> Servers: $2.9 million dollars per year.
> Registration Fees: $6 million dollars per year.
> Total Bandwidth: $2.8 million dollars per year.
> Additional Services: $700,000 dollars per year.
Signal pays more for delivering verification SMS during sign-up, than for all other infrastructure (except traffic) combined. Wow, that sounds excessive.
That'd be all well and good... the technology would die naturally, but all my American relatives continue to stubbornly use iMessage.
Personally, I prefer it over downloading yet another client, dealing with additional credentials, wondering about who can access my messages, and so on and so forth…
And all that just to message the handful of people that I know who use <popular in other country third party app>.
Nobody wants this. Universal access means universal access for spammers. iMessage won over SMS because of cost and spam filtering.
Not nobody.
> iMessage won over SMS because of cost and spam filtering.
Really? I've never used imessage.
Within the scope of messaging network effects, nobody.
> Really?
Yes. iMessage spam is rare and stamped out fast. Open protocols tend to have spam problems the moment they begin scaling.