zlacker

>>quenti+(OP)
SMS was, in my opinion, the killer feature for Signal. Telling people to install yet-another-inbox which was only going to be used by their one privacy-weirdo friend was a non-starter.

Saying "this is a better SMS app" got people on-board and let them "upgrade" to secure messaging. That's why I started using it in the "TextSecure" days.

But, sadly, I agree with Signal's reasoning here. Mixing the two protocols was annoyingly complex. If someone stopped using Signal, messages you sent to them would never arrive - with no notification. And there's no obvious way to "downgrade" to SMS.

I was working on RCS a decade ago. I'm glad to see it is finally getting somewhere - but I'm sad it is at the expense of better and more secure protocols.

>>edent+X9
As a Dutch person, I'm still amazed that the US still seems to use SMS as much; mind you, our phone plans here were "you get 1000 text messages and X minutes or a bajillion megabytes of data"; that + 'free' international messaging / calls with services like Whatsapp quickly pushed people to data-only messaging like Whatsapp or maybe FB Messenger. We also have a big immigrant population that like to chat with their family wherever they may live, and international calls / text messages are stupid expensive.

I can imagine that's less of an issue in the US; do you pay extra for text messages and calls that go across state lines?

>>Cthulh+zb
I've gotten SMS messages from iPhone users. In some Apple centric areas (rich people or people who think/want to pretend they're rich), I think iMessage is the default.

Fine by me. If they want a better experience, I have almost every messaging app on the Dutch market bridged to my Matrix server so I don't care, they'll just have to live with the lack of features if they want to chat with me (or install something like Signal).

I don't care about RCS and other ISP standards that exist to squeeze more money out of texting. I'll use Telegram/Signal/WhatsApp calling before I'll use my phone app because my subscription doesn't include free minutes (and I barely call anyway) so I've gotten the benefits of tech like WiFi calling through VoLTE for years before ISPs bothered sending their VoLTE profiles to my phone.