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Comment by Daniel_sk | Hacker News Reader

Who uses SMS? I am always surprised when this feature is being mentioned.

Canadians, people in their 30s and beyond, people who aren't on Facebook, random people not in your friend group, businesses. But most of all, the people who keep complaining about SMS support! What you're saying is a bit nonsensical "if I ignore everyone in this group, the group has no one in it".

I use SMS from time to time too - especially random people that call me, but I don't see much added value of having it unified in Signal. I just use the default SMS app on my phone (iMessage app in my case, which also works for SMS). For me Signal is about E2E encrypted messages with more features, SMS is a different much more limited platform.

Discovery. If you and another were texting each other via SMS, but signal was your app, signal would just upgrade your sms to a signal msg. You didn't have to have a conversation ahead of time, or save them in your contacts and let signal scan them - it just worked.

Discovering you're not limited to sms was nice, when now you have to have an aside - "hey, have you ever heard of signal?"

Signal on Android previously worked a lot like iMessage on iOS - you'd use it as your default messenger, it'd SMS if that was the lowest common denominator, or it'd seamlessly upgrade to Signal protocol if both sides had it.

People with an Android phone that talk to people with iPhones where one of those parties doesn't use Signal. That's who.

My SMS use:

1) Spam (~40%)

2) Transactional messages (~40%)

3) Conversations with old (45+) relatives (~15%)

4) Conversations with people I barely know (parents of kids' friends, people responding to a web market listing, that kind of thing) (~5%)

Yeah, but why do you need Signal to handle those messages?

Lots of people like having just one messaging app, for messaging that's basically SMS-like. Apple and Google have both chased that dream for their SMS apps, for a good reason (Apple with more success than Google—does Google still have another messaging service attached to their SMS app, or did they give up on that when the first attempt was a disaster about a decade ago?)

> does Google still have another messaging service attached to their SMS app

Google Messages (the default SMS app on newer phones) uses RCS if available and overlays E2E encryption on top using the Signal protocol.

Still they have many. Really how many people exclusively use SMS on their phone?

You don't! But that's exactly the problem - you don't need signal at all. All the important messages that you get are gonna come through another platform (SMS, whatsapp, weechat, etc [depending on where you are]). So, now that SMS support is gone, all signal installs are in addition to the apps that you actually need.

Most people will use the messaging platforms that they need to have installed to get through their days. It's nice, ofc, to have friends who are privacy enthusiasts - but Signal main goal has always been to go beyond that group.

Americans basically.

Android users apparently.

everyone receiving packages, visiting doctor, receiving 2FA codes, etc. - TLDR basically every adult person not living on street

but you are right it doesn't have much use for children

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