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People would stop texting if there were a common protocol for messaging not on SMS.

I'm sure they exist, but until WhatsApp can communicate with WeChat etc, texting is unlikely to go away. This is one of the few areas where government mandated bridges may be required to allow for interoperability.

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It still boggles my mind that here we are in 2023, and we still don't have a way to universally and interoperably.... "send text over the Internet to someone in real time". This should be dead simple. Yet, every chat app is still incompatible with every other chat app, and no company evidently sees any value in fixing this. And, whenever a new chat app emerges, lo and behold, it's also incompatible with every other chat app. This incompatibility is obviously a deliberate choice companies are making, not an insurmountable technical challenge.

We were nearly there 20ish years ago. Then everything turned into a walled garden. We've somehow regressed in significant ways since the 90s and early 2000s.

"send text over the Internet to someone in real time"

Sounds a lot like email with push-mail functionalities.

Maybe I'm being naive, but isn't that just email?

If chat apps all used email as the backbone to their messaging, sure.

The exact spec doesn’t matter, what matters is that chat apps all work off some single interoperable spec

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