Pretty normal reaction after the announcement that Signal got rid of SMS support. A bunch of folks I used to talk to read that and ditched Signal entirely for FB Chat.
They had a good blog post about why - their take was that SMS is dying and the replacement was a moving target that was hard to support for reasons I’m forgetting. I agree it hurt them tremendously though.
Probably a lot. I was very annoyed myself, though it made android pretty similar to the situation on iOS where you can’t replace the default messaging app anyway.
It’s an area where I think we need a bunch of stuff:
Antitrust regulation to force companies to use open standards and allow customization
Folks like the Signal Foundation should get over themselves and run their project like a real open source project, where others can fork/modify/run both the server side and client side.
There’s so much anti-competitive bullshit regarding #1 from all sides, from carriers to Apple to Google to device manufacturers.
They are an ancient technology, it was needed before we had phones connected to internet, but now they are a relic. And have been for at least a decade.
They are good at giving us fun by making americans fight each other about the color of their bubbles.
Pretty normal reaction after the announcement that Signal got rid of SMS support. A bunch of folks I used to talk to read that and ditched Signal entirely for FB Chat.
They had a good blog post about why - their take was that SMS is dying and the replacement was a moving target that was hard to support for reasons I’m forgetting. I agree it hurt them tremendously though.
I get that. That is specifically the reason they uninstalled Signal and started using FB.
How many other folks did that?
Probably a lot. I was very annoyed myself, though it made android pretty similar to the situation on iOS where you can’t replace the default messaging app anyway.
It’s an area where I think we need a bunch of stuff:
There’s so much anti-competitive bullshit regarding #1 from all sides, from carriers to Apple to Google to device manufacturers.
Who still uses SMS ???
Clearly enough people for this to be a point, a big majority of people in the US still do at least in the places I’ve stayed in.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with SMS.
I think fewer people are actually using SMS than you’d think though - it’s been quietly replaced with RCS.
They are an ancient technology, it was needed before we had phones connected to internet, but now they are a relic. And have been for at least a decade.
They are good at giving us fun by making americans fight each other about the color of their bubbles.
And no, RCS is not the solution.