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Comment by wintermutestwin | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed that too and it is super annoying having family in the UK that will only communicate via Whatsapp. Is this because cell providers outside the US charge for SMS? Even the ones who have iPhones end up using it because it is too much of a pain to use separate messaging apps.

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It's because SMS is simply inferior to Whatsapp, Messenger, Instagram, Line, kakaotalk, Snapchat, Signal, etc unless you own an iPhone. All of them are cross platform and aren't intentionally broken for people who don't have or use iMessage. I personally avoid giving out my phone number as much as possible as all the other platforms have much better tools for communication, blocking, media, etc.

To add to that, I can use the WhatsApp desktop app at work. Can’t do that with iMessage.

Why not? I do.

Non Apple work machine?

Of course, it’s Linux.

Signing into your personal accounts on a work machine is a terrible idea, as it opens up your personal accounts to search if there is a lawsuit (against you or against the company). That's assuming it's not already strictly forbidden by the company rules to prevent you from sending yourself confidential data.

Also outside of programmers, IT, and designers, you rarely get a choice in the company issued laptop. It never makes sense for a company to issue more expensive Apple computers instead of ThinkPads or Dell computers.

> Signing into your personal accounts on a work machine is a terrible idea, as it opens up your personal accounts to search if there is a lawsuit

The machine is mine and I do work on it. Thanks for the concern but I’m not worried about getting sued. I’m sure it’s happened here previously, but it’s not like the US.

> Also outside of programmers, IT, and designers, you rarely get a choice in the company issued laptop. It never makes sense for a company to issue more expensive Apple computers instead of ThinkPads or Dell computers.

I’m not one of those professionals and I can get my job done quicker on a Mac. My employer doesn’t dictate how I get things done and paid for the machine I want. I think this is a good thing.

Any job that requires a crappy trackpad isn't a job worth having.

Anyone working on a trackpad all day probably isn’t doing serious work ;) see we can all make unkind generalizations.

Touché.

Just seeing those laptops is frustrating. What is the point of the trackpad if you have to use a mouse?

When you need to travel between workstations I work docked all day, once in a while I need to be mobile, but it’s much easier to work on one machine vs two.

> The machine is mine and I do work on it.

> My employer doesn’t dictate how I get things done and paid for the machine I want.

That is very much not your machine. If your employer ever gets sued, or runs into some investigation, or some internal dispute escalates enough, all the data on it is now likely available for them for review.

Given large enough company and enough people, you'll get that "preserve documents for discovery" email one day. It happens outside of the US too.

To be clear sms sucks on iPhones also. iMessage is also better then sms though.

I've never really understood what people mean by this. For me, iMessage is indistinguishable from SMS, except for the color of the messages, and the fact that I can use iMessage over WiFi.

Being able to use it without a mobile network seems pretty distinguishable. As well as not being subject to international charges.

And then of course the vastly higher fidelity of pictures and video sent via iMessage.

It's easy for me to forget how different my circumstances are from most other people. I'm far more likely to be in a place where I have no WiFi than a place where I have no cell service. And I don't personally know anyone outside the US, so I don't send international messages. I guess I've never paid enough attention to the fidelity of pictures I'm sent or am sending over SMS to notice a quality difference.

Group messages.

If I send an SMS message to a group of people, they all see a message from me. They don't know who else got it. And if they reply, they reply only to me. Is your experience different?

WhatsApp (and I think iMessage) allow me to create a group with a name/purpose and send messages to the group and receive replies to the whole group.

(P.S. I went from dumb-phones to Android and have limited exposure to iMessage's feature-set).

That used to be my experience years ago, but now whether I use android or iphone, I see the whole group.

> If I send an SMS message to a group of people, they all see a message from me. They don't know who else got it. And if they reply, they reply only to me. Is your experience different?

Does MMS not exist in your country?

It does, but is priced uncompetitively compared to mobile data.

Interesting. Here in the US, plans that don't include unlimited talk+text are hard to find, even among the budget MVNOs, and that's been the case for at least a decade.

I imagine your experience of sending a message to multiple people and it not making a "group message" was your older dumb phones weren't switching to MMS, it was keeping it as pure SMS. In the SMS world, there is one recipient. In MMS, it's like an email, you can list a lot (100+ in some cases) of receipts and they can all see the list.

Just checked my provider's pricing ( in the UK) MMS are capped at 300kB and cost 30p (0.39 USD) per message.

That kind of pricing made WhatsApp an infinitely preferable alternative.

Phones automatically switching to MMS would be catastrophic.

Data (WhatsApp) is essentially free in comparison. £10 (13 USD) per month gets you 20GB: which doesn't care how many messages/recipients/photos you send.

Dang, that's some highway robbery pricing right there.

Here in the US its common to have at least 1MB MMS max size. Back in the day 300-600KB was often the max size, but that's definitely changed over the years. Maybe its just splitting it up and re-assembling it behind the scenes, I'm not sure.

I can't speak for all history, but from about 2004 or so in the US MMS and SMS were often bundled and billed the same, especially for networks which had rolled out 3G/EV-DO. Having a plan with 500 messages usually meant 500 combined SMS and MMS message.

Using it over WiFi is big feature alone for a lot of people who are often in spaces with good WiFi but poor cellular reception. Some carriers support SMS over WiFi in the same way they do "WiFi calling" which can alleviate that.

The other major feature I see for other messengers over SMS/MMS is much larger attachment sizes. It can be challenging sending an MMS with attachments >1MB. Meanwhile, I can send a 100MB file/video or an 8MB photo over Signal. WhatsApp allows for 16MB attachments. Sending a quick video in-line with the chat thread in MMS is miserable and gives an incredibly trash quality video while most other chat apps you can stick a decent quality 30 seconds or so video without any issue. Photos sent over MMS are usually junk while one could get a decent 4x6+ print off an 8MB photo.

It is mostly because international SMS and MMS is not free. People in the UK travel more to other countries, and communicate more with people in other countries.

Not to mention MMS is vastly inferior to WhatsApp and iMessage for sharing media and other information.

The price of built-in text messaging whether SMS or iMessage (or a combination of the two) largely went to zero for most people in the US texting especially other people in the US by the time other apps gained traction. And services like appointment reminders and verification codes pretty much all use SMS in the US--whatever its potential security vulnerabilities.

So I use 2 or 3 other apps for mostly a few international people I know but basically everyone I know just defaults to SMS/iMessage.

To be fair a slightly better comparison would be MMS, but even then it doesn't compare. It's simply because data is cheap, the app is free, and the rich media features that came before iMessage/RCS existed (voice, photos/video, attachments, group chats, voip/video calling, etc), and because it's multiplatform (ios to android usage is near 50/50 or 60/40 depending on the country)

The opposite is more annoying...

Whatsapp works on PC, Mac, Android and iOS

iMessage only works on Apple devices.

SMS is cheap now but wasn't universally when Whatsapp gained critical mass.

Nowadays it's mostly about convenience and features compared to SMS, and iPhone has a much smaller marker share in Europe so iMessage isn't a thing.

I beg to differ. iMessage is definitely quite common in Europe as well.

iPhone has like a 33% market share so I wouldn't call it common if you can't reach 2 out of 3 people on it at least.

In contrast, in many European countries Whatsapp has 90%+ penetration [1]. Even where it's relatively unused it's more common than iMessage.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1311229/whatsapp-usage-m...

SMS was historically expensive and today is still worse with regards to features. (Also international texts as others mentioned) And once you have to choose a specific system, why would you use one that's limited to just part of the market? If you want to use a communicator to talk to people, you may as well go with one that's accessible to everyone.

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