Would be very interesting to hear some practital experiences!
For a daily driver, I literally just went out and picked up a new Android device this weekend because I can't see the Pinephone being able to take on that role for me from a software standpoint for quite some time or with this generation of hardware.
Mobian has Anbox functional (though it is still experimental), so you can install apps on that. WhatsApp and Signal with without play services so that shouldn't be an issue.
Obviously you do have a use-case; please don't think I'm trying to say it's invalid, I just honestly don't understand what it would be and would really like to be enlightened.
Does MMS make it easy to have a group conversation, or does everyone have to remember to do the equiv or "reply-all" (add everyone's number in) when sending a message to the group?
Do you get free SMS/MMS included in your plan? (My American Aunt has always insisted SMS was obscenely expensive and refused to use it to communicate.)
Do you get Data as standard with the plan? (Eg is it that people can't easily use WhatsApp because they don't have data when out and about or is it that people just won't agree which IP product to use in the first place?)
Really appreciated; thank you :)
- MMS has been free and unlimited for the last decade or so on most major carriers (maybe more like ~7 years but we got it waaay before unlimited data made a comeback).
- Data comes standard most of the time, most people have at least a gig or two a month, going all the way up to unlimited. It’s not a problem of data use (since you’d be hard pressed to burn through two gigs of text and meh resolution images), but it’s that MMS is a lowest common denominator. Everyone has it, so you know you can reach them (except for the 10% of the time a message doesn’t go through and you don’t know about it :P). I’m in the US, and I don’t know anyone who uses something other than MMS or iMessage (which is invisible and acts exactly the same) for most of their communication. Some of us have Discord but we only use it on desktop. I think my parents may use Facebook Messenger for something.
MMS never seemed to catch on in the UK and never seems to be included in the free allowances which probably doesn't help (eg I have unlimited calls, sms, >100gb data but MMS still costs me 50p each). I think the only time I've seen it used in years is very occasionally when I ask an iPhone user to send me a photo and they don't realise I'm on Android and won't automatically have it funnelled via Apple, so instead I get badly compressed unreadable photos of printed letters.
...until you can't, as this thread shows. This is also part of what's keeping me from using my PinePhone as a daily driver.
Facebook Messenger is like iMessage except you can generally assume everyone is on it. The main caveat is that you get the best experience if everyone is friends on Facebook, so it works great for friend/family convos but poorly for stuff like online dating (mostly SMS, Snapchat, and iMessage) and coordinating loosely attached groups of people (GroupMe used to be popular for this, but I haven’t seen it in awhile, iMessage also gets used for this but strongly excludes half of all people).
It depends on the client, but yes, MMS makes it pretty easy to go.
> Do you get free SMS/MMS included in your plan? (My American Aunt has always insisted SMS was obscenely expensive and refused to use it to communicate.)
Most common plans that I know of have unlimited SMS/MMS/Phone calls (unless you get a really cheap one).
> Do you get Data as standard with the plan? (Eg is it that people can't easily use WhatsApp because they don't have data when out and about or is it that people just won't agree which IP product to use in the first place?)
Data is generally standard with a plan. SOme only give you a limited allotment, and some give you some version of "unlimited" (i.e. if you use too much they will start to throttle you).
It was for a long time, and still is with some services. I used a tracphone flip-phone for a while, and a single SMS is like half a minute of phone time IIRC.
I have a phone plan with a Sprint reseller that costs $6/month and still have unlimited texts. It's really rare for a plan to not include unlimited SMS, unless maybe it's prepaid.
MMS uses data though, and that can get expensive.
These days it's less than a penny per message for SMS, or just unlimited depending on the plan.
I know Signal can now, but can WhatsApp notify you of incoming messages without Play Services?
I really wish Pine64 would step in to help with these sort of base issues, or have a bug bounty for it.
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/jl6q6w/pinephone_arr...
I don't have the first hand experience, but I was doing research on this very topic earlier today. https://www.github.com/nanu-c/axolotl looked promising. (ubuntu touch only)
As others have mentioned, anbox is another alternative.
I ended up going with the xcover pro instead, but I'm still highly considering getting a pinephone to do dev work on. There's exciting stuff to reinvent over here!
[1] https://matrix.org/docs/projects/bridge/mautrix-whatsapp [2] https://fluffychat.im