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Comment by eof | Hacker News Reader

integration with imessage would be the most valuable. where internet is strong, but cell signal is weak, SMS is really brutal. that's my life. any data that can't flow "over the internet" is just ridiculous at this point

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Thankfully, in this regard, major carriers support VoWiFi, a way to do Voice and SMS over WiFi, which has improved this problem a ton.

I can do voice calls over WiFi, but SMS does not seem to ever go over Wi-Fi. Because I am rural and connection is so valuable, I carry two phones, one on Verizon, one on ATT+TMobile. Both are iPhones, but one of them is about 4 years old.

(If anyone has any hacks to get on FirstNet, I’d love to hear them)

Incredibly weird, I have the same issue with bad cell reception in a lot of parks, so I tend to go into airplane mode and can send and receive SMS on T-Mobile‘s network with VoWiFi just fine. Have you tried reaching out to them?

This is a great idea. Thank you! We will look into it for sure. We're looking at WhatApp, WeChat, etc. too and trying to decide the best way for us to let the staff decide how they want to receive the message.

If you're looking to expand to continental Europe, I'd strongly suggest WhatsApp if you want to stick to the SMS-style interactions. The only SMS messages I get are one-time verification codes and roaming notifications. Everything else is usually spam.

Good info, thank you! We were pushing on WhatsApp for South America and Asia (we tested through Singapore, Philippines, Myanmar, Indonesia and Malaysia but pulled back on the region because SMS carrier support is so varied. New Zealand is a nightmare too. But being well used in EU, we might need to bump this up the roadmap.

Telegram and Signal have been gaining some traction in Germany (don't know about other EU countries) but the former saw most of its adoption among "COVID skeptics" and has had some kind of falling out with the German government over refusal to cooperate with the authorities, so its reputation is mixed and its legal status going forward is unclear. Signal doesn't seem to suffer the same reputation but doesn't seem to control much market share.

WhatsApp is ubiquitous, at least among millenials and above. I'm not sure what the zoomers are up to. It's unavoidable for parents especially because parent groups exist for everything from kindergarten to sports. Usage may decline in the years to come over Meta's data protection issues but there's no end in sight.

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