RCS sucks ass. I have had more missed messages and fucked up communications due to it NOT USING SMS FALLBACK. other person isn’t available via IP? Then FUCK YOUR MESSAGE.
Want a different app? FUCK YOU
Wanna sort your messages, or filter them, or run an automation? FUCK. YOU.
I don’t blame apple for not implementing this shit.
I haven’t used SMS for anything besides receiving auth codes and maybe sending some short info to a stranger (for example a contractor). But then again, I live in Europe.
SMS Is way more common I guess in the US because you can text anyone across the US, whereas before EU carriers may have charged more for intra-EU texts?
WhatsApp became popular (in the UK) around the time when SMS was free for most. It was a huge jump over SMS because:
group chats
read receipts
worked on WiFi without a phone signal
picture / video messages
it was fast (or it certainly felt faster anyway)
From what I recall at the time, BBM was quite popular but WhatsApp won over in the end as it was cross platform. There was a big appetite to move away from SMS. WhatsApp wasn’t even free at the time, it had a small annual fee on Android or a one off installation fee on iOS and still gained popularity. It’s kind of surprising that the rest of the world seemed to make this jump at the same time but the US seems to be stuck on SMS.
There are always four decisions at play - country of origin of sender and receiver, current location of sender and receiver.
Whenever you enter a different country, you gen an automated SMS informing you of the prices of SMS, MMS, outgoing and incoming price calls per minute.
Rule of thumb used to be - SMS receiving is always free, accepting a call with local SIM card is also free. All the other combinations are usually extra if you are currently in a different country than the SIM origin.
But, now that most of EU is either in Shengen or is a partial member with contracts (like Croatia with mobile internet), you either don’t pay as much or pay no extra at all.
But, yeah, that’s probably the reason SMS never really got off.
There is a reason they don’t send it until someone is online. On iMessage, you know if someone read it, not if they actually are able to receive it. If they fix the bug where the time of the message is when it finishes sending, it will be a great feature because you know if they have access to their phone and data. It will try to send it throughout the down time. Also you can use other rcs apps and have things go through rcs messages because of desktop authentication.
iMessage automatically goes to read if it doesn’t work correctly. Partner got a new phone number when switching providers. She has a Samsung phone, and kept it. The number they gave her came from an iPhone. All messages sent to her from iPhones were marked read on their end and never get delivered. All messages sent to iPhones appear to send, but don’t arrive. All texts from Android to Android still worked fine so we didn’t realize immediately as I had an android phone as well.
The phone number that isn’t owned by Apple is being routed to them even though they should have no part in the process. Apple’s advised solution is to acquire an iPhone to disable iMessages. Thankfully they have a website where you can remove a number from their service, but it is not intuitive to go to AT&T/Verizon/Spectrum/whoever and purchase a cellular plan and then have to reach out to a 3rd party company to shut down their invasive services on products they down own.
RCS sucks ass. I have had more missed messages and fucked up communications due to it NOT USING SMS FALLBACK. other person isn’t available via IP? Then FUCK YOUR MESSAGE.
Want a different app? FUCK YOU
Wanna sort your messages, or filter them, or run an automation? FUCK. YOU.
I don’t blame apple for not implementing this shit.
Also, fuck bubble shaming
I haven’t used SMS for anything besides receiving auth codes and maybe sending some short info to a stranger (for example a contractor). But then again, I live in Europe.
SMS Is way more common I guess in the US because you can text anyone across the US, whereas before EU carriers may have charged more for intra-EU texts?
WhatsApp became popular (in the UK) around the time when SMS was free for most. It was a huge jump over SMS because:
From what I recall at the time, BBM was quite popular but WhatsApp won over in the end as it was cross platform. There was a big appetite to move away from SMS. WhatsApp wasn’t even free at the time, it had a small annual fee on Android or a one off installation fee on iOS and still gained popularity. It’s kind of surprising that the rest of the world seemed to make this jump at the same time but the US seems to be stuck on SMS.
There are always four decisions at play - country of origin of sender and receiver, current location of sender and receiver.
Whenever you enter a different country, you gen an automated SMS informing you of the prices of SMS, MMS, outgoing and incoming price calls per minute.
Rule of thumb used to be - SMS receiving is always free, accepting a call with local SIM card is also free. All the other combinations are usually extra if you are currently in a different country than the SIM origin.
But, now that most of EU is either in Shengen or is a partial member with contracts (like Croatia with mobile internet), you either don’t pay as much or pay no extra at all.
But, yeah, that’s probably the reason SMS never really got off.
Asia represent!
There is a reason they don’t send it until someone is online. On iMessage, you know if someone read it, not if they actually are able to receive it. If they fix the bug where the time of the message is when it finishes sending, it will be a great feature because you know if they have access to their phone and data. It will try to send it throughout the down time. Also you can use other rcs apps and have things go through rcs messages because of desktop authentication.
iMessage indicates “Delivered” for messages that was received by a recipient device and switches to “Read [time]” when read.
Otherwise it’ll sit without a Delivered or fallback to SMS.
iMessage automatically goes to read if it doesn’t work correctly. Partner got a new phone number when switching providers. She has a Samsung phone, and kept it. The number they gave her came from an iPhone. All messages sent to her from iPhones were marked read on their end and never get delivered. All messages sent to iPhones appear to send, but don’t arrive. All texts from Android to Android still worked fine so we didn’t realize immediately as I had an android phone as well.
The phone number that isn’t owned by Apple is being routed to them even though they should have no part in the process. Apple’s advised solution is to acquire an iPhone to disable iMessages. Thankfully they have a website where you can remove a number from their service, but it is not intuitive to go to AT&T/Verizon/Spectrum/whoever and purchase a cellular plan and then have to reach out to a 3rd party company to shut down their invasive services on products they down own.
Do you know of a different RCS enabled app than messages? Honest question