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Comment by mikro2nd | Hacker News Reader

Another one: Mobile phones always received SMS texts.

This may be untrue because of reception issues (phones out of coverage areas or on their fringes) or because the phone number is associated with a non-phone device (e.g. LTE modem) that is not able to deal with SMS traffic.

This one is particularly galling for me, as I live in a fringe reception area (because topography happens!) but so many corporate devs labour under the illusion that we can all receive texts, and receive them instantly. This can have serious real-world consequences. (Try telling a certain bank's debt-collection department that text messages delivery is unreliable.)

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Yes, it's surprising how large amount of the SMSs get lost. At least in Finland this has been the case when using the most popular international SMS API providers. I previously thought also that eventually the messages will be received but have learned otherwise after trying several providers for two different apps. And I have not even found any good explanations for the SMSs getting lost. I think this is sad from the perspective of Progressive Web Applications because often SMSs could act as an easy replacement for push notifications (which are kind of unavailable/unreliable for PWAs).

When you realize that SMS is a hack and not a service that was designed from the ground up to do what it does it isn't all that surprising really.

This is true. However, email is explicitly not a reliable/guaranteed delivery system, so, despite the fact that is is really quite reliable, we keep that in mind when designing systems that make use of that channel of communication. SMS? Not so much. Idiots persist in thinking of it as reliable/guaranteed.

Your point would be more widely listened to if you used the less condemnatory label "The uninformed" instead of "idiots."

We also have people using SMS as a 2nd factor for authentication, account recovery mechanisms, unique identifier, advertising medium...

Like many people, I barely send SMS these days. I thought I'd have a look at my texts from the last month, to add to this discussion.

Here's what I see looking in my messages app - the last message in each of the most recent "conversations" :

50% off Pizza

A 2 factor authentication code for a government website

A person responding to a text I'd sent saying I'd phone them back

Another 2 factor code for some app

A conversation I had in a rare moment where I had phone signal but not a data connection

A link to my latest phone bill

A message from my countries national health service saying I could finally get a 2nd dose of vaccine

A text from my bank

Someone I know well enough to have their phone number, but don't talk to enough to have switched over to something else

A dentist appointment got missed by me because of that.

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