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Ah, I see. Your point isn't necessarily reliability but availability. It's an interesting perspective to hear that the US appears to be so behind (at least from a European perspective of course) when it comes to messaging apps. As far as SMS reliablity goes, I have occasionally had messages not send, or have messages come in delayed considerably. Or stuff like 2-factor auth texts not coming in, requesting a new one and then suddenly receiving 3 at a time. Not deal-breaking or anything, just the occasional annoyance.
I don't think WhatsApp allows you to send a message to someone who doesn't have the app. So WhatsApp would just inform you. Although I don't recall the last time someone did not have either WhatsApp or Signal installed. But again, that appears to be far more common in the US?
Do you ever miss the extra features that web messaging brings, like in-chat polls, voice messages, etc...? I'm not sure how much of that RCS supports (because almost nobody uses that here). To me it seems like the convenience of web messaging outweighs the "does person x have app y" question, but that's probably because I never really have to ask myself that question.
I also just realised that you state that everyone has SMS messaging. There are phone plans available here that don't offer SMS messaging anymore. You can still receive them, but sending them either doesn't work or costs a high premium (obviously this disadvantage is offset by a lower price for the rest of the plan). I wouldn't be entirely surprised if SMS eventually just gets phased out.
It's both. If it's not always available, it's not reliable.
I don't think we are, at all. Sure some other countries have a unified messaging platform, but all of them are corporate-owned, controlled, monitored, and not federated. In that regard it's barely a step up. Ideally we would have something like email (but of fucking course not email, because its atrocious) that doesn't require any corporation or centralization involved, where we could run our own or choose which entity we want to host our data, and would be interoperable across entities. Anything short of that I wouldn't consider much of an advancement (except Signal).
The only people that I talk to on Signal are the ones that I've been able to force to use it. If they send me messages on FB, IG, SMS or whatev, I just wont reply to them. I think there are quite a few more that use WA but I don't know because I refuse.
Nice to have but not necessary and not worth it.
Much like iMessage, Google Messages is the messaging app that comes pre-installed on most Android phones, so people who have those phones use them. There aren't many but there are some. RCS is pretty dreadful, currently. iMessage is by far and away the most popular chat platform here, and is largely responsible for Apple's local dominance in the smartphone market. Especially among teens it is WILDLY popular. Apple is moving to add interoperability with RCS soon (thanks EU).
I've never heard of such a thing.
Not around here, for sure.
I mostly say it because SMS is so ancient. Not encrypted, messages are storied by the carrier and can be requested by the government, etc... In that sense, even a corporate-controlled messaging system that offers E2EE would be a step up. After all, SMS is pretty corporate-controlled too, just different ones. But again, this is very much a European perspective, I can see why in the US this might be different.
Ah true, iPhones are much more popular in the US. Quite interesting actually how that happened, iPhones aren't all that popular here at all and Android phones dominate the market. I wonder why Apple hasn't managed to copy their dominance here as well?
Looks like Tello, Cricket, MobileX, US Mobile and T-Mobile can offer it at least. Apparently it's often marketed as a Tablet plan, which I suppose makes sense, but it seems a lot of carriers allow you to disable SMS in their web portals these days. I thought it'd be more niche in the US but it seems a more common option than I thought.
It's been interesting to hear from you about your perspective on this, thanks!
Yes, I understand all of that. I just refuse to ask anyone or be complicit in using a corporate-controlled chat platform. I'll ask them to either use Signal or use my Matrix server.
Well I've never owned or used a tablet so I can't comment on that but I don't think people are putting them in their phones.
Thats called jabber and it's existed for 25 years.
Yes, I know, there are dozens of potential choices, but no one wants to use them.