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Comment by lopkeny12ko | Hacker News Reader

Beeper has caught a ton of media attention in recent weeks but I truly do not understand it. The SMS protocol has been around for decades and works perfectly fine with iPhones. If you want rich media and other bells and whistles, use WhatsApp. How often does someone whine so loudly about insisting on using the closed, Apple-proprietary protocol that their friends need to pay a monthly subscription for a third party interop app?

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I tell you what, if you're a young person you can be publicly shamed for having the wrong color bubble, or outcast by being excluded from a group chat. To you and I that probably doesn't make sense, but for a big portion of the young, phone using population being unable to participate in the iMessage ecosystem is a huge deal socially. You are essentially excluded from the friend group, you're excluded from conversations, and it carries over into real life because you've been excluded and that carries an impact -- you're an outcast. It doesn't have to be rational to be true.

Being excluded from a group chat has a huge social impact for younger people.

Those young people are probably doing themselves a favor by disassociating from peers who are shallow and prejudiced enough to exclude someone for, of all things, not using a specific (proprietary!) chat app.

Oh come on, are you claiming you don't have arbitrary actions/clothing/language that you treat as a status signal amongst your in group? Have you forgotten what it was like to be a teenager?

I've experienced this first hand, even as an adult (well 20 something). I'd be left out of group chats because MMS breaks everything. I'd even missed events because it was all planned in the group chat, and assumed someone would mention it in person to me.

If you are a young person you can be publicly shamed for literally anything. If not this then a million other things.

It's a USA thing. No ones uses WhatsApp. Everyone has an iPhone. If you're using Android everyone knows it and they'll shame you for it.

> If you want rich media and other bells and whistles, use WhatsApp.

People in America don't use WhatsApp. There's no reason for me to switch when none of my friends/family/contacts have it.

> How often does someone whine so loudly about insisting on using the closed, Apple-proprietary protocol that their friends need to pay a monthly subscription for a third party interop app?

Enough that people don't date people who use Android

> The SMS protocol has been around for decades and works perfectly fine with iPhones.

It's not that simple, you get discriminated against for having a different color bubble and using up people's SMS allocation.

We should whine about (communication) interoperability, it's critically important for everyone. Purposefully or negligently creating incompatibilities is anticompetitive and generally toxic.

> you get discriminated against for having a different color bubble and using up people's SMS allocation

It's really not about either. It's about UX. SMS and MMS message UX is terrible.

You're obviously not a teenager desperately trying to fit in.

That's a symptom of the bad UX.

So many reasons not to use SMS: No indicators that the message was actually received (2023 and SMS is still flaky on deliveries), no read receipts, no presence notifications, no typing notifications, no encryption in transit or rest, no escaping group chat spam... that's just the high points.

All those real-time features are antipatterns that do nothing but create anxiety and a false sense of urgency. We use Slack at work, and the typing indicators/presence detection/etc. drive me (and many others) downright insane.

I agree that encryption in transit and rest are important, but there are open and verified solutions like Signal. It seems like extremely poor security hygiene to take Apple's word that their closed-source chat service is actually secure as they claim for it to be.

> All those real-time features are antipatterns that do nothing but create anxiety and a false sense of urgency. We use Slack at work...

...and I use other apps to keep in touch with family in different time zones. For me knowing somebody is online in real time is quite comforting. Knowing they got my message and then that they read it, even if they don't reply, is also useful.

I see your point but there is valid usage outside of a corporate setting.

> No indicators that the message was actually received (2023 and SMS is still flaky on deliveries)

Long time ago when I was actually sending SMS messages to real people, then-current phones had a "delivery notifications" setting you had to turn on. Then you would receive a notification when your message has been delivered.

SMS is fundamentally insecure. I don’t want to use WhatsApp.

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