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Comment by bigiain | Hacker News Reader

From the opposite point of view, in the last hour I’ve been added to 3 different group chats on Signal that were all previously WhatsApp chats (in which I did not participate, in spite of many of those friends repeatedly asking me to).

That’s added at least 20 or 30 friends/acquaintances into my signal contact list that I’m 99% sure downloaded signal for the first time this morning.

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Why not just use SMS/iMessage groups ?

In many countries, few people have iPhones, and SMS are costly.

SMS prices (or 'lack of price') was something that really surprised me after I moved to Canada, as well as phone voicemail.

In Brazil we hurry to turn off the call if it goes into voicemail, as we pay to leave a message AND nobody listens to them because it costs a lot to listen (or at least used to).

As someone whose mobile data plan is faster than home wi-fi and who does not pay for receiving calls and SMSes, the "fixed landline data first" approach in Android really pisses me off.

SMS is not encrypted, iMessage is Apple only

good point.

You can't do group chats in the same way using SMS messages. People who receive an SMS have no idea who else the message was sent to, so they can't even "reply all".

The person you're replying to probably meant MMS which can be used for group texting as you're describing.

Ah, I hadn't heard about that before. That's either not available or not common knowledge in the UK.

MMS are available in UK but not popular, because they were heavily overpriced and fundamentally underwhelming when they were introduced 15 years ago. They are also metered like SMS - one of the big wins when switching from SMS to internet-based systems was to stop worrying about yet another limit.

MMS is not a common technology in Europe.

Many European providers are still charging for each MMS. Something like 40cent/MMS.

The fragmented and quirky MMS implementations in the wild render MMS functionally useless, especially compared to what feature set an app can have. I've seen MMS implementations that send replies to only the sender of the original (so some replies, from better implementations, end up in the MMS group, and some end up only sent back to the sender, resulting in confusion); I've seen MMS implementations that allow you to "like" a message, and this is implemented by just sending "I liked this." as a message back to the other clients — which can't interpret it as anything other than just a normal message — resulting in confusion.

Did you know that MMS can transmit slideshows[1]? I didn't, until my father somehow sent me one. The UI that Android has for that is — naturally — a complete afterthought. (No way to pause the slideshow, no way to navigate the slides, nothing. Just one run through the animation at Warp 8.)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Messaging_Service

Signal is encrypted.

That's why I was there already, along with a few of those friends who used to be part of various WhatsApp groups as well - and they've convinced large groups of pissed off WhatsApp users to download and use Signal today.

I don't know how many of the new Signal users will stay (there's already discussion in one of the new Signal groups about "Why aren't we using Telegram instead?")

Same as much of this thread - these people are not concerned much at all about encryption details, they're largely a pissed of mob of people departing WhatsApp. And some of them are already saying "there's no web client! I can't use this!!!"

I suspect I may well end up back being "the guy who's not part of most group chats" if/when they decide Signal isn't for them... And I'm OK with that.

I've lived in several places and nobody really uses SMS unless it's for 1) someone you don't really know or 2) notifications of some sort...

My impression is the US/Canada are one of the only places where SMS is still frequently used for casual text communication and i'm horrified that Apple's iMessage is the one to somewhat challenge that.

International SMS is quite expensive and sometimes unreliable.

iMessage is only for Apple devices.

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