SMS are going away, so are the revenues | Hacker News Reader

SMS are going away, so are the revenues

fabcapo.com

20 pointssinzone37 comments

N900 has IMs and SMSes integrated into one UI, one application. Several protocols are supported, from Skype through Nokia's own Ovi to polish local Gadu Gadu (that via installable plugin). Same with contacts: both GSM and IM contacts are part of normal contact card. Pretty neat feature, but once you see it, it seems pretty much in line with other features. The application's called `Conversations'. Coolest thing ever, if friend's IM profile provides an avatar, it's added to contacts automagically.

Why is Apple hailed for introducing that feature now, when N900 had it in November 2009? Or is it that iPhone gets it better, integrates tighter?

To be honest, my reaction mid-article was literally ``What The Eff? I've been using just that for over a year now on N900; why is it described like a novum?''

Given that every article calls iMessage a clone of BBM, I don't think anyone is claiming that Apple just invented IM. What people are claiming is that iMessage will reduce SMS volume by billions, which the N900 cannot do because nobody has an N900.

It will reduce SMS volume by the same amount as it will reduce the Email volume.

My friend has an iPhone. I have an Android. My friend wants to send a short message to me. Will she use iMessage? No. Email or SMS.

Everybody is a visionary one day after WWDC. Maybe that is the secret of the Apple reality distortion field.

It's too much work to keep track of what phones your friends have. I have 200+ people on my contact list, and I think maybe only 4-5 of them don't use smartphones. It may take off if Apple makes their messenger available for all systems, and people actually download it.

You also need to remember, that a large amount of texters are students. Many of my friends send over 4000 texts a month, while I'm running slightly under 2000. On a student plan, unlimited texting in Canada is just bundled into the voice+data package. I haven't been to the states for a while, so I'm not quite sure how they're doing it.

Even if texting does die, it'll die slowly. It's just too much of a hassle to be a hardcore first-adopter for these changes, even if it is cheaper.

iMessage automatically uses SMS for all devices not registered in iCloud. What it will do is eliminate all messaging charges between newer iPhones. This is a significant percentage. Competition will take care of the rest.

I wasn't aware. That's beautiful. No complaints here I suppose :)

That is a great feature (automatically choosing the protocol).

I believe Windows Phone's latest update (Mango) will also use something like this but it will automatically jump between Windows Live Messenge, SMS, and Facebook Chat.

WebOS was the first to have just a "Messages" app (I believe it worked with SMS, AIM, ICQ and GChat/GTalk) that allowed you to have a conversation between a person over different protocols/services, but it was not automatic. Not sure if this has been changed for WebOS 3.0

I can't wait. based on my plan, I currently play $0.005 per goddamn SMS, and $0.000005 per kb.

the vast majority of the people I communicate with regularly are on an iphone or android, and many of them refuse to switch to beluga because they don't want to deal with beluga AND sms (multiple vectors). if imessaging is open protocoled, and transparently handles non-imessage reciepents, then this would solve a lot of problems for me*

*extra points if I can finally reply to sms/imessage via my desktop. I hate pulling my phone out when I'm at the computer.

I agree, it would be awesome to have an open standard for sms. It is ludicrous that phone companies have been able to charge so much for sms as long as they have.

One somewhat nice solution for desktop sms is google voice, it's pretty handy but not the ideal solution I think you and many of us are looking for.

"I spoke a few years back to a fax manufacturer who said the same thing about email"...

Yeah, the funny thing is, SMS came along after email, and is both worse and more expensive.

Let's see if I follow this:

* iMessage is going to kill SMS * iMessage is very similar to BBM * BBM has not killed SMS

How, again, is iMessage going to kill SMS?

Because business users don't text even a tiny tiny tiny amount of what young iPhone users do.

That's like saying "My Treo has apps way before the iPhone. Why would apps make smartphones popular if the Treo couldn't?"

(BTW, I loved my Treo)

It is the tight integration with the current messaging application on the iPhone that will possibly kill sms. The average user does not want to go through some 3rd-party app to deal with their text messages. If an average user sees no difference in complexity between using ATT/Verizon sms and iMessage it seems obvious which one they would choose.

BBM is not a 3rd party app, it is a core part of the Blackberry OS.

So long as iMessage remains iOS only, I don't see it severely eroding SMS usage.

BBM surely puts a dent in SMS usage on Blackberries, but not as much as it could. That's because it puts the burden on users to figure out that the person they want to chat with also has a Blackberry and to get their PIN from them. Unless they know both of these things, they will use SMS.

iMessage, on the other hand, replaces SMS. It's the one and only way to send text messages on the iPhone and it will avoid SMS whenever possible. Users won't even think about what underlying protocol they are using. But they may notice that texting between iPhones has nifty new features and doesn't show up on their phone bill. Apple is trying to take users out of the game. If that happens, it becomes just a technical battle that SMS can't win.

However, SMS won't completely die until all the phones are using the same federated IM protocol. We're not going to have The One True Phone any time soon so I wish they would all just swallow their pride and standardize on XMPP or whatever. If just Google and Apple did this, they could probably kill off both SMS and Blackberry. Seems to me that would be worth cooperating on.

"iMessage, on the other hand, replaces SMS. It's the one and only way to send text messages on the iPhone and it will avoid SMS whenever possible. Users won't even think about what underlying protocol they are using."

Now that is a great point. I wasn't aware that iMessage replaced SMS entirely. I assumed that it was a separate app.

I don't think the impact of it being the default method of sending messages can be understated.

It replaces SMS when the recipient has a device that supports it. Otherwise it'll just send an SMS. The send button is green for SMS and blue for iMessages. But the point is indeed that the user doesn't have to think twice about it.

So iMessage automatically figures out if the recipient has an iPhone or not? How does it do that?

Nobody knows yet, but it probably looks up the phone number in Apple's database.

iPhones are just the smartphone market. More like SMS's are going away for smartphones but staying for everyone else. Not everyone has an smartphone and not everyone can afford a dataplan.

Yet.

(And in emerging markets, it may be 10 years, I get that, but ... yet.)

The only people I call which don't have smartphones are my grandmother and my father in law. I got one friend with a blackberry and one with an Android Phone. Every other one has an iPhone. This includes friends of my wife, mom, dad, even my mother in law who is close to 70. Granted I am from Austria where cell plans with data are 15 dollars a month and which has the second highest iPhone penetration in the world. But usually what happens here moves to Germany 3 years down the line (in mobile phones only). SMS are virtually free anyway as we get 100s or 1000s included. The network is good and the companies still make money so I guess the carriers dont need to move anywhere if they are content to be a commodity business. They will need to sell some of the swanky shops they have on the streets and become a little more like my ISP.

I think you're taking a shorter view than the OP. Today's smartphones are 2020's "WHOA, you're still using that relic?"

Most of the world still uses relics though.

And today's smartphones (which have this technology) are tomorrow's relics. That's the OP's point. Right now it's just on the high end, but today's high end will be the low end in the not-too-distant future. My friends used to wish we could have those cool high-end camera phones — and now my mom's crappy relic has one, with a better camera to boot.

You say, "Not everyone has a smartphone and not everyone has a data plan." But that's not the point. What people have isn't relevant — it's what they will have in 10–15 years.

With the fragmentation of mobile operating systems, this move will take quite a while. As long as Apple, Google and RIM do not allow cross-platform messaging outside of SMS, SMS will still stay strong. I will always have friends who are using Android & other platforms and SMS is still the only way to communicate with them all.

Google has had jabber/gtalk integrated into Android since Day 1. It's push and the interface is fantastic. There's a web client built into every gmail user's inbox, and scads of desktop clients.

SMS is still here.

Now, if appleuser@me.com could jabber chat with googleuser@gmail.com across networks, this would be news.

Gtalk's been working great for me for years now.

The GTalk Android app only supports one account concurrently which makes it a deal-breaker for people who use business and personal accounts.

Nope. Not going away. Just like Skype didn't kill normal calls and replacing SMS has been attempted years and years ago. Even when MSN was introduced, carriers started charging a subscription for it.

Perhaps AT&T saw this coming and is trying to put up some fences around the high-margin SMS plans. Recently they started offering unlimited calling to any mobile regardless of network.

The catch is that you also must carry an unlimited SMS plan ($20/month on an individual line or $30 on a share plan).

I just hope they don't make data plans even more expensive than they are now.

Thankfully I'm still grandfathered into the unlimited plan, but I have a feeling they are going to make it harder and harder to stay on this plan as time goes on.

Pro-tip: SMS isn't going away.

Great, just what we needed, even more overpriced data plans.

I need to blog. I could have called all this crap ages ago. iMessage is amazing, but not one person has mentioned Google Voice.

Yes, SMS is not going anywhere as a result of this. Google voice has been around, and it already enables SMS less SMSs but doesn't suffer the weakness iMessage does: google voice is inter-operable with other carriers.

The reasons google voice didn't replace SMS completely is:

-it uses data, and sometimes your signal is too weak to use data

-text plans are usually bundled with data plans so they are effectively free anyways (for many people)

-an SMS sent without signal will send when it does get signal, but google voice does not (although this is not a technical hurdle)

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