5 ms·
What's funny is that the market has tried to solve it. The first cell phone I ever got offered low-cost AIM. My work BlackBerry has a free messenger app. But it
by cynicalkane 14y ago
What's funny is that the market has tried to solve it. The first cell phone I ever got offered low-cost AIM. My work BlackBerry has a free messenger app. But it turns out people like sending messages to a phone number, any phone number, and don't care for using multiple ways to text. So SMS is the only universal standard for this. Modern phones could re-route the data to save money but the receiving phone might still use the old protocol. It's a literal "network effect".
- fosk 14y agoAbstraction is the right answer. Just send a message, and let the application layer figure out the right transport to make it readable on the final device.
- lloeki 14y agoThat may be the Messages.app (on iOS and even more on Mac) plan. I sure wish iMessage and BBM were made interoperable via some well-defined bridge standard.
- simonh 14y ago>Modern phones could re-route the data to save money but the receiving phone might still use the old protocol. The iPhone messages app does exactly that. It first tries to send the message via Apple, with fallback to SMS if either the remote phone isn't an iPhone or if it can't establish a connection to it immediately.