Haven't received an SMS from a real person (in other words, all SMSes I get are 2FA etc) for, at least 5 years, maybe 10.
Even people who use iPhones don't send SMSes, MMSes or anything as obsolete (including RCS). Everyone just seems to use WhatsApp and Telegram (or if they don't know any better, Viber). Locale: Central Europe.
So, why would anyone stick to the obsolete stuff? Are there regions of the US which have cell phone signals but no Internet access?
This is indeed a US thing (culturally). Most countries seem to have chat culture revolve around Whatsapp, Telegram, Signal, WeChat or LINE.
On top of that, most people don't really care and read whatever comes in regardless of the format.
MMS was a failed concept, and so is RCS. Not because the technology is fundamentally bad, it's the implementation that is fundamentally flawed by keeping telcos in the loop. The only reason SMS didn't die is purely by accident: it was included as some sort of auxiliary technical channel, not really intended as a means of chatting with other people. Heck, it was almost not even included in the GSM standard and mostly thought of as a useless waste of protocol specification. This made it unattractive to market or monetise at first, and later on with the whole ringtone/bitmap mess around the 00's it only enjoyed a short bubble of commercial exploitation.
The cost, and the limited format then caused the likes of BBM and even MSN for mobile to be used as true chat replacements, except in the USA. That was around the same time as the flop that was MMS. Then WhatsApp (and others) came along and by then the whole telco legacy mindset finally caught up and it was way too late. Then Apple came around and a decade later finally RCS was invented at some sad endeavour to get back in the loop as a telco.
Similar things were tried to 'replace' email etc. in the AOL days, which also turned into a big flop.
MMS wasn't a failed concept. It was successful at what it was designed for at the time - to share a photo or short video on 2G/3G phones. Not bidirectional conversational messaging.
MMS was never designed to be used for group chats. It was a clever implementation by Apple which made it become the standard for cellular group chats once every other platform copied it.
The US market standardized on mobile plans with unlimited texting a long, long time ago, so I think this caused people to mostly stick to SMS/MMS for communication since it was the path of least resistance. I don't know what the situation in Europe is like now, but in the past I remember it being difficult to find plans without very small SMS caps when traveling. That could be why Europeans naturally gravitated towards other messaging platforms.
Unlimited SMS plans have been a thing in western europe for the past 15 years, at least. People switched to whatsapp because you can send pictures, not only text.
MMS was (is?) spectacularly expensive, I recall sending an MMS and it costing in the realm of £1.50 -> £2.00 per message, furthermore there was a maximum size to the attachment you could send with it (100k-200k?). These two alone made it a non-starter.
Sure it was exciting at first when the first 3G colour display phones with cameras were a thing, but the cost and size limits were prohibitive when proper smartphones came on the scene.
When people in America want to send pictures without both ends having iMessage, they either use MMS (aka "text it to me") or share them some other way.
I still don't understand how SMS took off in the US. for a long time you had to pay to receive texts, which is madness.
given that undercurrent of expense, I'm still not sure why the US hasn't moved to whatsapp/signal/other. The only thing I can think of is that mobile data is even more expensive.
When you had to pay to receive SMS, WhatsApp didn't exist. Your only other options were more cumbersome things like email and AIM, which still required paying for a phone internet plan and having a capable phone.
In Argentina WhatsApp became the de-facto standard definitely because it was “free” messaging compared to the expensive SMS. The carriers ruined it for all of us.
Network effect. SMS works everywhere, all phones support it out-of-the-box. WhatsApp is opt-in. Almost nobody I communicate with regularly has a WhatsApp account.
Most Americans have few or zero regular international contacts. The US is geographically huge and there are only two other nations within relatively reach.
Personally I have one person in my contacts who's not in the US. This is someone I communicate with about twice a year, and we do indeed use WhatsApp for that.
For non-North American recipients from a North American phone number, you have to prefix with the country code[0]. So unnecessary if you're in the US and want to call Canada or Jamaica or wherever. But say you want to call someone with a UK phone number, you just send the SMS to +44-<their phone number>.
As a leftover artifact from growing up not allowed to call long-distance, I frequently think of things like "Is long-distance texting charges a thing? Will I get charged for texting my friend with a Mexico number? Does it matter if she's currently in Mexico or the US? Does sending a picture incur a fee even if an sms doesn't?"
But as other comments mentioned, the number of people I "text" with regularly without a U.S. phone number / the ability to send and receive SMS is very small.
Because its better than chat apps. I can send a text all over the place. Cell coverage for nondata service is incredible, you'd have to be really remote at this point to not have it at which point you definitely don't have a data connection. Meanwhile there are places all over my city where I can't get a reliable enough LTE connection to open my chat apps let alone send a message, much less one with any attachments. Inside stores are especially bad with LTE. I can't even get an imessage out inside the grocery store. I have to defer to sms, but then it sends instantly.
> Everyone just seems to use WhatsApp and Telegram (or if they don't know any better, Viber).
To remark that Telegram by default is not E2E encrypted, you need to explicitly start a "secret chat". And group chats are not encrypted as well. And when you start a secret chat it uses Telegrams "probably maybe secure, but possibly not because it's a non-standard in house built" encryption scheme with weird choices.
I absolutely love Telegram, but I will also definitely not use it for anything more confidential than mindless chatter and cat pictures".
basically it's the lowest common denominator. There are so many chat apps out there (signal, sms, fb, ig are popular in my circles) and the default app is the only one everyone has installed.
For people close to me, I insist on the use of signal, but I don't have that kind of social capital with every single acquaintance.
France here. I use SMS every single day, moreso than any specific given messaging app. I also routinely use Whatsapp with North Africans and Live Messenger with old FB contacts.
I have never even considered downloading an app to text people… because I just text them. I’ve never understood or needed something different. I’m only now piecing together that this is an American thing though.
> Are there regions of the US which have cell phone signals but no Internet access?
Yes, there are huge swaths of the U.S. that are lightly covered and don’t support Internet applications. I was in Marin County, CA (just north of San Francisco) last year and regularly saw 0 bars of 4g. At those times only SMS got through to friends and family (Messages app falls back to SMS if there is insufficient bandwidth for iMessage).
It works for every phone and doesn’t require me to have an app installed. It doesn’t change on which contact I have (“oh she uses WhatsApp, he uses some other app, this group chat is on facebook messenger, etc”.
It’s just one tech that works on all phones. I don’t even mind if its missing five million emojis or things like that.
My assumption was always that, from the get-go, iPhone just had that much of a bigger market share in the US compared to e.g. Europe. I remember in Finland in the early 2010s most of the people in my age group (~20-25 years old) had Android phones while I've understood in the US I'd been in the majority. Not suprising that that situation lead to different networking effects in the US vs elsewhere.
Yes. I don't think I know a single person in Germany that seriously uses iMessage or text message. WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, ... is the name of the game here.
I think a major factor is that Apple/iOS has a much lower market share vs. Android here, so iMessage was never a viable option unless you wanted to reach only 20% of your contacts.
SMS is convenient because everyone has it. With those other services, I have to find out what they use, install it, register for an account, etc. Simpler just to send a text.
This is the leading surveillance capitalism company trying to lay the groundwork to break the privacy of Apple's messaging system, demanding that Apple give up the privacy that it provides its paying customers, because it is intolerable to Google that there exists data that it doesn't have access to.
The rest is noise from morons who think that you don't deserve privacy unless you sysadmin your phone to an NSA standard, and people who work in adtech.
Supporting RCS doesn't give Google access to iMessage data. Currently SMS is also not encrypted.
Also number of times per week there are posts complaining about current state of capitalism in US, but then if walls of garden built by company with one of the highest valuations in history are endangered, hundreds of cultists will defend them with fire in their eyes and little merit in their words (see recent threads about EU legislation).
Haven't received an SMS from a real person (in other words, all SMSes I get are 2FA etc) for, at least 5 years, maybe 10.
Even people who use iPhones don't send SMSes, MMSes or anything as obsolete (including RCS). Everyone just seems to use WhatsApp and Telegram (or if they don't know any better, Viber). Locale: Central Europe.
So, why would anyone stick to the obsolete stuff? Are there regions of the US which have cell phone signals but no Internet access?