It really degrades the experience and often does really wonky things, like delivery 3/4 the messages to 3/4 of the people. Happens nearly every time in a decently sized group text for my friend group.
I don’t know if that’s Google’s, Apple’s, RCS’s, or SMS’s fault.
Is it not an option to use one of the many free OTT messengers such as Signal or WhatsApp that offer the same user experience as iMessage, but work for both major mobile OSes, and as an additional bonus don't depend on 30 year old brittle protocols (looking at MMS here) and don't hand over your entire conversation history to your carrier?
I spent my entire youth convincing people to move to platforms like signal, and including signal, that would then be used by said people only to talk to me, until they had some UX problem and I became tech support for them
after many years of this I gave up and now I use the default: SMS
I don't doubt that, and have heard it several times from other people as well.
Sometimes I think that keeping SMS and especially MMS ridiculously expensive was the greatest unintentional gift European mobile network operators could have ever given their customers:
People now just accept OTT messaging as a fact of life, and enough people will be able to provide that type of tech support, just like they'd fix a parent's or friend's internet connection in case of problems.
The problem with such messaging services is that they aren't universal. You have to find out and install what others are using, and then remember which service is used by which person. That's really the thing that makes OTT services undesirable to me.
SMS/MMS, for all of its myriad faults, is something you know that everyone has.
Yeah, whoever pushes this is way more annoying than whoever makes the bubbles green. Just one group chat I'm in uses Signal for some reason. People often miss messages cause it silently deprecates old versions. And nobody has verified each others' secret numbers anyway, so after all that work someone did to secure our bar plans, we might be mitm'd anyway.
E2EE apps have inherent UX problems. It's possible to do multi-device messaging with synchronized message history and a way to get in if you lose your codes, but it requires trusting the service and/or your cell carrier in some capacity. Something has to give if you want E2EE, usually it's the chat history or multi-device support.
WhatsApp didn't have multi-device support until mid 2023. I'd have to see exactly how it works now, cause it raises more questions. If you can rely on users remembering passphrases (no recovery mechanism), it makes chat history easier, even then I wonder if it knows how to merge divergent chat histories if one device misses messages. iCloud/GDrive storage is another moving part but also nice in case you want to download/copy it. Would be neat also if contacts could be stored that way, cause I ain't sending them to WhatsApp.
The only major app I've seen handle everything 100% reliably is FB Messenger, since the start, which was easy because there was no e2ee. Just a server-side master with simple web and mobile clients using it.
SMS is bad, but at least I can send/receive it on my Mac without my iPhone being online, idk how.
> WhatsApp didn't have multi-device support until mid 2023.
I think it was 2020, but in any case, it was very late. To be fair, it is quite hard to do securely and without compromising too much on usability with end-to-end encryption.
> even then I wonder if it knows how to merge divergent chat histories if one device misses messages.
There's one primary device (I think it has to be a phone) that maintains the "source of truth" message database and also does the backups, I believe.
> SMS is bad, but at least I can send/receive it on my Mac without my iPhone being online, idk how.
Are you sure? Does this work with the iPhone completely off (i.e. not just on mobile data, because it does proxy SMS to iMessage in that case)?
I didn't think that was possible. Only very few operators even allow voice calls via FaceTime (without proxying the audio data through the iPhone via local Wi-Fi), but maybe they extended that to SMS over IMS recently. I can't test it with mine in any case, since my provider/plan is not on that short list.
I think 2020 was the beta. They announced the full feature in 2023, and I see a 2022 article about enabling the beta. Primary device SoT makes sense, but that has its caveats, and yeah it all goes back to the privacy guarantees.
> Are you sure?
Nope, I was wrong. I must've been thinking about how the SMS forwarding will work even without cell service, provided the iPhone is on wifi, which was a new feature at some point and requires carrier support (AT&T was early).
"To automatically forward SMS/MMS messages to one or more of your other devices, the other device must be signed in with the same Apple ID as your iPhone, and your iPhone must be connected to a Wi-Fi or cellular network."
I suspect that something's slightly off with Apple's SMS implementation. People often complain about lost CSM chunks that were sent to them from iOS devices. Of course lost messages can happen anywhere, SMS is inherently not reliable, but the frequency with which they point to the other device being an iPhone raises my eyebrows.
One-on-one SMS was mostly fine, but group SMS was a constantly-buggy mess back when I was on Android, too.
I wouldn’t be surprised if SMS experience has more to do with carriers and with the details of the network topology and composition between correspondents, than with phone vendor.
There's no such thing as group SMS. Your phone either sends multiple SMS messages, or uses something else than SMS (usually MMS). I'm talking about SMS specifically, as CSM chunks aren't relevant to anything else.
My assumption is that iOS somehow manages to lose some SMS messages when sent in rapid succession more often than it would happen for usual reasons.
That is mostly SMS fault. It doesn't guarantee reliable delivery either in theory or practice, and the carrier will happily drop messages if a resource limit is exceeded. Essentially all of the IP-based chat protocols are reliable, whether that is WhatsApp or iMessage.
It absolutely guarantees reliability on the protocol level. If mobile network operators are load-shedding, that's on them.
I've never experienced this in decades of using GSM, and it's only recently become a thing (mostly for 2FA SMS since I stopped using it for P2P communication).
> Message delivery is "best effort", so there are no guarantees that a message will actually be delivered to its recipient, but delay or complete loss of a message is uncommon, typically affecting less than 5 percent of messages.
That's SMS's fault and partly the reason the rest of the world moved on, it's old and janky and you never know when it works, just use Whatsapp like everyone else in most of the world.
I blame apple for this. Basically forces me to use WhatsApp or something. Otherwise I'll not receive some messages or some people won't get mine. It's pretty confusing when trying to nail down plans.
Because often times the Android phone won't even do group SMS properly, and it screws everything up. You start getting messages that some other group members didn't. Maybe this is why a lot of Android users use WhatsApp, and that's what I do with my in-laws.
I know when my parents(on iphone) share an image with me(on android), the image is about 64x64 pixels. Whereas they send the same image to my brother on an iPhone and it is multiple megapixels...does the same kind of downgrading happen for everyone if a single person on a group chat is using android? That could be a reason to find out who it is.
It depends on the combination of the sender's and the receipient's carrier, specifically on what their MMS server allows.
MMS is a hot mess of a protocol stack straight from the early 2000s that is only still meaningfully used in the US, due to the unique iMessage situation there.
The big one for me is image quality and metadata. Images shared in "mixed company" are lower quality and have the metadata stripped; it's not dissimilar to being sent a screenshot of a picture instead of the picture itself. It's not a big deal for "Look at how big the kids have gotten!" but if I go on a hike or beach trip with friends or family, and there's something they took that I care about, I have to say "Great thanks for sending but can you upload it somewhere else," usually Google Photos, and go through that whole dance.
Genuinely curious -- why do you feel it's necessary to figure that out at all?