RCS is coming, and it doesn’t play well with Signal. I once had a situation when I was sending SMS to one of my friends via Signal, but I wasn’t seeing any of their responses – this was because their app was automatically responding via RCS, which wasn’t delivered to Signal. This is going to continue to get worse, and Signal can’t add RCS support because there’s no RCS API on Android. Honestly, the days of any third-party SMS app are numbered.
Still no RCS API on Android, after all their noise at Apple not adding RCS to iOS? I have zero faith in Google ever getting their messaging platform to a stable point.
Still no RCS API on Android, after all their noise at Apple not adding RCS to iOS?
I have zero faith in Google ever getting their messaging platform to a stable point.
They do support RCS in the default app (Google Messages). It looks like they're moving away from supporting "carrier messaging" (SMS/RCS) in anything other than the default app. You used to be...
They do support RCS in the default app (Google Messages). It looks like they're moving away from supporting "carrier messaging" (SMS/RCS) in anything other than the default app. You used to be able to see your SMS messages in Gmail via Hangouts, but not anymore.
Arguably, having different apps for different chat protocols is easier for people to understand, even if we don't like it much? You might be surprised that there are people whose grasp of networking is kind of tenuous. (Like, it was kind of difficult to explain to my mother about how a cell phone can work over WiFi some of the time and that if the cable modem goes out, that's also the Internet and cell service at her house.) Network protocols are invisible and abstract; an app you can see.
I'd guess it's also easier for phone companies to support customers when there's only one app for the messaging protocol that they support directly. If someone complains that their messages aren't showing up, there's only one app where they're supposed to be.
I totally get why they're doing this, but also Signal being able to handle both its own messages and SMS/MMS was a clutch feature in getting some of my friends to adopt it. They didn't really care...
I totally get why they're doing this, but also Signal being able to handle both its own messages and SMS/MMS was a clutch feature in getting some of my friends to adopt it.
They didn't really care about the privacy angle, but when I told them "hey, this can send high res photos/videos to anyone else who uses it" and also "you don't have to handle separate messaging apps", they gave it a try and it stuck.
Honestly, if Signal had been able to do the same thing on iOS (I understand that's Apple's fault, not theirs), I think Signal’s adoption would be way higher. It would have effectively given the app (rough) parity with iMessage while also being cross-platform. For any mixed-device grouping, it would have been the obvious best solution.
Also, this is somewhat of an aside, but I really do wish we weren't living in a world where where fragmented messaging is our forever future, but I also don't see any other way around it. At this point I hop between iMessage, SMS/MMS, Signal, and (begrudgingly) Discord based on who I'm messaging. The platforms themselves might change over time, but I just don’t foresee a future where everyone is ever under one roof.
It is weird reading about the last bit, but I forgot that probably you have a US POV. Is not a mistake, much less in this website, but is very (funny?) hearing about this US problem where the rest...
It is weird reading about the last bit, but I forgot that probably you have a US POV.
Is not a mistake, much less in this website, but is very (funny?) hearing about this US problem where the rest of the world mostly uses Whatsapp and we are fine with that (but we probably shouldn't because Facebook).
It's super unfortunate, but that's what I had always hoped though - everyone on both iPhone and Android under the same roof. With my friend group, it wasn't so much the privacy angle as the...
It's super unfortunate, but that's what I had always hoped though - everyone on both iPhone and Android under the same roof. With my friend group, it wasn't so much the privacy angle as the avoidance of corporations that folks in the group hated. That's what the idea behind protocols was originally - that anyone and everyone could make a client that interacted with other clients of the same protocol, but Apple seems to have put the kibosh on that.... I can only hope that another group or project steps up to address cross platform messaging. I'd love to convert my friends on to Element or some matrix cross platform client, but it seems like a hard sell, as it's still in its developmental stage.
I 100% blame Apple for this. If it wasn't for iMessage being a locked out, proprietary defacto class signifier, a cross platform messaging app would have become the standard in the US just as it...
I 100% blame Apple for this. If it wasn't for iMessage being a locked out, proprietary defacto class signifier, a cross platform messaging app would have become the standard in the US just as it is everywhere else in the world.
Most of Europe is on WhatsApp, many countries in Asia are on WeChat and various other regional messaging platforms, but the US is still stuck on SMS because of "LOL GREEN BUBBLES".
iMessage works great among other iOS users, and iOS users for the most part refuse to use any other messaging app so SMS becomes the default fallback. The situation is worse than if apple never released any sort of chat app.
Well. This will mark the end of my use of Signal, then. It was a good checks notes half-dozen years. A few percent of my contacts use Signal. I'm not interested in evangelizing a messaging app to...
Well. This will mark the end of my use of Signal, then. It was a good checks notes half-dozen years.
A few percent of my contacts use Signal. I'm not interested in evangelizing a messaging app to try to get that number higher (and I don't think I'd have meaningful success regardless). I only used it because it could handle SMS and MMS messages (which are almost all of my messages), and I have zero interest whatsoever in dealing with multiple messaging apps. I hope I can unlink my account reasonably cleanly so my few contacts who do use Signal don't end up shouting into the void.
I guess this will give me impetus to get my SMS/Matrix bridge polished up enough to be comfortably usable?
Same here. At this point I don't have any close Signal contacts left, so once it stops being usable for SMS I'll have no use left for Signal at all. It's a very nice messenger, but if it can't...
Same here. At this point I don't have any close Signal contacts left, so once it stops being usable for SMS I'll have no use left for Signal at all. It's a very nice messenger, but if it can't handle SMS then there goes my entire use case for it. Really is a shame because there's no open source (or closed source for the most part) SMS messaging apps of comparable quality, or at least there weren't last time I went looking.
QKSMS is very solid and nice, but also affected by the total absence of RCS libraries. (It also hasn't been updated in a year: but honestly, that's mostly because it's stable.)
QKSMS is very solid and nice, but also affected by the total absence of RCS libraries. (It also hasn't been updated in a year: but honestly, that's mostly because it's stable.)
I have Signal installed and I connected with a few people, but we don’t use it. I keep it around just in case we suddenly end up in a spy thriller or something.
I have Signal installed and I connected with a few people, but we don’t use it. I keep it around just in case we suddenly end up in a spy thriller or something.
Seems sensible to me. I was having a conversation a month or two ago with a friend about my frustrations with not being able to use Signal on two phones at once, and he pointed out it has to be...
Seems sensible to me. I was having a conversation a month or two ago with a friend about my frustrations with not being able to use Signal on two phones at once, and he pointed out it has to be linked to a single phone number for SMS support - which I'd never used and had totally forgotten was even a thing. Hopefully this paves the way for more general accounts that aren't tightly coupled to a network provider.
I guess it makes business sense, but as someone who uses Signal for their primary SMS, it's very aggravating, and I'll honestly probably stop using it completely as a result. Going to be looking...
I guess it makes business sense, but as someone who uses Signal for their primary SMS, it's very aggravating, and I'll honestly probably stop using it completely as a result. Going to be looking for another messaging app, I guess.
I think that they don't understand that the majority of people actually don't care about their strong privacy, so they just won't ever switch. They're going all in on a particular type of person, and that's great, but I get a ton of SMS messages, and I don't want to have to switch apps all the time; I want my messages in a single app. Since that app can't be Signal, it won't.
You won't find another one. The whole reason Signal is killing SMS support is because Android does not provide an API for handling RCS SMS messages. Other messengers may choose to keep SMS...
Going to be looking for another messaging app, I guess.
You won't find another one. The whole reason Signal is killing SMS support is because Android does not provide an API for handling RCS SMS messages. Other messengers may choose to keep SMS support, but any messages sent to you via RCS will end up getting lost in the void.
Going forward your only reliable option for SMS will be the app that came with your device.
Android just seems to be slowly corralling itself into a more walled garden shape over time. First it was launchers, there's some core UI features that only the default system launcher can access,...
Android just seems to be slowly corralling itself into a more walled garden shape over time. First it was launchers, there's some core UI features that only the default system launcher can access, now it's text messaging.
That’s understandable, although my read was actually quite different - I haven’t used SMS in years so I took it as them just deprecating a legacy feature to save dev time rather than doubling down...
That’s understandable, although my read was actually quite different - I haven’t used SMS in years so I took it as them just deprecating a legacy feature to save dev time rather than doubling down on privacy.
It’s good to get a reminder that there’s another perspective, actually. I know messaging platforms are quite regional, so it makes sense that SMS is still more of a feature elsewhere.
Either way, I’m with you in wishing for a unified app that can actually talk to everyone I want to talk to. Getting a critical mass of users on a secure, open protocol would be amazing, but there are too many vested interests against that - Signal included, to an extent, since they don’t allow third party clients.
yes, it is. This has been the feature that has allowed me to convince android users to switch to signal, that it's all housed in one neat app. It's also been the reason that I've struggled to get...
We understand that this change will be frustrating for those of you who use Signal on Android for SMS messaging in addition to sending Signal messages.
yes, it is. This has been the feature that has allowed me to convince android users to switch to signal, that it's all housed in one neat app. It's also been the reason that I've struggled to get iOS users to switch to signal (they can't send SMS or imessages in signal).
Personally, I suppose I'm going to have to find an SMS app that isn't quite as bare bones as the default lineage os one, but is still open source (any suggestions?). But for others, especially those who switched because of Signal's ability to combine sms and signal messages, I'm not hopeful that they will stay.
I guess I can see why they are doing this, but I'm really not sure that it's worth it. It feels to me like it's a case of "sms is annoying for us to support so we're going to strip out core functionality so that we don't have to bother". The rest of it seems like issues with users not understanding the difference between signal and sms messages, which feels like signals fault for not educating them well enough. Currently all signal shows is a different coloured send button and an open lock on messages. How about a big ugly unmissable red box or something with a clear warning? or idk, i'm not a ui designer, but I'm sure it can be made more obvious (such as the iOS route where sms is green and imessage is blue).
And as for RCS, it feels funny that so many users are going to leave signal for an SMS app that probably just like signal does not support RCS.
E: Funnily enough in my searches for "open source SMS app" the number 1 pick on this website is Signal!
This is dumb. What's the draw of Signal over Matrix, then? Clients like Cinny and Element v3 are now there from a usability perspective and the protocol has been sound for a while. I understand...
This is dumb. What's the draw of Signal over Matrix, then? Clients like Cinny and Element v3 are now there from a usability perspective and the protocol has been sound for a while.
I understand their ostensible reasons for this - SMS has a massive attack surface (see: every zero-click exploit used in Saudi Arabia in the last ten years) - but this is an entirely asinine move if you want to keep your userbase. The technical users will move to Matrix, and the non-technical users that Signal did such a good job (comparatively) at attracting will simply move back to SMS. Or likely, be attracted by RCS, which isn't any better...
I'll add on that this is my perspective as someone from North America. People not from the States or Canada are probably surprised at the pushback against this. SMS is by no means a dead protocol...
I'll add on that this is my perspective as someone from North America. People not from the States or Canada are probably surprised at the pushback against this. SMS is by no means a dead protocol here, and indeed is some people's primary one.
I intellectually knew it was a thing, but the number of replies here saying they use SMS on a daily basis has absolutely blown my mind. I actually checked my backups out of sheer curiosity and I...
I intellectually knew it was a thing, but the number of replies here saying they use SMS on a daily basis has absolutely blown my mind. I actually checked my backups out of sheer curiosity and I haven't sent an SMS to a real person since 2019, and even then it was a relative outlier.
Is this purely an "everyone on iOS uses the default client" issue, or is there more to it that I'm missing?
Me too. I am genuinely shocked that people still use SMS. I sent one to my friend in May this year. Because I know he had Whatsapp notifications turned off at the time and I quite urgently needed...
Me too. I am genuinely shocked that people still use SMS. I sent one to my friend in May this year. Because I know he had Whatsapp notifications turned off at the time and I quite urgently needed his attention. Also my back pocket texted another friend in June, for some reason. But that's it for the entire year, and to be honest that feels like a lot.
All I use SMS for is getting notifications from delivery companies and my bank and so on. Personal SMS is even deader than personal email and has been for a long time.
What's more amazing is how many people on here I thought were very pro-privacy, but appear to be happy to use a system which sends messages in the clear and has government backdoors built in to it's delivery system. I rarely give a damn about "privacy" (as it's usually defined, at least) and even I am wary of SMS.
I wouldn't say we're happy to use it, but what are you gonna do, cut off family because they won't move to your messaging system of choice? It's a reality we've gotta live with, and Signal...
What's more amazing is how many people on here I thought were very pro-privacy, but appear to be happy to use a system which sends messages in the clear and has government backdoors built in to it's delivery system. I rarely give a damn about "privacy" (as it's usually defined, at least) and even I am wary of SMS.
I wouldn't say we're happy to use it, but what are you gonna do, cut off family because they won't move to your messaging system of choice? It's a reality we've gotta live with, and Signal supporting it alongside its normal functionality made that easier to swallow (and easier to move people off of it gradually).
Yeah, SMS is the de facto standard in the US. Someone with more technical knowledge and history can probably explain why that is, but all I really know is that, currently, I send multiple SMS...
Yeah, SMS is the de facto standard in the US. Someone with more technical knowledge and history can probably explain why that is, but all I really know is that, currently, I send multiple SMS messages every single day.
iMessage, if Apple had allowed it on other devices, likely would have become the de facto standard in the US in the same way WhatsApp was elsewhere. A lot of people with iPhones don’t even understand that iMessage and SMS are two different things — they just know that people with green bubbles “mess up” group chats. There’s actually a not insignificant social pressure that points towards iMessage that Apple is absolutely loving as lock-in mechanism. It’s the primary reason I switched from an Android phone to an iPhone.
Because iMessage remains device-dependent, the US has never settled on a “post-SMS” standard that works with all phones. Instead, people have just fragmented off into different apps, and many people (myself included) juggle different apps based on different contacts/groups.
I do wonder what led the US to settle on iMessage and Europe to WhatsApp. It makes sense that WhatsApp is the bigger global player just because iPhone pricing is considered ultra-luxury compared...
I do wonder what led the US to settle on iMessage and Europe to WhatsApp. It makes sense that WhatsApp is the bigger global player just because iPhone pricing is considered ultra-luxury compared to cost of living in a lot of markets, and obviously China's an outlier with WeChat because you can't really fight state sponsorship, but EU/US both have significant shares of users on both iOS and Android. It's not like WhataApp is some plucky underdog either - if anything I'd prefer to trust Apple than Zuckerberg, but not at the expense of platform lock in. Maybe it was just the way the cards fell in terms of marketing campaigns, but it seems interesting that it's so clear cut.
I’m curious as well. When Facebook bought WhatsApp in 2014, everyone I knew went “…huh?”. We’d never even heard of it. It seemed absurd that Facebook was paying $19 billion for something with no...
I’m curious as well. When Facebook bought WhatsApp in 2014, everyone I knew went “…huh?”. We’d never even heard of it. It seemed absurd that Facebook was paying $19 billion for something with no reach, but that was our perception only because, for some odd reason, WhatsApp was hardly used in the US at all.
I suspect it might have something to do with the fact that we had texting (via SMS) in our cell plans, but data was expensive and hard to come by for a while, so data-based messengers might have been at a significant disadvantage early on?
Ah, I think you're onto something there actually! Not just the higher data costs in the US (and even more so in Canada), but the fact that within the EU you're more likely to find yourself...
Ah, I think you're onto something there actually! Not just the higher data costs in the US (and even more so in Canada), but the fact that within the EU you're more likely to find yourself messaging internationally on a fairly regular basis. It's reasonably well regulated now, but as far as I know it was less so when WhatsApp was gaining market share. Perhaps if "interstate texting" were a thing, the US would've gone the same way.
It used to be kinda like that with banking. Most retail banks only operated within one state, and many wouldn’t recognize stuff from out of state. That’s one of the reasons credit and charge cards...
It used to be kinda like that with banking. Most retail banks only operated within one state, and many wouldn’t recognize stuff from out of state. That’s one of the reasons credit and charge cards took off here first versus Europe.
We all had bundled SMS in the EU as well - and data wasn't quite as bad as in the US but it was still pricey for a decent amount of time and if you were moving between EU countries it could get...
We all had bundled SMS in the EU as well - and data wasn't quite as bad as in the US but it was still pricey for a decent amount of time and if you were moving between EU countries it could get awfully expensive. Also iMessage uses data so if data were the determining factor, iMessage might not have done as well as it did. But it's not really about the EU or the US.
It was always about the developing world. Half a billion people in India use Whatsapp. That's more than the entire EU and US combined. In parts of Africa it's market penetration among people who have internet access approaches 100%. 87% of internet users in Indonesia have it. Whatsapp has over two billion users and the majority of them are outside the EU and US.
Because mobile phone is many people's only way to access the internet, data is relatively easy to come by in many developing nations, be it via wifi or on-plan, albeit often much slower than we're used to. That's the reason Whatsapp crushes the hell out of images sent over it (this comes from my friend at Meta who knows the WA team) - because large transfers upset the UX for people whose data rate is measured in kbps.
For what it's worth these days there are 75 million whatsapp users in the US. So it's not insignificant there either, but I do wonder how many of those installs are not the user's primary instant messaging app.
Everyone and their mum uses it here in the UK, at least everyone and their mums that I know. My parents are in their seventies and on loads of group chats all over the place. More than I am!
That's really a shame, I was looking forward to having this back when I go back to Android on my next phone. I don't think they realize just how important this was for pushing adoption in places...
That's really a shame, I was looking forward to having this back when I go back to Android on my next phone. I don't think they realize just how important this was for pushing adoption in places where SMS is still king.
Recently there have been rumors of Apple revamping iMessages, not even a day of no WhatsApp made my contacts move to another app such as Telegram or Signal (some still use Telegram because of...
Recently there have been rumors of Apple revamping iMessages, not even a day of no WhatsApp made my contacts move to another app such as Telegram or Signal (some still use Telegram because of bots). If I want something private I still recommend Session to avoid giving your phone number.
This is a fork of Signal that provides SMS support. It is far (FAR) from completion, but at least it doesn't have those stupid, naggy messages telling you to update.
The fork-5.53.8 branch is where the latest version is right now. Messy, I know, but I did this in less than an hour. I'll fix it eventually.
As far as I can tell, all messaging/calling/video calling features work fine.
Additional justification:
Still no RCS API on Android, after all their noise at Apple not adding RCS to iOS?
I have zero faith in Google ever getting their messaging platform to a stable point.
They do support RCS in the default app (Google Messages). It looks like they're moving away from supporting "carrier messaging" (SMS/RCS) in anything other than the default app. You used to be able to see your SMS messages in Gmail via Hangouts, but not anymore.
Arguably, having different apps for different chat protocols is easier for people to understand, even if we don't like it much? You might be surprised that there are people whose grasp of networking is kind of tenuous. (Like, it was kind of difficult to explain to my mother about how a cell phone can work over WiFi some of the time and that if the cable modem goes out, that's also the Internet and cell service at her house.) Network protocols are invisible and abstract; an app you can see.
I'd guess it's also easier for phone companies to support customers when there's only one app for the messaging protocol that they support directly. If someone complains that their messages aren't showing up, there's only one app where they're supposed to be.
I totally get why they're doing this, but also Signal being able to handle both its own messages and SMS/MMS was a clutch feature in getting some of my friends to adopt it.
They didn't really care about the privacy angle, but when I told them "hey, this can send high res photos/videos to anyone else who uses it" and also "you don't have to handle separate messaging apps", they gave it a try and it stuck.
Honestly, if Signal had been able to do the same thing on iOS (I understand that's Apple's fault, not theirs), I think Signal’s adoption would be way higher. It would have effectively given the app (rough) parity with iMessage while also being cross-platform. For any mixed-device grouping, it would have been the obvious best solution.
Also, this is somewhat of an aside, but I really do wish we weren't living in a world where where fragmented messaging is our forever future, but I also don't see any other way around it. At this point I hop between iMessage, SMS/MMS, Signal, and (begrudgingly) Discord based on who I'm messaging. The platforms themselves might change over time, but I just don’t foresee a future where everyone is ever under one roof.
It is weird reading about the last bit, but I forgot that probably you have a US POV.
Is not a mistake, much less in this website, but is very (funny?) hearing about this US problem where the rest of the world mostly uses Whatsapp and we are fine with that (but we probably shouldn't because Facebook).
It's super unfortunate, but that's what I had always hoped though - everyone on both iPhone and Android under the same roof. With my friend group, it wasn't so much the privacy angle as the avoidance of corporations that folks in the group hated. That's what the idea behind protocols was originally - that anyone and everyone could make a client that interacted with other clients of the same protocol, but Apple seems to have put the kibosh on that.... I can only hope that another group or project steps up to address cross platform messaging. I'd love to convert my friends on to Element or some matrix cross platform client, but it seems like a hard sell, as it's still in its developmental stage.
I 100% blame Apple for this. If it wasn't for iMessage being a locked out, proprietary defacto class signifier, a cross platform messaging app would have become the standard in the US just as it is everywhere else in the world.
Most of Europe is on WhatsApp, many countries in Asia are on WeChat and various other regional messaging platforms, but the US is still stuck on SMS because of "LOL GREEN BUBBLES".
iMessage works great among other iOS users, and iOS users for the most part refuse to use any other messaging app so SMS becomes the default fallback. The situation is worse than if apple never released any sort of chat app.
Well. This will mark the end of my use of Signal, then. It was a good checks notes half-dozen years.
A few percent of my contacts use Signal. I'm not interested in evangelizing a messaging app to try to get that number higher (and I don't think I'd have meaningful success regardless). I only used it because it could handle SMS and MMS messages (which are almost all of my messages), and I have zero interest whatsoever in dealing with multiple messaging apps. I hope I can unlink my account reasonably cleanly so my few contacts who do use Signal don't end up shouting into the void.
I guess this will give me impetus to get my SMS/Matrix bridge polished up enough to be comfortably usable?
Same here. At this point I don't have any close Signal contacts left, so once it stops being usable for SMS I'll have no use left for Signal at all. It's a very nice messenger, but if it can't handle SMS then there goes my entire use case for it. Really is a shame because there's no open source (or closed source for the most part) SMS messaging apps of comparable quality, or at least there weren't last time I went looking.
QKSMS is very solid and nice, but also affected by the total absence of RCS libraries. (It also hasn't been updated in a year: but honestly, that's mostly because it's stable.)
I have Signal installed and I connected with a few people, but we don’t use it. I keep it around just in case we suddenly end up in a spy thriller or something.
Seems sensible to me. I was having a conversation a month or two ago with a friend about my frustrations with not being able to use Signal on two phones at once, and he pointed out it has to be linked to a single phone number for SMS support - which I'd never used and had totally forgotten was even a thing. Hopefully this paves the way for more general accounts that aren't tightly coupled to a network provider.
I guess it makes business sense, but as someone who uses Signal for their primary SMS, it's very aggravating, and I'll honestly probably stop using it completely as a result. Going to be looking for another messaging app, I guess.
I think that they don't understand that the majority of people actually don't care about their strong privacy, so they just won't ever switch. They're going all in on a particular type of person, and that's great, but I get a ton of SMS messages, and I don't want to have to switch apps all the time; I want my messages in a single app. Since that app can't be Signal, it won't.
You won't find another one. The whole reason Signal is killing SMS support is because Android does not provide an API for handling RCS SMS messages. Other messengers may choose to keep SMS support, but any messages sent to you via RCS will end up getting lost in the void.
Going forward your only reliable option for SMS will be the app that came with your device.
Android just seems to be slowly corralling itself into a more walled garden shape over time. First it was launchers, there's some core UI features that only the default system launcher can access, now it's text messaging.
That’s understandable, although my read was actually quite different - I haven’t used SMS in years so I took it as them just deprecating a legacy feature to save dev time rather than doubling down on privacy.
It’s good to get a reminder that there’s another perspective, actually. I know messaging platforms are quite regional, so it makes sense that SMS is still more of a feature elsewhere.
Either way, I’m with you in wishing for a unified app that can actually talk to everyone I want to talk to. Getting a critical mass of users on a secure, open protocol would be amazing, but there are too many vested interests against that - Signal included, to an extent, since they don’t allow third party clients.
yes, it is. This has been the feature that has allowed me to convince android users to switch to signal, that it's all housed in one neat app. It's also been the reason that I've struggled to get iOS users to switch to signal (they can't send SMS or imessages in signal).
Personally, I suppose I'm going to have to find an SMS app that isn't quite as bare bones as the default lineage os one, but is still open source (any suggestions?). But for others, especially those who switched because of Signal's ability to combine sms and signal messages, I'm not hopeful that they will stay.
I guess I can see why they are doing this, but I'm really not sure that it's worth it. It feels to me like it's a case of "sms is annoying for us to support so we're going to strip out core functionality so that we don't have to bother". The rest of it seems like issues with users not understanding the difference between signal and sms messages, which feels like signals fault for not educating them well enough. Currently all signal shows is a different coloured send button and an open lock on messages. How about a big ugly unmissable red box or something with a clear warning? or idk, i'm not a ui designer, but I'm sure it can be made more obvious (such as the iOS route where sms is green and imessage is blue).
And as for RCS, it feels funny that so many users are going to leave signal for an SMS app that probably just like signal does not support RCS.
E: Funnily enough in my searches for "open source SMS app" the number 1 pick on this website is Signal!
This is dumb. What's the draw of Signal over Matrix, then? Clients like Cinny and Element v3 are now there from a usability perspective and the protocol has been sound for a while.
I understand their ostensible reasons for this - SMS has a massive attack surface (see: every zero-click exploit used in Saudi Arabia in the last ten years) - but this is an entirely asinine move if you want to keep your userbase. The technical users will move to Matrix, and the non-technical users that Signal did such a good job (comparatively) at attracting will simply move back to SMS. Or likely, be attracted by RCS, which isn't any better...
I'll add on that this is my perspective as someone from North America. People not from the States or Canada are probably surprised at the pushback against this. SMS is by no means a dead protocol here, and indeed is some people's primary one.
I intellectually knew it was a thing, but the number of replies here saying they use SMS on a daily basis has absolutely blown my mind. I actually checked my backups out of sheer curiosity and I haven't sent an SMS to a real person since 2019, and even then it was a relative outlier.
Is this purely an "everyone on iOS uses the default client" issue, or is there more to it that I'm missing?
Me too. I am genuinely shocked that people still use SMS. I sent one to my friend in May this year. Because I know he had Whatsapp notifications turned off at the time and I quite urgently needed his attention. Also my back pocket texted another friend in June, for some reason. But that's it for the entire year, and to be honest that feels like a lot.
All I use SMS for is getting notifications from delivery companies and my bank and so on. Personal SMS is even deader than personal email and has been for a long time.
What's more amazing is how many people on here I thought were very pro-privacy, but appear to be happy to use a system which sends messages in the clear and has government backdoors built in to it's delivery system. I rarely give a damn about "privacy" (as it's usually defined, at least) and even I am wary of SMS.
I wouldn't say we're happy to use it, but what are you gonna do, cut off family because they won't move to your messaging system of choice? It's a reality we've gotta live with, and Signal supporting it alongside its normal functionality made that easier to swallow (and easier to move people off of it gradually).
Yeah, SMS is the de facto standard in the US. Someone with more technical knowledge and history can probably explain why that is, but all I really know is that, currently, I send multiple SMS messages every single day.
iMessage, if Apple had allowed it on other devices, likely would have become the de facto standard in the US in the same way WhatsApp was elsewhere. A lot of people with iPhones don’t even understand that iMessage and SMS are two different things — they just know that people with green bubbles “mess up” group chats. There’s actually a not insignificant social pressure that points towards iMessage that Apple is absolutely loving as lock-in mechanism. It’s the primary reason I switched from an Android phone to an iPhone.
Because iMessage remains device-dependent, the US has never settled on a “post-SMS” standard that works with all phones. Instead, people have just fragmented off into different apps, and many people (myself included) juggle different apps based on different contacts/groups.
I do wonder what led the US to settle on iMessage and Europe to WhatsApp. It makes sense that WhatsApp is the bigger global player just because iPhone pricing is considered ultra-luxury compared to cost of living in a lot of markets, and obviously China's an outlier with WeChat because you can't really fight state sponsorship, but EU/US both have significant shares of users on both iOS and Android. It's not like WhataApp is some plucky underdog either - if anything I'd prefer to trust Apple than Zuckerberg, but not at the expense of platform lock in. Maybe it was just the way the cards fell in terms of marketing campaigns, but it seems interesting that it's so clear cut.
I’m curious as well. When Facebook bought WhatsApp in 2014, everyone I knew went “…huh?”. We’d never even heard of it. It seemed absurd that Facebook was paying $19 billion for something with no reach, but that was our perception only because, for some odd reason, WhatsApp was hardly used in the US at all.
I suspect it might have something to do with the fact that we had texting (via SMS) in our cell plans, but data was expensive and hard to come by for a while, so data-based messengers might have been at a significant disadvantage early on?
Ah, I think you're onto something there actually! Not just the higher data costs in the US (and even more so in Canada), but the fact that within the EU you're more likely to find yourself messaging internationally on a fairly regular basis. It's reasonably well regulated now, but as far as I know it was less so when WhatsApp was gaining market share. Perhaps if "interstate texting" were a thing, the US would've gone the same way.
It used to be kinda like that with banking. Most retail banks only operated within one state, and many wouldn’t recognize stuff from out of state. That’s one of the reasons credit and charge cards took off here first versus Europe.
We all had bundled SMS in the EU as well - and data wasn't quite as bad as in the US but it was still pricey for a decent amount of time and if you were moving between EU countries it could get awfully expensive. Also iMessage uses data so if data were the determining factor, iMessage might not have done as well as it did. But it's not really about the EU or the US.
It was always about the developing world. Half a billion people in India use Whatsapp. That's more than the entire EU and US combined. In parts of Africa it's market penetration among people who have internet access approaches 100%. 87% of internet users in Indonesia have it. Whatsapp has over two billion users and the majority of them are outside the EU and US.
Because mobile phone is many people's only way to access the internet, data is relatively easy to come by in many developing nations, be it via wifi or on-plan, albeit often much slower than we're used to. That's the reason Whatsapp crushes the hell out of images sent over it (this comes from my friend at Meta who knows the WA team) - because large transfers upset the UX for people whose data rate is measured in kbps.
For what it's worth these days there are 75 million whatsapp users in the US. So it's not insignificant there either, but I do wonder how many of those installs are not the user's primary instant messaging app.
source and more data here
Everyone and their mum uses it here in the UK, at least everyone and their mums that I know. My parents are in their seventies and on loads of group chats all over the place. More than I am!
That's really a shame, I was looking forward to having this back when I go back to Android on my next phone. I don't think they realize just how important this was for pushing adoption in places where SMS is still king.
Recently there have been rumors of Apple revamping iMessages, not even a day of no WhatsApp made my contacts move to another app such as Telegram or Signal (some still use Telegram because of bots). If I want something private I still recommend Session to avoid giving your phone number.
https://github.com/ryukoposting/Signal-Android/tree/fork-5.53.8