cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/17792695
After slowly phasing the app out in some regions, Samsung has announced that it will no longer pre-install Samsung Messagesโฆ
Ah, I see. Your point isnโt necessarily reliability but availability. Itโs an interesting perspective to hear that the US appears to be so behind (at least from a European perspective of course) when it comes to messaging apps. As far as SMS reliablity goes, I have occasionally had messages not send, or have messages come in delayed considerably. Or stuff like 2-factor auth texts not coming in, requesting a new one and then suddenly receiving 3 at a time. Not deal-breaking or anything, just the occasional annoyance.
I donโt think WhatsApp allows you to send a message to someone who doesnโt have the app. So WhatsApp would just inform you. Although I donโt recall the last time someone did not have either WhatsApp or Signal installed. But again, that appears to be far more common in the US?
Do you ever miss the extra features that web messaging brings, like in-chat polls, voice messages, etcโฆ? Iโm not sure how much of that RCS supports (because almost nobody uses that here). To me it seems like the convenience of web messaging outweighs the โdoes person x have app yโ question, but thatโs probably because I never really have to ask myself that question.
I also just realised that you state that everyone has SMS messaging. There are phone plans available here that donโt offer SMS messaging anymore. You can still receive them, but sending them either doesnโt work or costs a high premium (obviously this disadvantage is offset by a lower price for the rest of the plan). I wouldnโt be entirely surprised if SMS eventually just gets phased out.
Ideally we would have something like email (but of fucking course not email, because its atrocious) that doesnโt require any corporation or centralization involved, where we could run our own or choose which entity we want to host our data, and would be interoperable across entities.
Thats called jabber and itโs existed for 25 years.
I donโt think we are, at all.
I mostly say it because SMS is so ancient. Not encrypted, messages are storied by the carrier and can be requested by the government, etcโฆ In that sense, even a corporate-controlled messaging system that offers E2EE would be a step up. After all, SMS is pretty corporate-controlled too, just different ones. But again, this is very much a European perspective, I can see why in the US this might be different.
iMessage is by far and away the most popular chat platform here, and is largely responsible for Appleโs local dominance in the smartphone market.
Ah true, iPhones are much more popular in the US. Quite interesting actually how that happened, iPhones arenโt all that popular here at all and Android phones dominate the market. I wonder why Apple hasnโt managed to copy their dominance here as well?
Iโve never heard of such a thing.
Looks like Tello, Cricket, MobileX, US Mobile and T-Mobile can offer it at least. Apparently itโs often marketed as a Tablet plan, which I suppose makes sense, but it seems a lot of carriers allow you to disable SMS in their web portals these days. I thought itโd be more niche in the US but it seems a more common option than I thought.
Itโs been interesting to hear from you about your perspective on this, thanks!
