6 ms·

Because SMS is horribly limited. 140 chars per message* (less if chars are not plain vanilla ASCII), no support for attachments, group messages, reliable delive

Because SMS is horribly limited. 140 chars per message* (less if chars are not plain vanilla ASCII), no support for attachments, group messages, reliable delivery receipts, emoji reactions, etc etc. * There's a terrible hack called concatenated SMS that strings together multiple messages to build one longer message under the hood, but if any of those parts go missing along the way, the whole thing gets dropped on the floor.

Telaneo 11mo ago
For the proposed use case, you don't need those things, except maybe the 140 character thing, but I've never found that limiting, since phones stitch them together nowadays (and have for the past 15 years?). Sure, RCS has those functions, but half of them are broken 60% of the time, and you don't need those anyway for bootstraping into wherever you actually want to talk, and for short messaging. RCS brings nothing to the table if all you need is to tell mum she needs to come pick you up. On the contrary, it might fail you because it tried and failed to send that message over a 4G connection you barely have, rather than sending it as an SMS and then actually arriving. And you're never going to use it for group messages, attachments or with emojis unless its an actual service you intend to use for serious purposes, which is exactly what the comment I was responding to said you weren't going to use RCS for anyway. I disabled RCS (and iMessage back when I had an iPhone) for exactly these reasons, but still use SMS as a fallback with people I don't actually know and never intend to talk to again, and see no reason to upgrade to RCS even if it wasn't broken, since for my use cases, the extra feature set isn't needed. If I need more fancy features, its for use with people I actually know, and thus people I can get in touch with on not-SMS.
bxrt 11mo ago
It doesn't change your point, but SMS is limited to 160 chars per message. Twitter was originally limited to 140.
- decimalenough 11mo ago
  If we're being pedantic, it's 140 bytes, which can be 160 7-bit chars (ASCII), 140 8-bit chars (ISO 8859-x) or 70 2-byte chars (UTF-16).

Telaneo 11mo ago

For the proposed use case, you don't need those things, except maybe the 140 character thing, but I've never found that limiting, since phones stitch them together nowadays (and have for the past 15 years?). Sure, RCS has those functions, but half of them are broken 60% of the time, and you don't need those anyway for bootstraping into wherever you actually want to talk, and for short messaging. RCS brings nothing to the table if all you need is to tell mum she needs to come pick you up. On the contrary, it might fail you because it tried and failed to send that message over a 4G connection you barely have, rather than sending it as an SMS and then actually arriving. And you're never going to use it for group messages, attachments or with emojis unless its an actual service you intend to use for serious purposes, which is exactly what the comment I was responding to said you weren't going to use RCS for anyway. I disabled RCS (and iMessage back when I had an iPhone) for exactly these reasons, but still use SMS as a fallback with people I don't actually know and never intend to talk to again, and see no reason to upgrade to RCS even if it wasn't broken, since for my use cases, the extra feature set isn't needed. If I need more fancy features, its for use with people I actually know, and thus people I can get in touch with on not-SMS.

bxrt 11mo ago

It doesn't change your point, but SMS is limited to 160 chars per message. Twitter was originally limited to 140.

decimalenough 11mo ago
If we're being pedantic, it's 140 bytes, which can be 160 7-bit chars (ASCII), 140 8-bit chars (ISO 8859-x) or 70 2-byte chars (UTF-16).