zlacker

>>mikece+(OP)
> Storage: $1.3 million dollars per year.

> 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.

>>Duneda+Z
SMS rates are absolutely bonkers considering the technical way they're transmitted. The US is an outlier in SMS rates actually being reasonable (usually unlimited or close to) for consumers - but for the rest of the world the insane mark up on that communication method has mostly obsoleted it...

That'd be all well and good... the technology would die naturally, but all my American relatives continue to stubbornly use iMessage.

>>munk-a+58
> for the rest of the world the insane mark up on that communication method has mostly obsoleted it...

For P2P communication. SMS is alive and well for B2C messaging, most importantly for 2FA OTP delivery, but also as a first line of defense against spam/bot account creation.

It's not a good solution to either problem, but it's slightly better than nothing (which apparently makes it good enough for many), so I suspect we're stuck with it for now.

> That'd be all well and good... the technology would die naturally, but all my American relatives continue to stubbornly use iMessage.

iMessage is not SMS, though. It just uses phone numbers as identifiers, but so do many other popular over-the-top messengers, including the most popular one globally.

>>lxgr+S9
To clarify - iMessage does not use SMS if you're going from Apple to Apple device and both devices have data/wifi available. iMessage refuses to support messaging to Android clients and defaults to SMS for these messages.

I've got an Android phone so all iMessage transmissions come across as SMS (or MMS).

>>munk-a+Wb
Ah, I see what you mean. That's not what I'd call iMessage though, that's just SMS:

The iOS application is called "Messages"; iMessage is the over-the-top Apple-exclusive messaging service.

>>lxgr+Nc
Messages inflexible reliance on SMS for communication to non-Apple devices is definitely an Apple issue, in my opinion. Apple has made it clear that they continue to default to SMS for non-iPhone communication solely because it's unpleasant for everyone involved.

>>cmiles+Zf
What does the default Android messaging app do?

>>oarsin+9h
Android's messaging app does much the same thing.

My preference would be that Apple drop SMS support from Messages all-together and market it as an iOS only communication method. People with iPhones would then have to pick some alternative, perhaps they would use Signal or perhaps something else.

I already have to install a handful of applications to talk to all of my friends and co-workers, at least I wouldn't have to continue to use SMS.

>>cmiles+Dk
As an iPhone user, I am happy with messages and do not want it to drop SMS support. Note Apple created iMessage way before RCS even existed. iMessage works well and I am happy with it.

>>Stress+tC1
It's interesting that you mention that you like it having SMS support; do you only use this function to message Android phones? In my experience, the iPhone people I know are consistently annoyed by me and my SMS messages.

IMHO, RCS isn't a solution to anything since it still requires phone carriers to adopt it. A quick check of the internet indicates that many of these phone carriers are actually charging more to send RCS messages than SMS, making it a non-starter all around.

Maybe Google could create an iMessage-like (internet only) alternative for Android... Although it still wouldn't work with the actual Apple iMessage protocol unless Apple adopted it. IMHO they'd have better luck getting companies like Apple to interoperate if it was pre-installed and worked on all Android phones.