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Comment by heresaPizza | Hacker News Reader

I don’t get why in the US people still use SMS. Third party apps run basically everywhere and they don’t depend on carriers and manufacturers supporting things.

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Because of ubiquity - there are too many third party apps, and I don’t know which ones to reach you on. But sms is preinstalled on your phone. If your phone is an iPhone, iMessage works better than many of the other third party apps anyways and if it’s not it degrades to sms and you still get the message.

Some people want to communicate over Line, others Telegram, discord, a few on WhatsApp or Facebook messenger, and myself on Signal. I’ve gone down the path of installing now defunct apps like Allo before at friend’s urging, but I am too grumpy now to manage a mapping of people to preferred apps. Similarly, convincing all my friends, present and future, to use my platform of choice is a losing battle and managing threads between them invariably must decay to the lowest common denominator.

I think a better question would be why and how most other places moved away successfully from SMS despite this problem; and I think it’s because unlimited texting plans did not catch on with carriers there, so they had very strong economic reasons to prefer data messaging instead. Whatever app hit that market first became the new default.

> and I think it’s because unlimited texting plans did not catch on with carriers there, so they had very strong economic reasons to prefer data messaging instead.

In case it's not clear to anyone outside the US who reads this: unlimited SMS/MMS is available from virtually every carrier in the US including the budget MVNOs, and that's been the case for many years. But the "unlimited" data plans are expensive enough that there's still a significant market for cheaper plans with limits of a few GB per month—limits that SMS and MMS don't contribute to.

So i guess the cost of data is probably the reason why those apps didn’t get much traction when they were launched

I think it’s more that they were competing with “free” and pre-installed. By the time the apps launched, most US users were not being hit with sms fees that motivated them to look for the apps in the first place, and for the ones who did the data cost is so small I doubt users were really picking out the difference vs things like loading news websites with images. This is just a theory based on personal experience and I haven’t rigorously lined up dates to confirm it though.

I'm in Norway, one of the countries where most people don't use SMS.

As a result, there are some people I can only chat with on Facebook Messenger, some people I can only chat with on Telegram, some people I can only chat with on WhatsApp, some people I can only chat with on Snapchat, some people I can only chat with on Signal, and some people I can only chat with on Discord.

I'm not sure that's so much better than a single standard which everyone on every device on any software platform can integrate with.

I’m in Italy and as long as you have the phone number, you can just use whatsapp. It’s the de-facto standard and everyone has it. I really don’t understand the problem.

SMS works for everybody. To use a third party app, I'd have to find out which specific app the person I want to talk to uses, install it, then remember which app goes to who.

SMS just works without all that kerfluffle. And doesn't involve me with yet another service provider, as a bonus.

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