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Comment by mullingitover

2 years ago

It's not sms, it's mms, and it is in fact a technical limitation.

Honestly we should just sunset MMS entirely. It's like using 56k dialup.

83 comments

mullingitover

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gryn  2 years ago

yeah, but the one blocking its sun-setting is apple with their artificial barriers. if apple didn't do it's shenanigans, RCS or something similar with a different name would've have replaced MMS by now.

  • inferiorhuman  2 years ago 

      if apple didn't do it's shenanigans, RCS or something similar with a
  different name would've have replaced MMS by now.

    The only reason there's any RCS interoperability right now is because most carriers have bought into the Google RCS stack. Before that you absolutely had to be aware of which carrier the recipient was using. If memory serves T-Mobile is running both a Google and non-Google RCS stack. RCS is and was a mess.

    Hell, if you've a rooted Android you can't access Google RCS and any RCS messages sent your way will disappear into the ether.

    • simfree  2 years ago

      There are no third party RCS apps outside of hardware manufacturer skins on Google Messages as Google has shut them all out.

      If you want to interact with the RCS world as a non-wireless carrier, expect to pay upwards of 10 cents a message and have a minimum revenue commit of thousands of dollars a month. Carriers also don't get paid for inbound texts on RCS, creating a huge new cost center instead of symmetrical texting volume resulting in minimal costs like the current SMS/MMS ecosystem.

      5 replies →

  • throwaway-blaze  2 years ago

    Um no, if the powers that be who control the LTE and 5G (and soon 6G) standards would improve or replace MMS, apple would be forced to improve their ability to send images/videos because they must comply with the standards to have their phone allowed on the carrier networks.

    This is a dumb complaint honestly. The carriers and Qualcomm closely control the standards bodies and could address this problem. Instead they focused on the bag-of-garbage that is RCS, which Apple has finally said they will support. But because RCS is a bag-of-garbage, Apple plans to support a different flavor (the basic standard) from Google's. $0.50 says Google will magically start supporting the basic standard too once Apple ships it.

  • mullingitover  2 years ago

    [flagged]

    • ygjb  2 years ago

      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.

      3 replies →

    • rezonant  2 years ago

      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.

      35 replies →

    • catlikesshrimp  2 years ago

      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...

inferiorhuman  2 years ago 

  it is in fact a technical limitation.

No, it's not. Carriers limit the attachment sizes quite severely, but that's not an inherent limitation of MMS.

  • simfree  2 years ago

    The file size limits on iOS for MMS are far below what most carriers permit, making photos and videos sent from iPhone look much worse when sent via MMS.

LorenDB  2 years ago

I still want to see Matrix get adopted for messaging by default. Purism actually did it with their Librem 5 (probably one of the few good things about that company, but that's a rant for another day).

  • c0pium  2 years ago

    That sounds like hell. If you think that carrier interop is bad now, wait till everyone is using a different matrix provider with different optional features turned on or off. At least today there are some barriers to SMS spam, matrix would open the floodgates while making blocking it exponentially worse.

secondcoming  2 years ago

I can count on one hand the number of MMS messages I've ever received.

  • starttoaster  2 years ago

    MMS was much more common before data messaging apps like Discord or Facebook Messenger became some of the normalized places for cell phone chatter, which anecdotally I think that switch started happening (or at least I began recognizing that switch) around the early 2010's.

    So I'm guessing you're a very young person based on how little MMS you claim to have received. Which is fine, it's fair to point out that technologies us old folk use may differ slightly from what the whippersnappers are doing. And there are no wrong answers there, except that it's also fair to point out that when you purchase a cell phone, before you install any apps, you have some ingrained cell phone messaging features. One of which is a messenger app built on top of SMS and MMS.

    I've probably sent and received thousands of MMS messages over the years, because it was the primary method for a cell phone user to send a picture to your friends and family. Back in the day, at least, and still today for some. It was also the way that us old folk were able to send group texts at a time.

    • Toutouxc  2 years ago

      Must be a regional thing. Where I live in Europe, MMS were just too expensive to use regularly, roughly 5-10x more expensive than SMS, and they came roughly around the time when phones were slowly getting simple email clients and usable data (GPRS and sane pricing).

      I’m around 30, I grew up with a dad who was a fan of modern phones and technologies (first camera phones, Windows smartphones, PDAs) so I always had fancy phones, and I’ve received < 20 MMS in my whole life.

      2 replies →

    • johnisgood  2 years ago

      MMS has always been extremely rare here, and I am around ~30 years old, so I guess it depends, of course. Personally I have never received, nor have I known anyone who has either received or sent a single one that was not by accident.