8 ms·

Having lived all over the world, but not the US, I don't think I've sent or received an SMS/text message once in the last decade (except for bad 2FA implementat

Having lived all over the world, but not the US, I don't think I've sent or received an SMS/text message once in the last decade (except for bad 2FA implementations). Apple's weird and semi-transparent (to the user) hybrid system of mixing a proprietary web protocol and SMS in the same app is obviously problematic, and the rest of the world moved on to other messaging services, but it's weird that the US is still stuck on this.

afavour 4y ago
It is a little odd that the US is so iMessage-heavy when the rest of the world isn't but IMO relying on another proprietary protocol (i.e. WhatsApp) really isn't great either. I kind of think everyone is in an awful place.
- qwytw 4y ago
  I think text massages (SMS) are much more popular in US than in some other countries (obviously there are a lot of places where people still use SMS besides US). Not sure how accurate is the data but this seems interesting: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1263720/mobile-messaging-apps-usage-by-country/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1263720/mobile-messaging...
  - tgma 4y ago
    US historically was much more into "unlimited" plans vs pay-per-use was/is more of a common thing in poorer countries. That may explain the prevalence of SMS in the US.
  - liotier 4y ago
    Seen from my window, Whatsapp gained traction as free international messages and voice - which are only attractive for usage across international boundaries, which is uncommon in the USA... Maybe that partly explains why SMS lasted longer in the USA.
    - cryptonym 4y ago
      SMS are not always free, even locally. They are not convenient for a group chat. Apps allow group communication and is "free" over wifi.
      - mrguyorama 4y ago
        The US has had stupidly overpriced cellular data, while unlimited texts have been a standard thing since like 2005 on even the cheapest plans.
    - Macha 4y ago
      Did it? My recollection was that it was more due to the wider usage of prepay, at least in my country. With more prepay, there were more people paying per message for SMS so once data got low enough people first went to IM clients (MSN, Facebook Messenger), then to the new wave of phone apps (Viber, Line, Whatsapp) of which Whatsapp was the eventual winner in the local market.
      - liotier 4y ago
        Accounts with per SMS billing were unlikely to have mobile data for comfortable Whatsapp usage, so I doubt that was the substitution. To call between France and various African countries in the early Android era, I remember first using Viber - but after a while everyone switched to Whatsapp in a few months: somehow, through some sheer black magic, Whatsapp had nailed voice quality over the lossy high-latency links that were the norms then, and users noticed.
        sangnoir 4y ago
        > Accounts with per SMS billing were unlikely to have mobile data for comfortable Whatsapp usage, so I doubt that was the substitution. Care to quantify that? PAYG SMS was/is consistently way more expensive than PAYG data[1] in every country I have visited; granted I haven't been to many countries, but I've visited most continents. IIRC, there's a 2-3 orders of magnitude difference in the costs-per-140-bytes sent. Per WhatsApp message, which ends up being a few KiB per day for text only
  - mrtnmcc 4y ago
    SMS was more reliable for delivery with poor cellular connections, and many people learned to use it for that reason. The US (had) many rural areas with poor reception. So maybe that plays into it? That theory would seem disproved by Mexico which is also pretty rural, but I believe their cell infrastructure sprung up pretty quickly and later than the US so "old school" sms didn't get the same traction.
- miroljub 4y ago
  As much as I don't like WhatsApp for other reasons, at least it's honest in a way that you know that messages sent over WhatsApp will be sent and received using WhatsApp, and not some confusing half-backed combination of SMS and another App that you can't control. iMessage is not the only one at fault here, Google Messages (or how they call it today) is not better. It's the first thing I disable when switching to a new phone.
  - bmitc 4y ago
    WhatsApp can also be confusing. It's a message client but yet is tied to your phone number. I recently logged into a backup phone that has WhatsApp on it. The reason WhatsApp is in the backup phone is because you cannot backup between iOS and Android. So I left it there. i recently got a new phone, so I tried to back up WhatsApp, but it claims no such backup exists, which is not true. So I log into the backup phone and see that WhatsApp has discontinues support for that phone or version of Android. That was a change that occured over just a month or so of not logging in, and I received no warning. There's no way to get around it. And I think that action is potentially what deleted my Google Cloud backup of WhatsApp. It's a mess, and I have potentially lost years of messages.
    - ValentineC 4y ago
      > The reason WhatsApp is in the backup phone is because you cannot backup between iOS and Android. So I left it there. i recently got a new phone, so I tried to back up WhatsApp, but it claims no such backup exists, which is not true. You can migrate between iOS and Android, but I think Android > iOS is a very recent feature. iOS backs up to either iTunes as part of a phone backup, or separately to iCloud within its own app container; and Android backs up to Google Drive. I'm very surprised that WhatsApp on iOS doesn't support Google Drive either, given that it's the more "open" of the two. [1] https://faq.whatsapp.com/1295296267926284/ https://faq.whatsapp.com/1295296267926284/ [2] https://faq.whatsapp.com/686469079565350/ https://faq.whatsapp.com/686469079565350/
  - hackmiester 4y ago
    If that's the configuration you want, it's more or less available in iMessage. You can either disable SMS fallback (and you will always use iMessage to talk to contacts with iPhones) or you can disable iMessage (in which case you will obviously always use SMS). Of course they do not offer to split these up into two apps, which may be what you want.
- reaperducer 4y ago
  It is a little odd that the US is so iMessage-heavy when the rest of the world isn't It's not odd at all. Lots of iPhones in the US because of high incomes, and high iPhone availability. Lots of non-iPhones in the rest of the world because of comparatively low incomes, and significantly less iPhone availability. I see no mystery.
  - delta_p_delta_x 4y ago
    > Lots of iPhones in the US because of high incomes, and high iPhone availability The US is not the only country with a wealthy populace which tends to use mostly iPhones. The UK, Germany, Switzerland, the Baltics, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan are all roughly equally as wealthy (if not more so) per capita. However, in literally everywhere else but the US, people almost exclusively use third-party apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, WeChat, etc. iMessage is completely ignored, and the Messages app on iPhones is used solely for SMSes from carriers, 2FA OTPs, and random spam that is ignored. Furthermore, several flagship Android phones rival iPhones in cost now.
    - dixie_land 4y ago
      One of reasons WeChat and WhatsApp became popular in low income countries first, was that in those countries SMS were/are charged PER MESSAGE
      - mrguyorama 4y ago
        This was the case in the US as well until the early 2000s. Texting before then could be as much as a quarter per 160 characters!
      - tomatocracy 4y ago
        International SMS charges and ability to send photos without very high MMS charges were also a big driver of WhatsApp uptake - in the UK individual SMS charges had basically gone before WhatsApp came along but those two reasons were why my friendship group moved to it.
    - 4y ago
- saiya-jin 4y ago
  I agree that proprietary protocols suck and users are harmed long term, iMessage due to reasons described is by far the worst : it doesn't even bother to tell senders reliably if recipients received it, not even going into read status. Due to Apple's desperate need to keep all their inventions to themselves only regardless of long term effects (lightning port say hi and bye in quick succession), its worse than useless and actually harms communication between people. I don't know a single person/haven't met a single one in Switzerland in past 13 years who is using it, everybody is on some other competition (while working in IT and bank and quite a few folks here sport mostly older apple devices).
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    > it doesn't even bother to tell senders reliably if recipients received it, not even going into read status Huh? That's exactly what iMessage does, and one of the key reasons people prefer it over SMS.
  - shagie 4y ago
    https://support.apple.com/guide/messages/change-imessage-settings-in-messages-on-mac-icht39422/14.0/mac/13.0 https://support.apple.com/guide/messages/change-imessage-set... > Send read receipts > Turn on read receipts so that people who send you messages see when you’ve read them. > You can also send read receipts for a conversation only. The per-conversation setting overrides the global setting. --- Note that some people don't enable this. One member of my family has read receipts off and I don't see anything on that one. Another member has them on and I can see 'delivered' and 'read' show up. Many people who are security conscious have that setting off by default because, well, security conscious. I would contend that not having read receipts as an option is important functionality for some.
    - thewebcount 4y ago
      Even if the other person in the conversation has read receipts turned off you will still get a delivery receipt that shows it made it to their phone. I turn off read receipts because it's nobody's damn business if I read their message or not.
- sneak 4y ago
  I don't have WhatsApp or iMessage; anyone who wants to communicate with me can use email or Signal. Signal lets me sign in with VoIP numbers, so it works fine for my uses, and is reasonably secure.
  - dalyons 4y ago
    If I drew that line I would have approximately zero people communicating with me.
    - layer8 4y ago
      It must be sad to realize that people don’t want to communicate with you all that much. ;)
    - sneak 4y ago
      This is the fear that keeps people serving as the honey in the trap of these surveillance apps. If someone can't be assed to download a zero cost and surveillance-free, ad-free app to talk to you, how much do they really value communicating with you?
      - dalyons 4y ago
        It’s not fear. Asking others to use a special (from their pov) app just to talk to me is me imposing a burden and an inconvenience on them. I don’t care enough about iMessage’s cons to annoy others around me.
        sneak 4y ago
        Subjecting friends to surveillance without their consent is more of an imposed inconvenience than downloading an app.
- Enginerrrd 4y ago
  Signal was starting to gain some traction here IMO because it was open source and therefore a bit more trustworthy, and it gracefully fell back to SMS so people could adopt it without risk and interruption to their existing network. Then they decided they were going to shoot themselves in the foot and drive off a cliff. Unbelievably frustrating.
  - kipple 4y ago
    > Then they decided they were going to shoot themselves in the foot and drive off a cliff. Unbelievably frustrating. Wait I missed this, what did Signal do?
    - oaththrowaway 4y ago
      Removed SMS support from the app
      - five82 4y ago
        It seems counterintuitive to use SMS in the first place if your users expect end to end encryption.
        _23sd 4y ago
        Maybe, but confusing iMessage and SMS doesn’t seem to be a problem for iOS users who use both in the same app. The bigger problem was going to be RCS. 3rd party apps can’t use it, so as SMS conversations moved to RCS the SMS support in the Signal app would become less useful or even confusing.
        wkat4242 4y ago
        It did in fact support even that. That's how the whole thing started, as TextSecure which encrypted SMS.
        FateOfNations 4y ago
        Yeah, as an iPhone Signal user, the concept that you'd ever use want to use it for anything other than explicitly encrypted messaging never even occurred to me. I learned about this feature that the Android version had when they announced it would be discontinued. I would even consider the "graceful" fall back to SMS to be potentially an anti-feature/security flaw, as it opens you up to downgrade attacks.
tannhaeuser 4y ago
> the rest of the world moved on to other messaging services Speak for yourself. I'm not in the US and still prefer SMS, simply because you can port over your contacts and don't have to share them with shady businesses on a fscking platform, for freaking text messages, something we already did 30 years ago (not counting emails almost double as old).
- snehk 4y ago
  What country are you from where SMS messaging is more popular than apps?
  - frosted-flakes 4y ago
    Canada
- miroljub 4y ago
  Good for you if you don't see your telecom provider as a shady company.
- this_user 4y ago
  So you'd rather pay extra to send completely unencrypted messages?
  - sneak 4y ago
    They're not completely unencrypted - they are encrypted with A5 between the handset and the tower. They are certainly not e2ee.
    - WelcomeShorty 4y ago
      They are completely unencrypted, just on the initial and the last "mile" the TRANSPORT layer is (sort of) encrypted.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
bmitc 4y ago
I also use WhatsApp and WeChat. The problem is getting everyone to agree on a personal or friend group preference.
downrightmike 4y ago
SMS is an old and dated protocol that we strangely use for security 2FA too. There needs to be an updated protocol, there is one in the works, but the carriers AT&T and it's spawn, are really trying to set it up so they can nickel and dime users.
- acomjean 4y ago
  I'm starting to get SMS spam.. (my favorite from banks I don't have an account at..) I hate being nickel and dimed, but if this is one case where if sending me a message cost a few cents, and it ends up stopping SMS spam, it might be worth it.. Back when I stated using a phone, we used to have to pay for texts...
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    I think most companies DO have to pay per message for texting phones, I know we do. Largely companies consider it worth it because Americans spend a ton on marketing and it largely works on us.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pupppet 4y ago
If I have to trust any company with my data, I'll take Apple over Facebook any day. WhatsApp is not the answer.
- itake 4y ago
  That’s not the point. If you use SMS (which isn’t encrypted) you’re trusting everybody. Do you trust no encryption vs whatever Meta/WhatsApp claim to use?
stonemetal12 4y ago
Why is it weird that people expect the default preinstalled message app to work? Especially when it is from Apple, famous for it just works, and being the largest company on the planet.
bombolo 4y ago
Google has an app that mixes SMS and messages as well transparently. They put this in the android SMS app at some point. Then they started to ask me daily to switch to using their messaging thing whenever possible. That's when I went on f-droid and downloaded the first SMS app I found. I can't understand why the SMS app should send anything else than SMS. After all, I'm aware that using any messenger made by google means constant migration.
smitty1110 4y ago
A lot of people have forgotten that iMessage was really the original killer app for the iPhone, as a side effect of how terrible US carriers were in the late 00's early 10's. You used to get a handful of txt messages a month, basically no MMS messages a month, and if you went over you got an overage fee, and still had to buy the 20 message package. MMS messages were more than a dollar each! But WiFi had become common both in the office and at home, and there wer unlimited data plans (with no SMS or MMS) that could be bought for reasonable prices. iMessage bypassed the carrier tax, It's that simple. That's why it became popular, and that's why the network effects working against Whats App, Signal, and others are so strong. And it's why there's skepticism towards the standards that Google and carriers are pushing for, because a lot of people don't remember the carriers' business practices very fondly.

afavour 4y ago

It is a little odd that the US is so iMessage-heavy when the rest of the world isn't but IMO relying on another proprietary protocol (i.e. WhatsApp) really isn't great either. I kind of think everyone is in an awful place.

qwytw 4y ago
I think text massages (SMS) are much more popular in US than in some other countries (obviously there are a lot of places where people still use SMS besides US). Not sure how accurate is the data but this seems interesting: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1263720/mobile-messaging-apps-usage-by-country/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1263720/mobile-messaging...
- tgma 4y ago
  US historically was much more into "unlimited" plans vs pay-per-use was/is more of a common thing in poorer countries. That may explain the prevalence of SMS in the US.
- liotier 4y ago
  Seen from my window, Whatsapp gained traction as free international messages and voice - which are only attractive for usage across international boundaries, which is uncommon in the USA... Maybe that partly explains why SMS lasted longer in the USA.
  - cryptonym 4y ago
    SMS are not always free, even locally. They are not convenient for a group chat. Apps allow group communication and is "free" over wifi.
    - mrguyorama 4y ago
      The US has had stupidly overpriced cellular data, while unlimited texts have been a standard thing since like 2005 on even the cheapest plans.
  - Macha 4y ago
    Did it? My recollection was that it was more due to the wider usage of prepay, at least in my country. With more prepay, there were more people paying per message for SMS so once data got low enough people first went to IM clients (MSN, Facebook Messenger), then to the new wave of phone apps (Viber, Line, Whatsapp) of which Whatsapp was the eventual winner in the local market.
    - liotier 4y ago
      Accounts with per SMS billing were unlikely to have mobile data for comfortable Whatsapp usage, so I doubt that was the substitution. To call between France and various African countries in the early Android era, I remember first using Viber - but after a while everyone switched to Whatsapp in a few months: somehow, through some sheer black magic, Whatsapp had nailed voice quality over the lossy high-latency links that were the norms then, and users noticed.
      - sangnoir 4y ago
        > Accounts with per SMS billing were unlikely to have mobile data for comfortable Whatsapp usage, so I doubt that was the substitution. Care to quantify that? PAYG SMS was/is consistently way more expensive than PAYG data[1] in every country I have visited; granted I haven't been to many countries, but I've visited most continents. IIRC, there's a 2-3 orders of magnitude difference in the costs-per-140-bytes sent. Per WhatsApp message, which ends up being a few KiB per day for text only
- mrtnmcc 4y ago
  SMS was more reliable for delivery with poor cellular connections, and many people learned to use it for that reason. The US (had) many rural areas with poor reception. So maybe that plays into it? That theory would seem disproved by Mexico which is also pretty rural, but I believe their cell infrastructure sprung up pretty quickly and later than the US so "old school" sms didn't get the same traction.
miroljub 4y ago
As much as I don't like WhatsApp for other reasons, at least it's honest in a way that you know that messages sent over WhatsApp will be sent and received using WhatsApp, and not some confusing half-backed combination of SMS and another App that you can't control. iMessage is not the only one at fault here, Google Messages (or how they call it today) is not better. It's the first thing I disable when switching to a new phone.
- bmitc 4y ago
  WhatsApp can also be confusing. It's a message client but yet is tied to your phone number. I recently logged into a backup phone that has WhatsApp on it. The reason WhatsApp is in the backup phone is because you cannot backup between iOS and Android. So I left it there. i recently got a new phone, so I tried to back up WhatsApp, but it claims no such backup exists, which is not true. So I log into the backup phone and see that WhatsApp has discontinues support for that phone or version of Android. That was a change that occured over just a month or so of not logging in, and I received no warning. There's no way to get around it. And I think that action is potentially what deleted my Google Cloud backup of WhatsApp. It's a mess, and I have potentially lost years of messages.
  - ValentineC 4y ago
    > The reason WhatsApp is in the backup phone is because you cannot backup between iOS and Android. So I left it there. i recently got a new phone, so I tried to back up WhatsApp, but it claims no such backup exists, which is not true. You can migrate between iOS and Android, but I think Android > iOS is a very recent feature. iOS backs up to either iTunes as part of a phone backup, or separately to iCloud within its own app container; and Android backs up to Google Drive. I'm very surprised that WhatsApp on iOS doesn't support Google Drive either, given that it's the more "open" of the two. [1] https://faq.whatsapp.com/1295296267926284/ https://faq.whatsapp.com/1295296267926284/ [2] https://faq.whatsapp.com/686469079565350/ https://faq.whatsapp.com/686469079565350/
- hackmiester 4y ago
  If that's the configuration you want, it's more or less available in iMessage. You can either disable SMS fallback (and you will always use iMessage to talk to contacts with iPhones) or you can disable iMessage (in which case you will obviously always use SMS). Of course they do not offer to split these up into two apps, which may be what you want.
reaperducer 4y ago
It is a little odd that the US is so iMessage-heavy when the rest of the world isn't It's not odd at all. Lots of iPhones in the US because of high incomes, and high iPhone availability. Lots of non-iPhones in the rest of the world because of comparatively low incomes, and significantly less iPhone availability. I see no mystery.
- delta_p_delta_x 4y ago
  > Lots of iPhones in the US because of high incomes, and high iPhone availability The US is not the only country with a wealthy populace which tends to use mostly iPhones. The UK, Germany, Switzerland, the Baltics, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan are all roughly equally as wealthy (if not more so) per capita. However, in literally everywhere else but the US, people almost exclusively use third-party apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, WeChat, etc. iMessage is completely ignored, and the Messages app on iPhones is used solely for SMSes from carriers, 2FA OTPs, and random spam that is ignored. Furthermore, several flagship Android phones rival iPhones in cost now.
  - dixie_land 4y ago
    One of reasons WeChat and WhatsApp became popular in low income countries first, was that in those countries SMS were/are charged PER MESSAGE
    - mrguyorama 4y ago
      This was the case in the US as well until the early 2000s. Texting before then could be as much as a quarter per 160 characters!
    - tomatocracy 4y ago
      International SMS charges and ability to send photos without very high MMS charges were also a big driver of WhatsApp uptake - in the UK individual SMS charges had basically gone before WhatsApp came along but those two reasons were why my friendship group moved to it.
  - 4y ago
saiya-jin 4y ago
I agree that proprietary protocols suck and users are harmed long term, iMessage due to reasons described is by far the worst : it doesn't even bother to tell senders reliably if recipients received it, not even going into read status. Due to Apple's desperate need to keep all their inventions to themselves only regardless of long term effects (lightning port say hi and bye in quick succession), its worse than useless and actually harms communication between people. I don't know a single person/haven't met a single one in Switzerland in past 13 years who is using it, everybody is on some other competition (while working in IT and bank and quite a few folks here sport mostly older apple devices).
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  > it doesn't even bother to tell senders reliably if recipients received it, not even going into read status Huh? That's exactly what iMessage does, and one of the key reasons people prefer it over SMS.
- shagie 4y ago
  https://support.apple.com/guide/messages/change-imessage-settings-in-messages-on-mac-icht39422/14.0/mac/13.0 https://support.apple.com/guide/messages/change-imessage-set... > Send read receipts > Turn on read receipts so that people who send you messages see when you’ve read them. > You can also send read receipts for a conversation only. The per-conversation setting overrides the global setting. --- Note that some people don't enable this. One member of my family has read receipts off and I don't see anything on that one. Another member has them on and I can see 'delivered' and 'read' show up. Many people who are security conscious have that setting off by default because, well, security conscious. I would contend that not having read receipts as an option is important functionality for some.
  - thewebcount 4y ago
    Even if the other person in the conversation has read receipts turned off you will still get a delivery receipt that shows it made it to their phone. I turn off read receipts because it's nobody's damn business if I read their message or not.
sneak 4y ago
I don't have WhatsApp or iMessage; anyone who wants to communicate with me can use email or Signal. Signal lets me sign in with VoIP numbers, so it works fine for my uses, and is reasonably secure.
- dalyons 4y ago
  If I drew that line I would have approximately zero people communicating with me.
  - layer8 4y ago
    It must be sad to realize that people don’t want to communicate with you all that much. ;)
  - sneak 4y ago
    This is the fear that keeps people serving as the honey in the trap of these surveillance apps. If someone can't be assed to download a zero cost and surveillance-free, ad-free app to talk to you, how much do they really value communicating with you?
    - dalyons 4y ago
      It’s not fear. Asking others to use a special (from their pov) app just to talk to me is me imposing a burden and an inconvenience on them. I don’t care enough about iMessage’s cons to annoy others around me.
      - sneak 4y ago
        Subjecting friends to surveillance without their consent is more of an imposed inconvenience than downloading an app.
Enginerrrd 4y ago
Signal was starting to gain some traction here IMO because it was open source and therefore a bit more trustworthy, and it gracefully fell back to SMS so people could adopt it without risk and interruption to their existing network. Then they decided they were going to shoot themselves in the foot and drive off a cliff. Unbelievably frustrating.
- kipple 4y ago
  > Then they decided they were going to shoot themselves in the foot and drive off a cliff. Unbelievably frustrating. Wait I missed this, what did Signal do?
  - oaththrowaway 4y ago
    Removed SMS support from the app
    - five82 4y ago
      It seems counterintuitive to use SMS in the first place if your users expect end to end encryption.
      - _23sd 4y ago
        Maybe, but confusing iMessage and SMS doesn’t seem to be a problem for iOS users who use both in the same app. The bigger problem was going to be RCS. 3rd party apps can’t use it, so as SMS conversations moved to RCS the SMS support in the Signal app would become less useful or even confusing.
      - wkat4242 4y ago
        It did in fact support even that. That's how the whole thing started, as TextSecure which encrypted SMS.
      - FateOfNations 4y ago
        Yeah, as an iPhone Signal user, the concept that you'd ever use want to use it for anything other than explicitly encrypted messaging never even occurred to me. I learned about this feature that the Android version had when they announced it would be discontinued. I would even consider the "graceful" fall back to SMS to be potentially an anti-feature/security flaw, as it opens you up to downgrade attacks.

tannhaeuser 4y ago

> the rest of the world moved on to other messaging services Speak for yourself. I'm not in the US and still prefer SMS, simply because you can port over your contacts and don't have to share them with shady businesses on a fscking platform, for freaking text messages, something we already did 30 years ago (not counting emails almost double as old).

snehk 4y ago
What country are you from where SMS messaging is more popular than apps?
- frosted-flakes 4y ago
  Canada
miroljub 4y ago
Good for you if you don't see your telecom provider as a shady company.
this_user 4y ago
So you'd rather pay extra to send completely unencrypted messages?
- sneak 4y ago
  They're not completely unencrypted - they are encrypted with A5 between the handset and the tower. They are certainly not e2ee.
  - WelcomeShorty 4y ago
    They are completely unencrypted, just on the initial and the last "mile" the TRANSPORT layer is (sort of) encrypted.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]

bmitc 4y ago

I also use WhatsApp and WeChat. The problem is getting everyone to agree on a personal or friend group preference.

downrightmike 4y ago

SMS is an old and dated protocol that we strangely use for security 2FA too. There needs to be an updated protocol, there is one in the works, but the carriers AT&T and it's spawn, are really trying to set it up so they can nickel and dime users.

acomjean 4y ago
I'm starting to get SMS spam.. (my favorite from banks I don't have an account at..) I hate being nickel and dimed, but if this is one case where if sending me a message cost a few cents, and it ends up stopping SMS spam, it might be worth it.. Back when I stated using a phone, we used to have to pay for texts...
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  I think most companies DO have to pay per message for texting phones, I know we do. Largely companies consider it worth it because Americans spend a ton on marketing and it largely works on us.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

pupppet 4y ago

If I have to trust any company with my data, I'll take Apple over Facebook any day. WhatsApp is not the answer.

itake 4y ago
That’s not the point. If you use SMS (which isn’t encrypted) you’re trusting everybody. Do you trust no encryption vs whatever Meta/WhatsApp claim to use?

stonemetal12 4y ago

Why is it weird that people expect the default preinstalled message app to work? Especially when it is from Apple, famous for it just works, and being the largest company on the planet.

bombolo 4y ago

Google has an app that mixes SMS and messages as well transparently. They put this in the android SMS app at some point. Then they started to ask me daily to switch to using their messaging thing whenever possible. That's when I went on f-droid and downloaded the first SMS app I found. I can't understand why the SMS app should send anything else than SMS. After all, I'm aware that using any messenger made by google means constant migration.

smitty1110 4y ago

A lot of people have forgotten that iMessage was really the original killer app for the iPhone, as a side effect of how terrible US carriers were in the late 00's early 10's. You used to get a handful of txt messages a month, basically no MMS messages a month, and if you went over you got an overage fee, and still had to buy the 20 message package. MMS messages were more than a dollar each! But WiFi had become common both in the office and at home, and there wer unlimited data plans (with no SMS or MMS) that could be bought for reasonable prices. iMessage bypassed the carrier tax, It's that simple. That's why it became popular, and that's why the network effects working against Whats App, Signal, and others are so strong. And it's why there's skepticism towards the standards that Google and carriers are pushing for, because a lot of people don't remember the carriers' business practices very fondly.