Agreed, SMS needs to stop being supported by handset vendors so people stops relying on it as the universal text platform.
When a communication system silently drops messages, this is unacceptable. But people are ok with it because they're accustomed to it being shit. The sender wonders why you never responded, and you are unaware they contacted you. Or the sender asks if you want to meet for lunch, and you get it 8 hours later. Group messages? I've compared phones on a table and we all have a different context to the conversation because each phone has different set of missing messages.
The messaging platforms are in silos and it sucks, everyone is annoyed about having 3-4 chat apps. But at least they work reliably, and that's the better alternative to garbage SMS.
> When a communication system silently drops messages, this is unacceptable. But people are ok with it because they're accustomed to it being shit.
Or they are OK with it because they have never had their SMS messages dropped, like me (that I know of).
At least here (Finland) SMS is used for a lot of stuff like bank transfer verification and postal package pickup notifications, having many dropped messages would seemingly make it unsuitable for those purposes.
Of course, MMS is a completely different story and I've seen issues left and right on various phones and carriers. I don't think anybody really even uses MMS group chats here.
SMS is important. It's universal, and it can be used as a way to communicate with anyone. I have friends that I chat with exclusively over SMS. They use Facebook Messenger, and I won't use Facebook anymore. They could join me on Signal or something, but I'm not going to ask them to download a whole app just to chat with me.
It's the one messaging platform that's not in a silo, and that's just as important (maybe more so?) than 100% reliability.
When a communication system silently drops messages, this is unacceptable. But people are ok with it because they're accustomed to it being shit. The sender wonders why you never responded, and you are unaware they contacted you. Or the sender asks if you want to meet for lunch, and you get it 8 hours later. Group messages? I've compared phones on a table and we all have a different context to the conversation because each phone has different set of missing messages.
The messaging platforms are in silos and it sucks, everyone is annoyed about having 3-4 chat apps. But at least they work reliably, and that's the better alternative to garbage SMS.