It’s happening!!!
Encrypting doesn’t necessarily boost the size of the message. You can also use compression very effectively since it’s mostly text.
You don’t need to also solve media hosting, you can just leave it be links like it is now. Just adding encryption would be an amazing improvement.
There are no additional changes needed to the transport layer, it would be transparent for telcos. It can be an OTG encryption layer.
Initial key exchange would be the only part that would require a couple of additional one-time messages but it would be automated. And not all messages need to be encrypted, nobody cares that my package has been shipped. And it would be an improvement anyway from having zero encryption to being able to have encryption
The whole thing is so simple that it could be implemented today by all the SMS apps without missing a beat. The only thing missing is the willingness to do so.
In fact it could be added as an option in any SMS app very easily — only for people who are both on the same app of course.
