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Comment by schvenk | Hacker News Reader

Just published. Abstract:

Suppose you had two choices when chatting with your friends. The first will give you a great messaging experience, but you’ll need to sign up for a new app. The second requires no sign-up, but sometimes fails to deliver messages; sends tiny, blurry photos and videos; only works on your phone; confuses all your friends; and offers no privacy whatsoever.

That choice is real. And if you’re like most people in the US (and millions of others worldwide), you choose that second option every day by using SMS.

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> (and millions of others worldwide)

Where else do SMS remain common?

At least here in Europe they've been relegated to automatic communications, like receiving 2-factor codes. No one uses them for messaging. I think the app of choice is different per country, but I haven't met any non American that's still used to SMS.

That's simply untrue. Tens or hundreds of millions of people in Europe still use SMS, for messaging.

If you're trying to say X% of people under the age of Y tend to use WhatsApp(iMessage/IG/SC/Telegram/Signal) for messaging, then what are X and Y? and in which European countries (it varies).

Pretty much anyone communicating across platforms, iPhone to Android or the other way, is using SMS. As you say, it varies from country to country, but also from social circles.

Because SMS has been basically free for 20 years in some market, it's not something people felt a need to migrate away from.

Tens or hundreds of millions of people in Europe still use SMS, for messaging?

I doubt that:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEurope/comments/mni2bx/sms_vs_me...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23412598

At least in my country (Spain), it is not at all age related. No one uses sms for communication. I just checked a local source and Whatsapp usage is 97% among the young lowering to 87% among the 70+ group, with the practical totality of the others choosing just calls or no phone usage.

If you know a European country where SMS are the norm, can you share which one? As I said, I don't know a single one, but they might exist.

To be fair, when I said "millions of others worldwide" I was making a (pretty safe) assumption. As the default messaging service on every phone, and with literally billions of phones out there, it seems pretty likely that in the entire non-US world there are millions of people using it.

> Suppose you had two choices when chatting with your friends. The first will give you a great messaging experience, but you’ll need to sign up for a new app.

Make that several new apps, all of which are completely separate from each other with no integration. That's why people choose option 2.

>confuses all your friends

who exactly is confused by SMS?

I'm assuming this is referring to utterly broken iphone/android group messaging.

..and other things that, to be fair, I didn't fully spell out in the article. I suppose I could have said "periodically confuses your friends" because a lot of it has to do with switching phones, switching numbers, having more than one number, etc.—-things that aren't everyday affairs but also aren't that uncommon.

why utterly broken? Would't iPhone just use SMS in this case?

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