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Comment by firekvz | Hacker News Reader

As a side note, not american and not iphone user.

the last time i got an sms from a real person was mid 2018 and it was my mom telling me that she had no wifi thus could not answer my whatsapp messages

after that, i have received around 2k SMSs, all of them are just notifications from bunch of services (banking, airlines, etc) and 2FA from another bunch of services.

Has SMS really died as a form of communication for most of the people?

Also, I saw some news about RCS in android, I saw my pixel 4 got it, i set it up but i had noone to use it with

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I keep using a lot of text messages: I have many people with different type of chat apps, or no chat apps at all (old gen), so the only way to reach everybody is doing that instead of juggling with different services.

I don't use whatsapp, and don't have an iPhone, so no imessage. Most people don't use Telegram or Signal which I do. Not to mention a lot of geeks have their favorite way of being contacted (slack, wire, etc).

And of course all that will have change in a few years. Before you had to have facebook. When in Asia, it was lime or something else.

As soon as you have a lot diversity in your life, text messages are the only thing that works all the time, plus they are free in my country.

In fact, iMessage is basically sending text messages without the user knowing they do if the other hand is not an Apple device.

In the end, I suspect text messages will still be here in 10 years, and all people around me asking to subscribe to yet another chat service will have change 3 times (and lose their contact list in the process).

In America for people in their 30s it's the primary method of communication for personal use. I try to push Signal but haven't had much success. It's Slack (or Discord) and iMessage/SMS for the most part. I do communicate internationally though and that's nearly exclusively through WhatsApp.

Younger generation seems to be more on Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, and Instagram DMs.

I’m in the US and the only people I know that use WhatsApp or the like instead of sms/iMessage are those who came from another country and use WhatsApp to talk with their friends and family back home.

Most people in my circle refuse to use whatsapp because of privacy concerns or just simply that they don't want to use any facebook apps.

Since there is a mix of messenger apps out there that everyone uses, SMS is always reliable, especially when you interact with many different people whose preferences you do not know.

Most people I talk to still text me. I don't have facebook or instagram I think is the main reason.

Apple killed internet chat by effectively disallowing community maintained clients on the app store.

So your choices are convince all your friends to use a proprietary app/service (with all the downsides) or put up with mms group chats which are free in the US anyway and don't require setting up accounts. I've struggled with this for years and until apple un___ks iOS I think it's going to stay the same.

> Apple killed internet chat by effectively disallowing community maintained clients on the app store.

Can you elaborate on this please? Is this a reference to the GPL being incompatible with proprietary appstores, or something else?

No.

The publisher of the app is the only one allowed to run push notification servers. The privilege of doing this costs $100/year and you're not allowed to sign other people's keys to allow them to do it. Since most chat apps were maintained by volunteers they're unlikely to have the time to dedicate to running a service like this which means that pretty much have to be paying someone in order to have usable chat apps.

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