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Comment by toomuchtodo

11 years ago

> Remember when we had ICQ, and AIM, and MSN Messenger, and Gadu-Gadu, and we were dreaming of a unified messaging system?

We'll always have SMS.

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toomuchtodo

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GauntletWizard  11 years ago

SMS? Or SMS, iChat, Hangouts, Whatsapp, and the thousands of others that use your SMS number as username? Some (iChat, Hangouts) even steal your SMSs and place them on proprietary networks; If you switch devices from iPhone to Android or vice-versa, messages get lost.

  • toomuchtodo  11 years ago

    SMS, the network.

    > If you switch devices from iPhone to Android or vice-versa, messages get lost.

    I moved from an Android phone to an iPhone, back to an Android, and then back to an iPhone again. I never had my messages in limbo, and its easy to fix (at least, on the Apple side) if it occurs: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204270

    Note that link also comes up as a search engine provided result by google just by googling "disable imessages". That's stupid simple.

    • cplease  11 years ago

      First of all, I'll wager a supermajority of iPhone users do not understand any distinction between iMessage and SMS. Apple designs away the distinction. Secondly, when an ex-iPhone user ports away their number and is able to send SMS's without issue and receive SMS's from most of the world except for iMessage senders, how are they supposed to 1) discover they have lost messages before they lose something critical, and 2) discern that the cause of their inexplicably lost messages, is that they need to "disable iMessage", when they are not even an Apple user anymore?

      I'm not an Apple hater, I use Apple products, but this is a huge fuckup and the OTT fragmentation is a real issue vis-a-vis SMS.

      And SMS is not IM so your premise from the start is a nonsequitor. It's telephony, it's wildly and widely overpriced and non-open.

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kps  11 years ago 

  > We'll always have SMS.

Not much good for talking to people on things that aren't phones.

Yhippa  11 years ago

I was thinking about this recently. After having some trouble with my iPhone 5 sending SMS's last year and my Nexus 6 sending and receiving MMS's this year I feel that SMS/MMS reliability has gotten really bad. I know it's due to a cocktail of buggy OS's and the cell phone towers themselves but I never thought my old Motorola flip-phone from 10 years ago would be more reliable than this stuff.