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Comment by dingus | Hacker News Reader

SMS has always been unreliable. It has no place in modern communications.

No delivery confirmation: messages silently drop and the recipient is unaware you attempted to message them. There is no notification to you that your message failed to deliver.

Profoundly long delivery delays: messages sometimes get stuck and get delivered hours or days later. "Hey dude meet me out front" delivered 16 hours later, etc.

Length restrictions: some phones still do not handle long messages correctly. If the character limit is exceeded, messages are cut into unordered pieces, or the message is truncated and part of the message is simply deleted.

I'm not saying RCS is the answer, just pointing out that SMS is garbage.

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> just pointing out that SMS is garbage

So is email, it just happens to be the best we have because like email it's ubiquitous.

I have none of those experiences.

Use SMS constantly. Often with extensions, MMS, read receipts, etc...

It just works. Faults are rare.

I do not disagree on it being "garbage", in the same way email is, but both bits of tech work well.

I can count faults on one hand per quarter, and that is among a ton of comms with many people.

It failed for over a month for me, but only in one direction, and I didn't know. Other party thought I was ignoring them. Lack of confirmation makes it 'worse than useless' in the failure case

Maybe some hardware/carrier configurations have less problems?

All I can say is, in the past 15+ years of SMS messaging, in the US, on every carrier, with devices ranging from the early Nokias to the latest iPhones, I have had reliability problems that are frequent enough for me to avoid SMS when possible.

It is crazy how different our experiences are!

I travel a lot, internationally at times. SMS just works.

Maybe it has to do with hardware and carrier. I use Verizon, or whatever cheap plan I get on a SIM card.

Samsung phone, and it gives read notifications when the other party agrees to them, and is good on fails, in that I know when one did not get sent.

When I make mistakes, I even get SMS over major flyover cities. Like I pull my phone out, and several emails and texts came through.

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