this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
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This is a long story. But the short version is that we don't have per-message charges in the US, so most people continue on using SMS for daily conversations.
Unless you're an Apple user, because then you were only allowed to use 1 SMS app, and if you used with another Apple user, you were automatically upgraded to iMessage, which gave you a better messaging experience. And Apple users are an arrogant bunch so instead of switching to using literally any other chat app to chat with other users, they will just not message you if you don't have iMessage (green bubble).
I suppose Google is equally to blame because they had several very similar apps that they abandoned over and over again.
Apple also intentionally made the green bubble contrast worse so that iPhone users would have eyestrain when conversing with non-iPhone users.
Oh yay another thing I can add to my list of "ways in which Apple's marketing is extremely predatory"
I'm just surprised people aren't fed up with how shit SMS (well, MMS, but I never want to hear about that again) is for anything other than text. It was always a fucking pain and just plain shit even if it weren't.
It's still the most reliable method of ensuring your messages are sent. And images are "fine", so long as there aren't any iPhones.
Really? Sent but not received, I guess? It seems like near any other method has things to show that you've sent it, that the server has received it, that the other user(s) received it, that they read it...
And images are... Well, very limited indeed. And costly, if we're talking MMS!
To me, it's definitely not the best choice - but I'm not in the states.
Read receipts are just a way to incite social strife.
You can usually turn those off. Not sure if you can turn them off for SMS, I remember text messages having those
Farthest I've seen regular text messages go is received receipts. And that depends on the provider, some of them only return up to "sent".
Sent and received.
Just because you can't see it doesn't mean it didn't happen.
Also I always disable read receipts anyway.
We don't here in the UK either, but we still use data messaging for the most part. I use WhatsApp for my Android friends, iMessage for my iPhone friends, and it's never a problem.
You don't now. My understanding is that most of the UK did in the early years of cell phones, so everyone jumped off that bandwagon real fast and found something else collectively. That ended up being WhatsApp, which was unfortunately later acquired and predictably ruined by Facebook.
Oh aye, back in the day we had a text allowance. My first contract allowed me 50 SMS per day, which felt like a lot until you actually started using them. But I’ve had functionally limitless - or actually limitless - SMS for probably twenty years at this point.
I’m lucky if I send five a month, and most of those were intended to be iMessages that failed for whatever reason.
We don't have per message charge in France either but people still use WhatsApp or Signal because you can't have groups in SMS.