interoperability between (some of) these platforms, mandated by EU, will actually come true. Thing is, SMS is ancient technology, but it does work everywhere, on any kind of device, even on the dumbest one. All the other 3-rd party apps are (a) requiring an Internet connection to work, which most people have, but some don't, having limited data plans or prepaid accounts where data is way too expensive to use, and (b) they can only communicate with their own users, exactly like iMessage.

threeseed 4y ago
> but some don't The proportion of people with phone-only plans is very small and getting smaller by the year. Let's just have an interoperability standard that is data based, encrypted and independent of carriers.
klabb3 4y ago
> SMS is ancient technology, but it does work everywhere Nowhere near true. As soon as you cross a geo boundary (ie travel) SMS is Russian roulette. It often doesn't go through at all. In the US, I've also seen carriers remove non-ascii characters.

minimaul 4y ago

The fragmentation of these third party apps gets frustrating very fast though. I'm in the UK and my work uses Slack and also wants me to use WhatsApp for OOH contact. My friends are mostly on Discord. My family is mostly only available via iMessage. A few of the more privacy conscious use Telegram or Signal. A few of the more OSS conscious use Matrix. Some chat is still on IRC (actually I like that...). Users relying on third party apps over the top has strong network effects for keeping people using services from Facebook et al, and I'm not too fond of that. I'm vaguely optimistic about the EU's idea of forcing these apps to be able to federate in at least a basic sense, but we'll see.

londons_explore 4y ago
> forcing these apps to be able to federate I predict it'll 'work' so that the companies aren't fined by the EU, but the service will be atrocious. You'll probably have to jump through a lot of hoops to make it work, and even then you'll probably have to wait 5 minutes for messages to be delivered, have to deal with bugs galore, and have most of the features not work. "Warning: Sending an animated emoji will eject all non-iMessage users out of this group conversation".
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  > You'll probably have to jump through a lot of hoops to make it work, and even then you'll probably have to wait 5 minutes for messages to be delivered, have to deal with bugs galore, and have most of the features not work. Traditionally the EU is not amused by companies trying to cleverly work around its competition laws. I fully expect long trials with significant fines following the introduction of this law and hopefully things should settle for the better in a couple of years.
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
    Traditionally, the EU is eroding their market and terrible at writing laws. You can’t legislate product decisions. That’s not what people actually want. As Facebook and their suits illustrate, you can’t always run an international and feature-full service with their laws. The requirements for federation will probably devolve to an email or SMS fallback or just a lack of service offered. Big companies that don’t want to retreat at the risk of market share will totally provide lip service to the rules and implement the exact letter of the law and nothing more. I expect that the EU taking this and other action will be a lot like the GDPR: solving a problem and providing a few solutions but basically none of the vision. The GDPR mandates data-exporting out of a service with the idea of portability. Except no one offers imports so there’s no real portability gained, just auditability (which is nice). I do agree that I expect long trials and significant fines. The EU will look good politically for taking a stand to those big American companies. Those big American companies will maybe write a big check but certainly appeal for a decade.

Nextgrid 4y ago

Nitpick - iMessage is also Internet-based. The phone number is only checked once when you first install the phone (by Apple sending an SMS that the OS intercepts) and is then registered with Apple so that other Apple phones with iMessage enabled know that this number can receive iMessage. The carrier is no longer involved beyond the initial verification step. You can also use iMessage with an Apple ID, including to contact those who only have a phone number (and the reverse also works). This works on non-cellular devices as well such as iPod/iPad/Mac.

riggsdk 4y ago

I get the feeling that it is highly subjective how widely adopted people seem to believe these are. It would be interesting to see some actual research on this. While many may have a whole bunch of those apps installed it says nothing about their actual usage. My own personal view (Denmark based, age: mid thirties): In my group of extended friends and family almost everyone uses SMS/iMessage. SMS has been (basically) free to use here for many many years (or so many included in your basic plan you would never reach the limit). I believe this has slowed the adoption of the various chat apps here significantly - at least for people my age. Most of my friends share the same habit of calling each other if you want to know something that is time sensitive. If you don't need an answer right away you can text. New acquaintances are first added on Facebook/Messenger since you can find people by their name and then if you actually communicate with them on a regular basis you eventually get their phone number to make it easier if you for example need to call them. Almost nobody I know use Messenger's voice calls. My family (and some friends) has resorted to sending SnapChat images instead. Sharing something without it ending up in a "permanent" chat history seems to be getting more common as it is somewhat informal. I never watch people's "stories/reels" in whatever format they might take as they are not sent directly to me and they seem to expire after a short while. I hate that pressure to constantly check in not to miss anything so now I ignore it completely and I'm happier for it. If anything I have a lot more to talk about with people when I finally meet them than if I already knew everything they had been doing. I have a few WhatsApp groups going with my international friends and various local volunteer-based organizations.

quitit 4y ago

The blue bubble/green bubble thing is Google's iPhone is just "round corner" argument. They're very good at pushing the "our competitor is evil" style messages rather than being honest about the genuine reasons why others aren't embracing their various platforms. Google have repeatedly failed at making legitimate competitors to popular chat services such as Whatsapp, so Google is trying to sneak around the competition in their attempt to force Apple to bundle their technology with every device. The real hesitation by Apple is obvious, RCS is half baked: it's not a true E2EE solution and in some scenarios encryption is simply not available at all. It is demonstrably worse than other chat technologies, doesn't solve the problems it sets out to fix and the only benefit to its existence is that it gives Google a way to control a competitor's platform. Apple have already made the right kinds of concessions for chat apps on their platforms. All apps are able to hook into the native video/voice call, Contacts and instant-notification reply interfaces. Not only does this make each 3rd party app have the same feeling and level footing as Messages. It has the run on benefit of extending support for these services into devices where there isn't even an app available. E.g. one can reply to chat messages from their car or apple watch, even if there is no app on those platforms - this really goes a long way to helping 3rd parties establish themselves without having to build an app for every single one of Apple's hardware endeavours. Google could go this route with an RCS app, but it's clear that there is no end-user benefit here, especially when Whatsapp and others did the hard work in carving out the critical mass needed to exist as a standalone chat app.

paulryanrogers 4y ago
iMessage is non-interoperable by design. RCS is at least a standard, and better than the existing SMS standard. So it's progress, even if E2EE isn't there yet.
- hendersoon 4y ago
  That's a facile argument because nobody uses RCS. RCS failed to gain acceptance, so Google took RCS and built their own app with centralized servers and that's what everybody actually uses on Android. It's basically the same as iMessage, except it requires a phone number.

amyjess 4y ago

I use Messenger and Discord to talk to all of my friends. The only people I use SMS to talk to are my parents, who are too non-technical to install any apps that didn't come with their phones.

qubex 4y ago

I’ve often hoped that Apple would adapt the iMessages app to accept ‘plugins’ that would implement the various protocols (WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram, Signal, & cetera) so that all messaging were located in a single location à la Blackberry circa 2008.