5 ms·

It really degrades the experience and often does really wonky things, like delivery 3/4 the messages to 3/4 of the people. Happens nearly every time in a decent

It really degrades the experience and often does really wonky things, like delivery 3/4 the messages to 3/4 of the people. Happens nearly every time in a decently sized group text for my friend group. I don’t know if that’s Google’s, Apple’s, RCS’s, or SMS’s fault.

lxgr 2y ago
Is it not an option to use one of the many free OTT messengers such as Signal or WhatsApp that offer the same user experience as iMessage, but work for both major mobile OSes, and as an additional bonus don't depend on 30 year old brittle protocols (looking at MMS here) and don't hand over your entire conversation history to your carrier?
- dingnuts 2y ago
  I spent my entire youth convincing people to move to platforms like signal, and including signal, that would then be used by said people only to talk to me, until they had some UX problem and I became tech support for them after many years of this I gave up and now I use the default: SMS life is too short for this
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - lxgr 2y ago
    I don't doubt that, and have heard it several times from other people as well. Sometimes I think that keeping SMS and especially MMS ridiculously expensive was the greatest unintentional gift European mobile network operators could have ever given their customers: People now just accept OTT messaging as a fact of life, and enough people will be able to provide that type of tech support, just like they'd fix a parent's or friend's internet connection in case of problems.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - hot_gril 2y ago
    Yeah, whoever pushes this is way more annoying than whoever makes the bubbles green. Just one group chat I'm in uses Signal for some reason. People often miss messages cause it silently deprecates old versions. And nobody has verified each others' secret numbers anyway, so after all that work someone did to secure our bar plans, we might be mitm'd anyway. E2EE apps have inherent UX problems. It's possible to do multi-device messaging with synchronized message history and a way to get in if you lose your codes, but it requires trusting the service and/or your cell carrier in some capacity. Something has to give if you want E2EE, usually it's the chat history or multi-device support.
    - lxgr 2y ago
      > Something has to give if you want E2EE, usually it's the chat history or multi-device support. True, but then again, neither SMS nor RCS have server-side message history either. WhatsApp lets you backup your chat history to iCloud or Google Drive, optionally end-to-end encrypted using a passphrase.
      - hot_gril 2y ago
        WhatsApp didn't have multi-device support until mid 2023. I'd have to see exactly how it works now, cause it raises more questions. If you can rely on users remembering passphrases (no recovery mechanism), it makes chat history easier, even then I wonder if it knows how to merge divergent chat histories if one device misses messages. iCloud/GDrive storage is another moving part but also nice in case you want to download/copy it. Would be neat also if contacts could be stored that way, cause I ain't sending them to WhatsApp. The only major app I've seen handle everything 100% reliably is FB Messenger, since the start, which was easy because there was no e2ee. Just a server-side master with simple web and mobile clients using it. SMS is bad, but at least I can send/receive it on my Mac without my iPhone being online, idk how.
        lxgr 2y ago
        > WhatsApp didn't have multi-device support until mid 2023. I think it was 2020, but in any case, it was very late. To be fair, it is quite hard to do securely and without compromising too much on usability with end-to-end encryption. > even then I wonder if it knows how to merge divergent chat histories if one device misses messages. There's one primary device (I think it has to be a phone) that maintains the "source of truth" message database and also does the backups, I believe. > SMS is bad, but at least I can send/receive it on my Mac without my iPhone being online, idk how. Are you sure? Does this work with the iPhone completely off (i.e. not just on mobile data, because it does proxy SMS to iMessage in that case)? I didn't think that was possible. Only very few operators even allow voice calls via FaceTime (without proxying the audio data through the iPhone via local Wi-Fi), but maybe they extended that to SMS over IMS recently. I can't test it with mine in any case, since my provider/plan is not on that short list.
  - JohnFen 2y ago
    The problem with such messaging services is that they aren't universal. You have to find out and install what others are using, and then remember which service is used by which person. That's really the thing that makes OTT services undesirable to me. SMS/MMS, for all of its myriad faults, is something you know that everyone has.
wombat-man 2y ago
I blame apple for this. Basically forces me to use WhatsApp or something. Otherwise I'll not receive some messages or some people won't get mine. It's pretty confusing when trying to nail down plans.
seba_dos1 2y ago
I suspect that something's slightly off with Apple's SMS implementation. People often complain about lost CSM chunks that were sent to them from iOS devices. Of course lost messages can happen anywhere, SMS is inherently not reliable, but the frequency with which they point to the other device being an iPhone raises my eyebrows.
- vundercind 2y ago
  One-on-one SMS was mostly fine, but group SMS was a constantly-buggy mess back when I was on Android, too. I wouldn’t be surprised if SMS experience has more to do with carriers and with the details of the network topology and composition between correspondents, than with phone vendor.
  - seba_dos1 2y ago
    There's no such thing as group SMS. Your phone either sends multiple SMS messages, or uses something else than SMS (usually MMS). I'm talking about SMS specifically, as CSM chunks aren't relevant to anything else. My assumption is that iOS somehow manages to lose some SMS messages when sent in rapid succession more often than it would happen for usual reasons.
jonny_eh 2y ago
> I don’t know if that’s Google’s, Apple’s, RCS’s, or SMS’s fault. It's Apple's fault for "extending" a standard messaging standard with a non-standard protocol.
- hot_gril 2y ago
  What's wrong with that? Google did it too with RCS.
  - jonny_eh 2y ago
    RCS is a published standard
jandrewrogers 2y ago
That is mostly SMS fault. It doesn't guarantee reliable delivery either in theory or practice, and the carrier will happily drop messages if a resource limit is exceeded. Essentially all of the IP-based chat protocols are reliable, whether that is WhatsApp or iMessage.
- lxgr 2y ago
  It absolutely guarantees reliability on the protocol level. If mobile network operators are load-shedding, that's on them. I've never experienced this in decades of using GSM, and it's only recently become a thing (mostly for 2FA SMS since I stopped using it for P2P communication).
  - aspenmayer 2y ago
    > Message delivery is "best effort", so there are no guarantees that a message will actually be delivered to its recipient, but delay or complete loss of a message is uncommon, typically affecting less than 5 percent of messages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS Oliver, Earl, Design and Implementation of a Short Message Service Data Channel for Mobile Systems https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/research/tr/2007/CS-2007-42.pdf https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/research/tr/2007/CS-2007-42.pdf
hot_gril 2y ago
The part of my family that all uses Samsung phones still can't rely on group chats between themselves, so I think it's them.
KoolKat23 2y ago
That's SMS's fault and partly the reason the rest of the world moved on, it's old and janky and you never know when it works, just use Whatsapp like everyone else in most of the world.

lxgr 2y ago

Is it not an option to use one of the many free OTT messengers such as Signal or WhatsApp that offer the same user experience as iMessage, but work for both major mobile OSes, and as an additional bonus don't depend on 30 year old brittle protocols (looking at MMS here) and don't hand over your entire conversation history to your carrier?

dingnuts 2y ago
I spent my entire youth convincing people to move to platforms like signal, and including signal, that would then be used by said people only to talk to me, until they had some UX problem and I became tech support for them after many years of this I gave up and now I use the default: SMS life is too short for this
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- lxgr 2y ago
  I don't doubt that, and have heard it several times from other people as well. Sometimes I think that keeping SMS and especially MMS ridiculously expensive was the greatest unintentional gift European mobile network operators could have ever given their customers: People now just accept OTT messaging as a fact of life, and enough people will be able to provide that type of tech support, just like they'd fix a parent's or friend's internet connection in case of problems.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- hot_gril 2y ago
  Yeah, whoever pushes this is way more annoying than whoever makes the bubbles green. Just one group chat I'm in uses Signal for some reason. People often miss messages cause it silently deprecates old versions. And nobody has verified each others' secret numbers anyway, so after all that work someone did to secure our bar plans, we might be mitm'd anyway. E2EE apps have inherent UX problems. It's possible to do multi-device messaging with synchronized message history and a way to get in if you lose your codes, but it requires trusting the service and/or your cell carrier in some capacity. Something has to give if you want E2EE, usually it's the chat history or multi-device support.
  - lxgr 2y ago
    > Something has to give if you want E2EE, usually it's the chat history or multi-device support. True, but then again, neither SMS nor RCS have server-side message history either. WhatsApp lets you backup your chat history to iCloud or Google Drive, optionally end-to-end encrypted using a passphrase.
    - hot_gril 2y ago
      WhatsApp didn't have multi-device support until mid 2023. I'd have to see exactly how it works now, cause it raises more questions. If you can rely on users remembering passphrases (no recovery mechanism), it makes chat history easier, even then I wonder if it knows how to merge divergent chat histories if one device misses messages. iCloud/GDrive storage is another moving part but also nice in case you want to download/copy it. Would be neat also if contacts could be stored that way, cause I ain't sending them to WhatsApp. The only major app I've seen handle everything 100% reliably is FB Messenger, since the start, which was easy because there was no e2ee. Just a server-side master with simple web and mobile clients using it. SMS is bad, but at least I can send/receive it on my Mac without my iPhone being online, idk how.
      - lxgr 2y ago
        > WhatsApp didn't have multi-device support until mid 2023. I think it was 2020, but in any case, it was very late. To be fair, it is quite hard to do securely and without compromising too much on usability with end-to-end encryption. > even then I wonder if it knows how to merge divergent chat histories if one device misses messages. There's one primary device (I think it has to be a phone) that maintains the "source of truth" message database and also does the backups, I believe. > SMS is bad, but at least I can send/receive it on my Mac without my iPhone being online, idk how. Are you sure? Does this work with the iPhone completely off (i.e. not just on mobile data, because it does proxy SMS to iMessage in that case)? I didn't think that was possible. Only very few operators even allow voice calls via FaceTime (without proxying the audio data through the iPhone via local Wi-Fi), but maybe they extended that to SMS over IMS recently. I can't test it with mine in any case, since my provider/plan is not on that short list.
- JohnFen 2y ago
  The problem with such messaging services is that they aren't universal. You have to find out and install what others are using, and then remember which service is used by which person. That's really the thing that makes OTT services undesirable to me. SMS/MMS, for all of its myriad faults, is something you know that everyone has.

wombat-man 2y ago

I blame apple for this. Basically forces me to use WhatsApp or something. Otherwise I'll not receive some messages or some people won't get mine. It's pretty confusing when trying to nail down plans.

seba_dos1 2y ago

I suspect that something's slightly off with Apple's SMS implementation. People often complain about lost CSM chunks that were sent to them from iOS devices. Of course lost messages can happen anywhere, SMS is inherently not reliable, but the frequency with which they point to the other device being an iPhone raises my eyebrows.

vundercind 2y ago
One-on-one SMS was mostly fine, but group SMS was a constantly-buggy mess back when I was on Android, too. I wouldn’t be surprised if SMS experience has more to do with carriers and with the details of the network topology and composition between correspondents, than with phone vendor.
- seba_dos1 2y ago
  There's no such thing as group SMS. Your phone either sends multiple SMS messages, or uses something else than SMS (usually MMS). I'm talking about SMS specifically, as CSM chunks aren't relevant to anything else. My assumption is that iOS somehow manages to lose some SMS messages when sent in rapid succession more often than it would happen for usual reasons.

jonny_eh 2y ago

> I don’t know if that’s Google’s, Apple’s, RCS’s, or SMS’s fault. It's Apple's fault for "extending" a standard messaging standard with a non-standard protocol.

hot_gril 2y ago
What's wrong with that? Google did it too with RCS.
- jonny_eh 2y ago
  RCS is a published standard

jandrewrogers 2y ago

That is mostly SMS fault. It doesn't guarantee reliable delivery either in theory or practice, and the carrier will happily drop messages if a resource limit is exceeded. Essentially all of the IP-based chat protocols are reliable, whether that is WhatsApp or iMessage.

lxgr 2y ago
It absolutely guarantees reliability on the protocol level. If mobile network operators are load-shedding, that's on them. I've never experienced this in decades of using GSM, and it's only recently become a thing (mostly for 2FA SMS since I stopped using it for P2P communication).
- aspenmayer 2y ago
  > Message delivery is "best effort", so there are no guarantees that a message will actually be delivered to its recipient, but delay or complete loss of a message is uncommon, typically affecting less than 5 percent of messages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS Oliver, Earl, Design and Implementation of a Short Message Service Data Channel for Mobile Systems https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/research/tr/2007/CS-2007-42.pdf https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/research/tr/2007/CS-2007-42.pdf

hot_gril 2y ago

The part of my family that all uses Samsung phones still can't rely on group chats between themselves, so I think it's them.

KoolKat23 2y ago

That's SMS's fault and partly the reason the rest of the world moved on, it's old and janky and you never know when it works, just use Whatsapp like everyone else in most of the world.