Edit: NOTE, I am the receiver of the texts.

So many people asking me to have my wife do something different on her end.

Beloved, she is on iPhone because she doesn’t want to do anything “weird.” She is texting from her phone number using her texting app. That’s what’s going to happen.

Now, why can’t I get iMessage on my android phone? If it’s just a messenger app why not make it available for Android?

I’d use it.

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
    5·
    2 months ago

    Standard SMS/MMS are the de facto standard in the US, outside of iMessage. Hundreds of millions of people use it. It’s not “never really used anywhere”.

    And you’re right, people have moved on from caveman technology; the youth is switching to iOS and iMessage en masse. That’s why people need to deal with shit like this, iOS users don’t know that the only reason they can text like normal people is because of Apple’s weird version of WhatsApp.

    If iMessage hadn’t been sneaked into the iOS texting app, Americans may have moved over to something better as well, but they didn’t. They never felt the pressure to switch to texting apps because their carriers charged differently/less for texts than the ones in other countries.

    And it did go somewhere. RCS is SMS/MMS for data networks. Carriers didn’t run RCS servers and phones didn’t come with RCS clients so it went nowhere. Until Google started hosting Jibe and including it in the messages client, that is.

    Even RCS took some massaging by Google to make it actually usable as a texting standard, with Google making use of the freeform HTTP nature of the protocol to add some proprietary standards to make it actually usable. The first released versions of RCS were kind of terrible, basically MMS but over IP rather than weird telecom protocols.

    I pity the fool trying to use RCS without Jibe. Luckily, carriers are shutting down their bespoke RCS servers and renting RCS services from Google instead. Unfortunately, that makes RCS a standard practically governed by Google, carriers from whatever countries Google isn’t permitted to operate in, and spying agencies.

    • _edge@discuss.tchncs.de
      2·
      2 months ago

      Standard SMS/MMS are the de facto standard in the US

      SMS have been used extensively around the world. That’s texting in it’s original form. And we still use SMS to bootstrap WhatsApp or Signal.

      But MMS? Phones and carriers have supported this long before smartphones, but did people really use it? Are MMS free in the US? Because in Europe, before WhatsApp and Signal took over, the was a price tag on SMS (last non-zero price I remember is 0.09€, now free) and MMS (no idea because no one uses it, but I believe 0.39€ was typical at some point).