Comment by 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.
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.
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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.
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The legacy phone system has a lot of features that aren't present in its replacement, such as freedom to connect with anyone who has a phone number, the ability to move your phone number from carrier to carrier, and the knowledge that as an individual the phone company can't block me from contacting its subscribers entirely for free as long as I pay a fee to my own phone company.
It's way better than being on Whatsapp or iMessage or Slack or Teams or whatever you're proposing to replace it because I have a lot of control over who can contact me and nobody is using my presence on the phone network as a means to drag all of my friends over to the same phone network.
The legacy phone system currently enables breathtaking amounts of abuse and fraud. I know all the benefits you're listing, and I would enthusiastically surrender them just to watch the legacy phone system be decommissioned.
If we invented the legacy phone system today, it would be illegal to operate because it's so insecure. We certainly wouldn't dream of forcing everyone to use it.
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All you would need to replace this is a messaging app that uses email addresses as identifiers and then falls back to sending messages via email if the recipient doesn't have the app.
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> I have a lot of control over who can contact me
This might be the funniest thing I’ve ever heard. It’s literally legal in my country to spam me on my phone number and there is ZERO I can do to change that. Ergo I have fuck all control over who can contact me.
> freedom to connect with anyone who has a phone number
This is actually a bug, not a feature, as it enables all kind of robocalls and sms spam. That's why I love the iPhone feature that allows me to block all the calls from numbers not in my contact list. It does not allow this for SMS though...
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> holds us back from adopting modern technology.
Where we're all captive subjects of some cloud asshole spoon-feeding us bits of infrastructure we used to be able to run ourselves
US should sue themselves for requiring a phone number for a person to exist to begin with.