Well nothing else is standardized in the same way SMS is. I don’t want to be forced into one application. SMS and MMS are older but they work across all devices.
There are plenty of standardized communication protocols. There are far less in the smartphone world, which is why we have this problem. Imagine if you couldn’t do voice calls between AT&T and Comcast, North America and Europe, or Apple and Android. Now why on earth would anyone think that text messaging should be that way, or shouldn’t have been standardized decades ago?
Maybe I’m missing your point. You can make calls anywhere because its a standard. It doesn’t matter if you have a flip phone, android, apple or something totally different. It just works. Additionally everyone uses it already so you don’t need to try to convert people to a new standard.
Yes, exactly, however our built-in text standard is very outdated and not even used in many regions for a number of good reasons, and we don’t have a good drop-in replacement. Do you actually think phone calls work the same on the network level as they did 40 years ago? No. But the user still does it pretty much the same way and we can all interconnect. Except for some purists, mostly in the security and Apple camps, people don’t really care how they text each other, just that all their friends are available and they don’t have to install 15 apps to make it happen. And as demonstrated by voice calls with their modern network protocols, there is no reason that couldn’t have been achieved.
