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Comment by SOLAR_FIELDS | Hacker News Reader

I used a dumb phone for a few months last year. Ultimately it was actually the difficulty of using iMessage on my other devices conflicting with texting on my dumb phone that made it nonviable for me and forced me to switch back to the iPhone.

There is a difficulty (at least in the states) of finding decent flip phones with the exact level of dumbness that you need. And they are all quite expensive too, due to the nicheness of the product. I eventually found one reasonably priced on eBay secondhand, which seems to be a common story with a lot of dumb phone users.

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Months ago I've purchased a Nokia 8110 4G which does exactly what I need: calls, receiving confirmation text codes from the bank or other services, occasional photos on the fly (quality is not on par with most smartphones, but acceptable for some uses), and 4G hot spot for the laptop. Never been happier. I don't use it for texting though; coming from a qwerty blackberry-like one, going back to the numerical keypad for texts would be a nightmare. I paid it new €50 delivered locally, but noticed the price skyrocketed recently and some sellers ask over €400, which is absolutely insane. The price inflation might be related to chips shortage, therefore waiting a bit might be worth.

There is also community dedicated to replacing the factory OS (KaiOS, a fork of Firefox OS) with a more free one.

https://gerda.tech/

https://sites.google.com/view/bananahackers/home

The crap Apple does with iMessage really should be illegal.

Apple's only slightly worse than all the others in that they severely limit what you can use iMessage on, but I'll always be a lot more pissed at them because they kicked off this whole mess.

I really miss the days of when I could load all my accounts into Pidgin (Gaim!) and have almost everything centralized. Now I have a teams window (which doesn't bother me too much since it's a work app), a tab for slack, a tab for the umpteenth iteration of whatever Google has decided to call their chat platform, a tab to get SMS messages through google messenger (a welcome change), a window for signal on the desktop, and tabs for Facebook and LinkedIn (both or which I try to never visit, but would like to know if someone contacts my on, and I refuse to load on my phone). I just realized I've apparently abandoned my ICQ/AIM accounts to the past.

That's the desktop. I have almost all those as separate apps on my phone, with separate ways to use them, separate notification preferences, etc.

The instant messaging ecosystem has gone to complete shit, and I doubt anyone that used it seriously before this happened will disagree. And what we got in exchange for every company walling off their own IM system? Honestly, I'm not sure anything that couldn't be recreated fairly easily in a client with a couple months work if someone had extended their protocol to do more.

> ...I really miss the days of when I could load all my accounts into Pidgin (Gaim!) and have almost everything centralized...

Me too! I'm very much hoping that matrix - the protocol - continues its steady climb (both popularity and adoption), because that is what i see as the future for that kind of experience where if not everything at least lots/most of my comms interactions will be managed on my side by a single "interface". I'm an admitted fanboy of the matrix protocol (as well as matrix apps like Element, FluffyChat, Quaternion, etc.)...so maybe i'm biased, but have you tried playing around with matrix, and its associated apps, to see if it gets you closer to that older Pidgin/Gaim/Adium-like experience?

(I'm not affiliated with the matrix org. nor any app/client builder, as noted i'm just a fanboy.)

I haven't, but I have seen discussions of it here. I'm not sure how it could make the situation any better really unless it can actually interoperate with closed protocols (how?) or actually takes over a significant enough portion of the market that people choose to use it in lieu of hangouts or iMessage or facebook, etc, and there are lots of incentives those use to make that unlikely.

In any other case, it's just the XKCD standards meme[1] all over again, in that it might be better in many ways, but I doubt it will actually help market fragmentation.

1: https://xkcd.com/927/ which actually specifically mentions instant messaging.

You are not wrong that any new entrant might be introducing yet another standard like the referenced xkcd comic...but I have faith that this protocol will be the one that sticks. Time will tell of course. As far as interacting with closed protocols, yes, matrix most definitely accomodates those scenarios using something called "bridges/"bridging" (via a few methods such as puppeting etc.). You should review the following page for more info (yes, there are lots of bridges though quality differs among them): https://matrix.org/bridges/

What does Apple do with iMessage? I don't have an iPhone and always assumed it's just glorified SMS.

iMessage is exclusive to iPhones and works in the same application that does SMS, seamlessly.

The problem OP is alluding to is that some people avoid talking with people who don’t have iMessage, because SMS costs money. So there is a bit of peer pressure to use it, and a lot of people are stuck in iOS because of that.

It’s not that different from Signal/Telegram/WhatsApp, those apps are also closed and rely on network effects. But they are free and work on other OSs, while iMessage requires a relatively expensive phone.

OP here. The problem I had was actually more referring to the fact that Apple does not offer fine grained control over how messages are delivered or sent on a per device basis. I can’t easily say, for instance, that I want outgoing messages on all my non phone devices (Mac, iPad, etc) to use iMessage but inbound messages sent from phones should be received via SMS. I also can’t say that I want all messages from certain users to be received via SMS (like my wife, who I should always want to receive on my phone so I can respond quickly).

Should SMS cost money? (Or at least, more than ~10X the bandwidth bill so there's nice monopoly rent for the operator... I can't imagine the actual cost being over ~1 USD/1000 messages.)

It should be free, but spam should cost $5 per message.

Text messages between iPhones are also invisibly shunted to iMessage

When people with iPhones reply to someone who has switched away from Apple, and they use "Messages" (which does both iMessage and SMS) then there's a reasonable chance that the message will go into a black hole, where it will be delivered to iMessage and never appear on the other party's new phone.

This is doubly true if they have ever used an Apple PC to receive iMessages; in that case it will almost certainly never reach the new phone via SMS.

I don't believe there is a fix to this; sometimes you can repair it on the other party's phone by munging the contact, but most messages will just be blackholed.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203042

Two solutions. The first requires an iPhone (to disable iMessages on your account with) and the other does not. This has been around for years now.

This is a comment that should be kept to the annals of reddit. You can say this about any company who does thing out of spec and to create and ecosystem to drive profits. Google, twitter, Ford, IBM.

> You can say this about any company who does thing out of spec and to create and ecosystem to drive profits. Google, twitter, Ford, IBM.

The fact that abuse of standards and customer lock-in is ubiquitous doesn't make it any less abusive.

Nokia HMD dumb phones are inexpensive in Europe.

Tried two times as phone for family member and suggest do not buy them. Garbage-level plastic, buggy software and dying fast battery.

Maybe 8110 4G & GerdaOS is a good choice, but I'll ignore KaiOS in general.

The non-KaiOS ones work well as a phone and have a long battery life.

and full of nasty bugs, visit the reddit.com/r/KaiOS/ for more info

Their really dumb phones run Series 30+ [1], not KaiOS. A $20 phone can still have good call quality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_30%2B

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