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Comment by Andrew_nenakhov | Hacker News Reader

I'd say not being able to message ~85% of smartphone users is a pretty big UX flaw.

You can message 100% of all smartphone users, it magically delivers as SMS. Also supports group chats with regular SMS users. Also supports MMS with them.

Given this pretty graceful degradation, what do you mean by not being able to message 85% of smartphone users?

I don't know about other countries, but in India at least, SMS's are generally paid and won't send if you don't have balance.

While WhatsApp/Telegram messages are actually free if you have got data.

And nowadays I get absolutely zero SMS's from people. All senders are now just bots and notification services.

Eh, that's terrible UX for everyone involved.

I'm more or less OK with the idea of Apple not developing for other platforms. However, they are actively hostile to anyone who has offered and tried to get interop working on other platforms, which is really a shame.

You really can call SMS a 'graceful degradation' while keeping a straight face? I call it intentionally crippling communication capabilities. Also, just say no to walled gardens.

How about non-smartphone, non-Mac users? Every other messaging app I can think of has a desktop client (even if it's a crappy one that requires linking to your phone, like WhatsApp).

That's not bad UX. That's a product limitation (a conscious one I might say).

This 'product limitation' makes user experience worse. Actually, it makes it unusable for most users.

Whether this limitation is intentional is irrelevant, the UX is still bad.

It’s also not the case that there is such a limitation.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207006

A single contact / conversation can even mix and match.

Are you really suggesting that SMS fallback is a good enough way to message people in 2021? How about sending them a video? Location? Voice message? MMS? Does this crap ever work?? (In my country it doesn't work between operators and costs €.5 for one message)

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