Comment by daedalus_j | Hacker News Reader

Comment by daedalus_j | Hacker News Reader

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Paywall, so couldn't read more than the first paragraph, but every one of these articles that doesn't put "because Apple intentionally breaks SMS usability, and Google is barely better" in the first paragraph is automatically wrong.

There's no social problem here, there's a usability problem. I'm a 40 year old nerd and I dread having to open the 3rd party SMS app on my android. (The official Google one won't even send an SMS, just gives me the "Couldn't send, tap to retry" error every time I try.)

And the fault is firmly on Apple and Google for having their collective heads so far up their walled gardens.

Out of interest, in what way does Apple break SMS usability?

I will give them credit, it's gotten somewhat better in the last few years, but we went a LONG time with:

  * badly broken group chats
  * problems with long multi-part messages (sending and receiving both)
  * REALLY bad compression on images (well beyond common carrier size requirements)
  * missing basic features like read receipts
  * problems with messages not being sent/received correctly via carrier "wifi calling"
  * and of course some of the intentionally irritating features they added like the way iOS sends "reactions"

I've seen it from both the iOS and Android sides over the years, using both OSs myself, and helping others with issues, and I just can't draw any conclusion from it besides that Apple was either completely apathetic, or intentionally wanted to make SMS a bad experience.

I worked for the company for 10 years and was a big believer when iMessage first came out, but it still irks me that the promised of iMessage as an open standard never came to pass. In meme terms: "You were the chosen one Apple, you were supposed to bring balance to messaging, not leave it in darkness!"

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