5 ms·

SMS was, in my opinion, the killer feature for Signal. Telling people to install yet-another-inbox which was only going to be used by their one privacy-weirdo f

by edent 4y ago

SMS was, in my opinion, the killer feature for Signal. Telling people to install yet-another-inbox which was only going to be used by their one privacy-weirdo friend was a non-starter. Saying "this is a better SMS app" got people on-board and let them "upgrade" to secure messaging. That's why I started using it in the "TextSecure" days. But, sadly, I agree with Signal's reasoning here. Mixing the two protocols was annoyingly complex. If someone stopped using Signal, messages you sent to them would never arrive - with no notification. And there's no obvious way to "downgrade" to SMS. I was working on RCS a decade ago. I'm glad to see it is finally getting somewhere - but I'm sad it is at the expense of better and more secure protocols.

Cthulhu_ 4y ago
As a Dutch person, I'm still amazed that the US still seems to use SMS as much; mind you, our phone plans here were "you get 1000 text messages and X minutes or a bajillion megabytes of data"; that + 'free' international messaging / calls with services like Whatsapp quickly pushed people to data-only messaging like Whatsapp or maybe FB Messenger. We also have a big immigrant population that like to chat with their family wherever they may live, and international calls / text messages are stupid expensive. I can imagine that's less of an issue in the US; do you pay extra for text messages and calls that go across state lines?
- jlund-molfese 4y ago
  We do generally pay extra for international calls, though text messaging is often free (assuming you’re talking about international states. US states, of course, are all treated as the same country). Almost all phone plans have unlimited (domestic) texting and calling and differentiate themselves with data, reliability and ”free” perks like subsidized Netflix. You really have to go out of your way to find a plan with limited texts/calls.
  - rjzzleep 4y ago
    It's actually mostly some parts in central Europe where texting is expensive. For most parts of the world texting is quite important. I don't understand why people on this board keep forgetting that central Europe and the US is the minority of the world population. Everyone keeps bringing up WhatsApp. But it seems that everyone has all but forgotten that WhatsApp became so popular not because they only focused on the US market, but because they went around the globe and specifically targeted feature phones as well. I.e. they understood that their own home turf isn't enough to make a dominant chat application.
    - jhugo 4y ago
      The death of SMS is hardly specific to central Europe and the US. It's already thoroughly dead in most of Asia for person-to-person communication, replaced by WhatsApp/WeChat/LINE/Telegram/etc depending on country.
      - rjzzleep 4y ago
        That's incorrect. Dead for person-to-person communication in east Asia yes, but still EXTREMELY common for everything else. "It doesn't matter for the use cases I don't care about" - what a selfish look at the world. Besides paying for parking by SMS and other services in Europe there's also M-Pesa and similar services[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa
        jhugo 4y ago
        > That's incorrect. Read before replying. I literally said "for person-to-person communication".
        rjzzleep 4y ago
        I was specifically referencing YOUR language. You can't on the one hand proclaim death of a protocol and in the next sentence limit it to a specific use case. > The death of SMS is hardly specific to central Europe and the US. I hate to be a grammar Nazi, but since you're specifically attacking my wording I have to correct you. This statement would only be correct if it was: "The death of SMS for person-to-person communication is hardly specific to central Europe and the US." So yes, your statement is incorrect. It's not dead, far from. It might get there eventually, but definitely not yet.
- alexschnapp 4y ago
  No, my phone plan in the US was unlimited call and text. So it was either imessage with everyone or text.
- edent 4y ago
  FWIW, I'm not American. In the UK, where I am, most contracts have unlimited SMS. I think even the cheapest PAYG plans include massive bundles. Lots of companies send out reminders by SMS because it is universally accepted. Not every customer has WhatsApp.
- izacus 4y ago
  Why are you people always so proud of having all your communication owned by Meta? With Meta dictating which phones you can use to communicate with others?
  - yoghurt 4y ago
    Where are you getting the idea from that "we" are proud of our communication being controlled by a commercial party? I'm pretty sure most people are not proud, but either poorly informed or not willing to make the trade off for more security while losing half their social network.
    - izacus 4y ago
      And yet, every time we have this conversation we get this "who cares about SMS, we have WhatsApp!" comments, like that's some kind of a good thing? It happens in iMessage and RCS threads as well.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  I've gotten SMS messages from iPhone users. In some Apple centric areas (rich people or people who think/want to pretend they're rich), I think iMessage is the default. Fine by me. If they want a better experience, I have almost every messaging app on the Dutch market bridged to my Matrix server so I don't care, they'll just have to live with the lack of features if they want to chat with me (or install something like Signal). I don't care about RCS and other ISP standards that exist to squeeze more money out of texting. I'll use Telegram/Signal/WhatsApp calling before I'll use my phone app because my subscription doesn't include free minutes (and I barely call anyway) so I've gotten the benefits of tech like WiFi calling through VoLTE for years before ISPs bothered sending their VoLTE profiles to my phone.
rjzzleep 4y ago
Problem is Signal people had really odd visions how to make basic functionality work. This isn't really because SMS/MMS are bad(yes they are). But there are threads in their issue tracker where Signal people would disagree with basically functionality of responding to text messages on dual sim devices. "We'll always use the Signal registered number as default". One part of this is a terrible(but working) protocol, the other is really weird product management where basic needs of the consumer are brushed aside with a "I know best approach" that doesn't really work when you're not in the shoes of apple and have the ability to just replace SMS altogether.
- edent 4y ago
  Agreed. I remember when - years ago - they unilaterally switched all Android devices to use the Apple emoji. No consultation, no investigation with users, no reason other than they wanted consistency across their apps. Took a lot of grumpy users before they backtracked. I use and like Signal. I'm not smart enough to disagree with some of their technical decisions, but I wish they could have found a way to make SMS/RCS work.
  - NavinF 4y ago
    I can see why some people would want a toggle, but defaulting to Apple emoji seems like the obviously correct thing to do. I suspect a major reason why HNers hate emoji in general is because they see different images from what gen-z sees and therefore have a hard time understanding jokes that rely on how these images look.
    - batiudrami 4y ago
      This used to be a problem but has been largely solved for the last 3-5 years. Emoji while slightly different looking are tonally consistent across devices.
  - edent 4y ago
    Just to add some citations. You can see various threads where people complained about the forced Apple emoji e.g. https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/3712 https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/3712 and https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/3675 https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/3675 Signal's own FAQ says > Signal Android includes built-in emoji functionality for consistency between platforms https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360017561992-Why-are-the-emoji-on-Signal-Android-different-from-the-other-apps-on-my-phone- https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360017561992-Wh...
groestl 4y ago
Probably because I haven't witnessed the Textsecure days: I didn't even know Signal was doing SMS, until these days. Certainly didn't convince anyone to use Signal by telling them it was a better SMS app. So SMS as killer feature seems to be, at least for my peer group, firmly in the past.

by edent 4y ago

Cthulhu_ 4y ago

As a Dutch person, I'm still amazed that the US still seems to use SMS as much; mind you, our phone plans here were "you get 1000 text messages and X minutes or a bajillion megabytes of data"; that + 'free' international messaging / calls with services like Whatsapp quickly pushed people to data-only messaging like Whatsapp or maybe FB Messenger. We also have a big immigrant population that like to chat with their family wherever they may live, and international calls / text messages are stupid expensive. I can imagine that's less of an issue in the US; do you pay extra for text messages and calls that go across state lines?

jlund-molfese 4y ago
We do generally pay extra for international calls, though text messaging is often free (assuming you’re talking about international states. US states, of course, are all treated as the same country). Almost all phone plans have unlimited (domestic) texting and calling and differentiate themselves with data, reliability and ”free” perks like subsidized Netflix. You really have to go out of your way to find a plan with limited texts/calls.
- rjzzleep 4y ago
  It's actually mostly some parts in central Europe where texting is expensive. For most parts of the world texting is quite important. I don't understand why people on this board keep forgetting that central Europe and the US is the minority of the world population. Everyone keeps bringing up WhatsApp. But it seems that everyone has all but forgotten that WhatsApp became so popular not because they only focused on the US market, but because they went around the globe and specifically targeted feature phones as well. I.e. they understood that their own home turf isn't enough to make a dominant chat application.
  - jhugo 4y ago
    The death of SMS is hardly specific to central Europe and the US. It's already thoroughly dead in most of Asia for person-to-person communication, replaced by WhatsApp/WeChat/LINE/Telegram/etc depending on country.
    - rjzzleep 4y ago
      That's incorrect. Dead for person-to-person communication in east Asia yes, but still EXTREMELY common for everything else. "It doesn't matter for the use cases I don't care about" - what a selfish look at the world. Besides paying for parking by SMS and other services in Europe there's also M-Pesa and similar services[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa
      - jhugo 4y ago
        > That's incorrect. Read before replying. I literally said "for person-to-person communication".
        rjzzleep 4y ago
        I was specifically referencing YOUR language. You can't on the one hand proclaim death of a protocol and in the next sentence limit it to a specific use case. > The death of SMS is hardly specific to central Europe and the US. I hate to be a grammar Nazi, but since you're specifically attacking my wording I have to correct you. This statement would only be correct if it was: "The death of SMS for person-to-person communication is hardly specific to central Europe and the US." So yes, your statement is incorrect. It's not dead, far from. It might get there eventually, but definitely not yet.
alexschnapp 4y ago
No, my phone plan in the US was unlimited call and text. So it was either imessage with everyone or text.
edent 4y ago
FWIW, I'm not American. In the UK, where I am, most contracts have unlimited SMS. I think even the cheapest PAYG plans include massive bundles. Lots of companies send out reminders by SMS because it is universally accepted. Not every customer has WhatsApp.
izacus 4y ago
Why are you people always so proud of having all your communication owned by Meta? With Meta dictating which phones you can use to communicate with others?
- yoghurt 4y ago
  Where are you getting the idea from that "we" are proud of our communication being controlled by a commercial party? I'm pretty sure most people are not proud, but either poorly informed or not willing to make the trade off for more security while losing half their social network.
  - izacus 4y ago
    And yet, every time we have this conversation we get this "who cares about SMS, we have WhatsApp!" comments, like that's some kind of a good thing? It happens in iMessage and RCS threads as well.
jeroenhd 4y ago
I've gotten SMS messages from iPhone users. In some Apple centric areas (rich people or people who think/want to pretend they're rich), I think iMessage is the default. Fine by me. If they want a better experience, I have almost every messaging app on the Dutch market bridged to my Matrix server so I don't care, they'll just have to live with the lack of features if they want to chat with me (or install something like Signal). I don't care about RCS and other ISP standards that exist to squeeze more money out of texting. I'll use Telegram/Signal/WhatsApp calling before I'll use my phone app because my subscription doesn't include free minutes (and I barely call anyway) so I've gotten the benefits of tech like WiFi calling through VoLTE for years before ISPs bothered sending their VoLTE profiles to my phone.

rjzzleep 4y ago

Problem is Signal people had really odd visions how to make basic functionality work. This isn't really because SMS/MMS are bad(yes they are). But there are threads in their issue tracker where Signal people would disagree with basically functionality of responding to text messages on dual sim devices. "We'll always use the Signal registered number as default". One part of this is a terrible(but working) protocol, the other is really weird product management where basic needs of the consumer are brushed aside with a "I know best approach" that doesn't really work when you're not in the shoes of apple and have the ability to just replace SMS altogether.

edent 4y ago
Agreed. I remember when - years ago - they unilaterally switched all Android devices to use the Apple emoji. No consultation, no investigation with users, no reason other than they wanted consistency across their apps. Took a lot of grumpy users before they backtracked. I use and like Signal. I'm not smart enough to disagree with some of their technical decisions, but I wish they could have found a way to make SMS/RCS work.
- NavinF 4y ago
  I can see why some people would want a toggle, but defaulting to Apple emoji seems like the obviously correct thing to do. I suspect a major reason why HNers hate emoji in general is because they see different images from what gen-z sees and therefore have a hard time understanding jokes that rely on how these images look.
  - batiudrami 4y ago
    This used to be a problem but has been largely solved for the last 3-5 years. Emoji while slightly different looking are tonally consistent across devices.
- edent 4y ago
  Just to add some citations. You can see various threads where people complained about the forced Apple emoji e.g. https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/3712 https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/3712 and https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/3675 https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/3675 Signal's own FAQ says > Signal Android includes built-in emoji functionality for consistency between platforms https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360017561992-Why-are-the-emoji-on-Signal-Android-different-from-the-other-apps-on-my-phone- https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360017561992-Wh...

groestl 4y ago

Probably because I haven't witnessed the Textsecure days: I didn't even know Signal was doing SMS, until these days. Certainly didn't convince anyone to use Signal by telling them it was a better SMS app. So SMS as killer feature seems to be, at least for my peer group, firmly in the past.