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Comment by branon | Hacker News Reader

SMS/MMS needs to die at this point. I am glad to see Signal take a hard line here even though it will cause some headache for users, of which I am one, though I do not use it to send outgoing SMS/MMS.

These protocols are insecure, not private, and fundamentally incompatible with Signal's mission. Supporting them at all, while highly convenient, is a queer oxymoron for an app like Signal. We have to rip the bandaid off eventually.

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The theory is good, but when my non-technical schoolteacher neighbor wants to use her iPhone to tell me that my package was delivered to her house incorrectly she's going to pop open her iMessage app and look up my phone number, and that's going to come to me as an SMS.

There's no chance I'm going to get her to install Signal, she doesn't need it, her circle is almost all blue-bubble iPhone users who don't value anything Signal adds over what iMessages gives them.

This doesn't kill SMS/MMS. Not even a little tiny bit. All it does is make MY life more irritating because I have multiple apps that I have to deal with now. The way to kill it is to make something better that people WANT to use, that offers the extra value to make it worth the effort.

What do you suggest as a replacement for SMS? The replacement has to be supported by every device everywhere (including feature phones), should not require any deals with a FAANG company, and should still work when your data plan runs out. Being unencrypted is completely unimportant for 99+% of the uses I still have for SMS, but those uses are still important.

It needs to die when a federated replacement is available by default on all phones.

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