Android’s messaging mess is about to get even worse? | Hacker News Reader

Android’s messaging mess is about to get even worse?

theverge.com

48 pointsrahuldottech52 comments

Why do so many people think it's reasonable to use a messaging system like SMS that's tied to your cell phone?

I type at least 5-10 times faster on a real keyboard than on a phone... I can't be the only one who gets annoyed after two messages and prefers to move the conversation to a real computer where I can type faster, open lots of reference material, copy and paste content easily, etc. Most messaging apps let you do this, iMessage lets you do this, but without jumping through hoops, SMS on Android is stuck on your phone.

Yet tons of people seem to use plain old Android and use the plain old SMS app, and... are just fine with this?

Does this just not occur to people? Do kids these days not learn how to touch type anymore? Every time someone sends me an SMS I feel like I'm going insane.

I have an iPhone, iPad and MacBook. I use a lot of Messages (iMessage) tied to Apple IDs. Maybe one Android contact.

Sometimes I use Hangouts and Slack. Very little crossover among people on those. I don’t use WhatsApp or Telegram, but I can’t imagine those who are committed to Android don’t care about phone based messaging. Or they care a lot about other kinds of messaging and not about SMS and what else it will evolve into.

An iPhone using friend got a Windows laptop and couldn’t believe he couldn’t get his iOS messages on it.

On this front, I’m totally happy with the state of iOS Messages.

But that is more on Apple for not supporting iMessage on PC?

That is, for sure. But if you can nick Apple for that decision, I think what Google can be nicked for is much bigger, and it’s not a decision on their part, but something more akin to a thing they can’t accomplish.

I use a screen mirroring program on my computer and have the phone hooked up to it. The program allows you type, touch on the phone from your computer, copy and pasting between the systems works fine too.

So I only really need to use the phone itself to type when on the go.

But that's like connecting to a file server over VNC and then opening up an explorer window. It's so much nicer to just mount a remote volume.

What software are you using?

I use Vysor for Android, it comes with a few caveats:

- You need to have your phone in developer mode for it to work

- The free version has full screen ads that come up on your phone while you're mirroring it

1. I imagine having access to your phone and not a computer nearby is a pretty common use-case. Probably lots of phone users who don't even have a computer.

2. Looks like you can access your SMSes via Android Messages https://messages.google.com/web/authentication?redirected=tr...

You can use Google SMS app which has a web version that works like WhatsApp web (connects to your phone via a scannable QR and the phone app does the actual sending)

This caught my eye so I went to the Play Store and read the reviews. From the sounds of it, this used to be a very good app, but with after latest update it's 90%+ bad reviews.

That's just what the reviews say for every app on the play store.

Maybe this is a regional thing, but here in the down under (Australia and New Zealand) SMS is alive and well. I actually prefer email for the same reasons you mentioned but I frequently meet people of all ages who prefer SMS after initially establishing contact via email.

IIRC the ability to send SMS between US carriers was artificially crippled for a long time and as a result Americans are much less accustomed to the protocol even though the usability has improved a lot since. But I digress.

Hmm, SMS seems even less common in at least several European countries, so I don't think it's just because of the carriers. At this point, my SMS usage is limited to two-factor authentication codes with the rare message to a person.

I have iMessage (and SMS), but most of my messaging is over Whatsapp (family and AU business people), LINE (Thailand) and a stupid corporate messaging product called Blink for work.

SMS is really for the one person I know with Android and for 2FA from business/banks when needed.

WhatsApp is probably the number one messaging app on Android, so why would you not use it with the "one person you know with Android"?

I rarely use SMS, only with people I know to have old (not smart)phones or could be offline and must be immediately reached without a voice call.

I can type SMS on my Ubuntu laptop with GSConnect and there are apps like Airdroid that implement similar functionality. Still 99.999% of the time it's Whatsapp or Telegram which have web and desktop apps.

But to type any kind of message from a computer one must have a computer and be willing to use it. Not everyone can use a computer all day long and not every boy or girl is allowed on the family PC all the time. Furthermore they and everybody else prefer to message friends on their own phones instead of on some computer shared with other family members.

Counter point:

- my phone is always on me

- I spend less than 20% of my time in front of a computer (and I work in tech!)

- Everyone I know has a cell phone

- I can start a group chat with anyone I know

- iMessage is very pleasant and easily allows me to share photos I have taken without compression

- Most people I know respond to texts within 5 minutes, so it is good “mostly synchronous” communication

- If someone has my phone number then I consider them to be important.

I wouldn’t write a short story on my phone, but if I had a short story to tell I would probably just use my phone to call someone I care about and tell the story to them. SMS is the perfect lowest common denominator and I will miss it dearly when it is gone.

Hegelian synthesis point: I usually am at my desk, with my phone, and I use the messages app on my computer to do both iMessage and SMS. It’s honestly great to be able to hop between both, as for some conversations, a hardware full size keyboard is ideal.

Though, count yourself lucky that people respond to your texts in around 5 minutes. Mine are shots into the darkness, and maybe I’ll get a text at some point today.

Unless someone needs something, then response time seems drastically shorter :|

I've had a hard time understanding it as well. It seems like I can express so much more and operate so much faster on a computer, but these days a lot of people prefer to just stick with their phone for everything.

FWIW, if you use Google Fi as your carrier, you can send and receive SMS messages as part of Google Hangouts on web (including in gmail). That's what I do. But I certainly still prefer a phone-independent one like FB messenger or real Google Hangouts.

I think also a lot of people who might care are thoroughly in the iOS/macOS ecosystem and are ok with a messaging system (iMessage) that works across devices for most friends but degrades to phone-only (SMS) when communicating with friends using Android. I've even had one or two times where I use Messages on Mac (which doesn't work on Android and never will) to talk with an iOS friend since he didn't want to use SMS.

The cross-platform version of SMS is email. Both date from decades ago. There are countless more recent messaging systems, but nothing has achieved universal reach.

Indeed. Plus, girls won't go for a second date if they see green bubbles.

I use telegram as my cross platform replacement for iMessage, it's solved so many communications issues.

That's easy.

How can you think it is reasonable to expect someone to sign up for an service just for you?

How do people find it acceptable to use more than one-two messaging services?

I don't. I expect them to sign up for any other service of their choice for themselves. I personally find SMS infuriating -- what I find surprising is that most other people don't seem to hate it as much as I do.

Most other people use IP based messaging because it's a much better experience. SMS are a thing of the past with a few exceptions. Banks and Visa insist sending 2FA codes by SMS, people with old phones must use them, I do use them in emergency (no data connection.)

Opening up my "messaging apps" collection on my phone shows:

- WhatsApp (sees the most use by far)

- Facebook messenger (almost completely phased out, used for maybe one or two people and to regain contact when a phone/number is lost or changed)

- SMS (one or two people, some spam advertising I never get around to unsubscribing to, and number verifications from signups)

- Gmail, Outlook, Protonmail (mix of work and personal emails)

- Telegram (one or two people)

- Skype (mostly work contacts, but some personal)

Also an honourable mention to Instagram, which doesn't live in that folder but does house a few of my conversations with people.

I don't have any trouble associating a person with an app or apps, and occasionally will have different conversation "threads" running with the same person in two different mediums.

The only real difficulty, in that case, has been when I've needed to remember where something in particular was mentioned.

That's not the issue.

Those are mostly run by immoral companies that feed of your privacy.

One is bad enough, and none works for all. Except for sms.

It is not a hard choice to make.

I'm completely aware and in agreement on the sad state of the companies who manage those apps, and the transition that the various relationships have taken and are taking is from bad to better in that regard.

But I regularly talk to people from, at a quick count and including the EU as one because of the telecom rules, around 4 different countries. My circle of friends and colleagues travel frequently, as do I, and I don't want to have to think about where they are or I am before sending a message.

SMS is entirely inadequate for my usecase. It would cost me a fortune.

Sure, but that is an edge case.

For others the choice of sms is not surprising at all.

Because the Next Billion Users (basically all of India and Asia) does not own a computer or a full keyboard.

The only computing device they will ever own in their life is a smart phone.

But I don't communicate with any of them! I'm an American living in one of the most expensive cities on the planet. Everybody I interact with has a computer and uses it extensively.

Yet still, somehow, SMS messages everywhere.

I don't mean to come off as callous, I'm just genuinely surprised that there are computer literate people in Silicon Valley who prefer SMS over just about anything else.

There are messaging systems that treat both mobile and desktop as first class citizens, without using a harebrained sync-to-browser-by-routing-through-your-phone-after-scanning-a-QR-code scheme that doesn't work when your phone is offline or you're visiting a different country. I don't understand why one of these systems can't win over something that locks you to your carrier of all things. Don't people hate carriers? I totally accept that I have weird idiosyncratic preferences that others don't share, but this one honestly has me stumped.

That doesn't mean the rest of the planet has to downgrade their experience to the lowest denominator.

That is the rest of the planet. The number of computers are a sheer minority compared to the number of phones used as primary internet access devices for the rest of the planet.

We have more users coming online in a YEAR in India than the whole of the United States desktop population.

I take your point to an extent, but this is a bit dramatic, don't you think?

> The only computing device they will ever own in their life is a smart phone.

Computers effectively didn't exist for the general public when say, my mother was born.

The world will change dramatically over the next 50 years.

This is the current state of affairs. And it is so impactful that when these people are given a laptop for the first time, they try to swipe up on the screen. They don't know how to type on a full size keyboard ...they know how to swype-type.

In fact, Indian search traffic is heavily leaning towards voice typing (and we are already the world top 3 bandwidth consumers)

India is the first market where Netflix has a smartphone-only plan.

So yes, the world will change dramatically in thw next 50 years - but that's why the next evolution of computing devices will be foldables and the like. The laptop based interaction will be restricted to developers and the like.

The keynote of Android Dev summit (happening right now) started with foldables. They are making this a key part of the developer push as the next upcoming haptic interface.

Sure, all that makes sense, 'the only computing device they will ever own in their life is a smart phone' is simply not accurate, though.

What you really mean is that the only computing device they have owned so far is a smart phone.

You can't claim that in multiple decades smartphones will be the dominant computing platform. It could be anything; AR goggles, brain implants, hell, we could have gone back to the stone age and be mucking about with abaci. ;)

> SMS on Android is stuck on your phone.

Have you tried Googling about this? See https://messages.android.com/ (SMS) and https://web.whatsapp.com/ (WhatsApp) if you want to message from your computer. They've been around for ages.

I use both of these, but I think they're stupid.

I don't want some harebrained sync-to-browser-by-routing-through-my-phone-after-scanning-a-QR-code scheme that breaks whenever my phone is offline, or when I need to borrow a computer, or when I'm in a different country... I want a bog-standard client-server architecture with a fully featured client on my phone, desktop, and browser.

Everybody did this in the 90s, it's not hard... why has it gone out of style?

Wire does that and works better than Signal most of the time. You can also create an account using your e-mail address, no need to supply your phone number.

> works better than Signal most of the time

Not in my experience. YMMV.

Try Telegram

Everyone I know uses Facebook messenger, so I do to

> Why do so many people think it's reasonable to use a messaging system like SMS that's tied to your cell phone?

Same reason it's reasonable to use a voice chat system that's tied to your cell phone. Perhaps you've heard of it, it's called "making a phone call".

Also, same reason it's reasonable to use a text messaging system based on your physical address - "sending a letter".

So, the reason is: People have been doing that for hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of years.

I agree with ohazi's comment. I hate it when messaging systems are linked to mobile phones. This is true for most of them: WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.

I much prefer a system that works independently from my phone. Throughout high school, this used to be Hangouts. Now it's been replaced by matrix+riot.im for me.

This is a fairly ignorant article by the verge and some comments here just ran with it and made it worse.

Let me explain:

1. US carriers control a very small part of the global Android market. Google can still push for a better RCS and they will eventually have to follow.

2. Android suppprts many third party messaging apps (WhatsApp, signal, etc), some significantly better than on iOS. For example some apps have reduced functionality on iOS or lack an iPad version.

3. You can access your messages on your computer. Google supports this natively, Microsoft has great Android integration on Windows 10 and Linux has kde & g-connect. But more importantly, things like push bullet have been around for years, probably before iMessage even existed.

But I give you that Google has done a horrible job in the app department.

Good points. Also, nothing prevents you from sms-ing from your pc assuming you have a sim in it.

Although RCS (Rich Communication Services) [0] is/was supposed to be a good idea, I don’t see it being widely adopted like SMS. Many similar standards (MMS, video calls) failed to get traction due to lack of coordination, adoption and common sense between telcos, manufacturers and operators.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services

It seems the story is mixing up two different issues:

1. (Some) cell network operators want to standardize & popularize a protocol for messaging over cell networks but not over IP, i.e. a richer SMS. 2. Today, there are typically different apps for SMS and for IP-based messaging (and among the latter - different apps for different protocols/service providers - WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, etc.)

Obviously, Google can be involved at the most with (2.), and even there it's not clear there's much to be done. I mean, WhatsApp is closed-source and commercially controlled. You can't make a "SMS+WhatsApp+Telegram" unified app. Ok, well, unless you get Facebook to cooperate, which the story does not indicate is happening.

Right. But you can with Signal. Not only does the app already work that way, but it’s also open source.

The title should read "Somehow, the messaging mess is about to get even worse." The mess isn't about Android.

It's always mystified me why an open, cross platform messaging protocol hasn't become as widespread as SMS or email.

It seems messaging use is always driven as a side effect of other use; people use a messaging system because they use something else that happens to have a messaging system, and their friends all use it too.

Whatsapp is the choice even for Apple users where I live. Nobody I know bothers with SMS except for two factor authentication for online banking.

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