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
We do generally pay extra for international calls, though text messaging is often free (assuming you’re talking about international states. US states, of course, are all treated as the same country).

Almost all phone plans have unlimited (domestic) texting and calling and differentiate themselves with data, reliability and ”free” perks like subsidized Netflix. You really have to go out of your way to find a plan with limited texts/calls.

>>jlund-+Yc
It's actually mostly some parts in central Europe where texting is expensive. For most parts of the world texting is quite important.

I don't understand why people on this board keep forgetting that central Europe and the US is the minority of the world population.

Everyone keeps bringing up WhatsApp. But it seems that everyone has all but forgotten that WhatsApp became so popular not because they only focused on the US market, but because they went around the globe and specifically targeted feature phones as well. I.e. they understood that their own home turf isn't enough to make a dominant chat application.

>>rjzzle+8e
The death of SMS is hardly specific to central Europe and the US. It's already thoroughly dead in most of Asia for person-to-person communication, replaced by WhatsApp/WeChat/LINE/Telegram/etc depending on country.

>>jhugo+oi
That's incorrect. Dead for person-to-person communication in east Asia yes, but still EXTREMELY common for everything else.

"It doesn't matter for the use cases I don't care about" - what a selfish look at the world.

Besides paying for parking by SMS and other services in Europe there's also M-Pesa and similar services[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa

>>rjzzle+Sk
> That's incorrect.

Read before replying. I literally said "for person-to-person communication".