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Comment by mullingitover | Hacker News Reader

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That is a shockingly user hostile take, especially considering you call out the reason why so many people still use it: it is the only solution for most users that consistently works.

The main reason people still use it is despite the issues with MMS (and SMS in general) the reality is that every vendor wants to own the messaging stack to build or strengthen moat, and the regulators who are in a position to enforce standard protocols have incentives in many or all countries to weaken the security of messaging protocols to meet surveillance objectives (whether those objectives are well scrutinized methods with judicial oversight, or blanket surveillance requirements).

Blaming the user as lazy or incompetent completely overlooks the significant financial incentives that platform owners and network providers have to maintain the status quo, or force the new status quo to strengthen their moats.

Both your post and OP's are confident and emotionally forceful without any reasoning why. On one hand, in most of the world, especially countries less developed than the US, messaging apps are very popular and SMS is either not even provided in the plan or barely used. On the other I do think that at the very least phone manufacturers consider MMS/SMS to be a core functionality because it's built into most phones. As such it does feel user hostile to not care about MMS/SMS. I can see the merits of both but don't know why I'd believe one over the other.

I'm curious where y'all's confidence comes from in user hostility or not and what indicators you have to tip your hand one way or the other. That might result in more elucidating conversation too.

Sure, I consider calling users lazy and incompetent very hostile because I have spent nearly 22 years building, testing and securing systems starting with ecommerce apps in the early 2000s, through government, finance, browsers and supporting services (Mozilla), internet scale infrastructure at OpenDNS, Cisco, And Fastly, and now at Amazon.

All along the way people routinely attack users for making poor decisions when they are simply using defaults, or the easiest to use and most compatible technologies.

* Pffft... Of course they got hacked, they used IE * Of course they got hacked, they opened an email attachment * Of course they got hacked, they clicked that homoglyph

In this particular case, SMS and MMS are baked into the phone, and delivered by the wireless provider, and for better or worse on the UX front, work with just a phone number and across all mobile OS. For anything other than that, if users have peers using other device or services, the alternative is to use multiple services to communicate with different groups based on which services they use. That means repeating messages across multiple providers, and/or missing folks because all the platform services have actively silo'd their platforms to prevent interoperability.

Yeah, SMS and MMS suck, but they suck less for the simple use case of messaging folks with cell phones, because the barrier to messaging those folks is having their phone number.

It's lazy and incompetent to attack users when users actually have very little control over the actual security or usability of the services and systems they use, especially as everything is hosted in cloud platforms.

Most people couldnt care less with sub par video message security for most (not all) uses. The fact that every vendor want anything but a good standard stack for keeping their users captive is imo a more powerful incentive.

Please don't conflate messaging apps with texting, it's disingenuous. Texting is the feature users expect of any smartphone to be able to send a message to any other user who has a smartphone, regardless of what apps they have installed.

My vague understanding is nobody uses SMS outside America and the entire population is on WhatsApp.

If only! My wife seems to juggle her friends between SMS, iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal.

Sounds complicated. No wonder people in the US don't want to do that when texting is 100% free (with their phone plan) and universal.

Yeah I’m not installing an app to send a message. I get video and gifs and all sorts of whatever I need with iMessage.

Only android people fuss with third party apps because their phones can’t reasonably send messages by default.

Android devices can reasonably send messages between each other, by default. The whole issue here is that Apple has been intentionally holding back the cross-platform messaging experience in order to make competitors seem less appealing.

I can easily send SMS to any Android phone from my iPhone. I really dont understand your reasoning.

IOW, SMS is cross-platform. Whats the issue?

As an iOS user myself, SMS is still a low quality messaging experience, cross platform or not. Apple could have taken RCS seriously years ago, raising the standard of cross platform messaging for everyone. This would result in an objectively better experience for users of all platforms, including iOS.

Contrary to you, I only have a subjective opinion on the matter. In the 12 years that I sometimes use SMS on iOS, I never missed anything. What is it that I am apparently not intelligent enough to miss?

In no way am I intending to insult your intelligence, and I apologize for any lack of clarity that could lead to such a misunderstanding.

Unlike modern messaging platforms, SMS has no:

- guaranteed delivery

- read receipts

- proper support for group chats (MMS adds this, but the implementation is poor compared to modern platforms)

- support for multimedia (again, MMS added this, but support is poor)

- support for replies

- support for reactions

- support for any kind of encryption

- support for typing indicators

- ability to work independently of an active cellular connection

If SMS works for your needs, and you have no issues with it, that’s great. Ultimately, SMS does work, but many users rightfully expect more of a messaging platform at this point. There are real benefits to users from upgrading to a more modern system.

And without wanting to insult your intelligence, none of the features you listed were something I really wanted or needed from SMS. Its just that, a short message service. Relying on encryption in a world where each and every country does an attack on E2EE every two years is unrealistic. Read notifications are just a "let me spy into your day" feature that I, no-control-freak, never ever needed. The rest also just reads like a corporate feature list, many nice to haves, but nothing, for me at least, essential.

I am fine with using SMS, and it has always served me well.

The difference between SMS and iMessage doesn't really count in this context, since usage is largely transparent. Its the same app, and the same contact list.

They have completely different privacy and reliability expectations: SMS is ephemeral, unreliable, unencrypted and short; whereas iMessage is semi-persistent, reliable, end-to-end encrypted and long.

TLDR: It has nothing to do with MMS

But that didn't address GP's comment. Apple states that green bubbles are pariahs because messages can't be sent to androids so it breaks the system, or something like that [BS]

Iphone users think that green bubbles are pariahs because they aren't part of their exclusive group, and because green bubbles turn chat groups into rubbish, because yada yada not iphone. (spoiler alert, apple does it on purpose)

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/android-users-stig...

For laughs: Tim Cook telling someone he has to buy her mom an iphone (1hr 0mins 17secs)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=3615&v=sdvzYtgmIjs&feature=you...

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