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In my view, none of the mobile OS manufacturers have a good handle on messaging.

I don't see why this should be tied to the mobile OS platform. That just makes no sense at all. Should I only be able to communicate with people who use the same type of mobile OS as me? What sort of pre-internet madness is this?

Right now, at least for Android, I find facebook (yes, facebook!) to have the best mobile IM client. Light, clean, to the point with some nice UI details and options.

And it also has all my contacts. And it is cross platform. And accessible from the web. And standards-based (I can still XMPP in to facebook IM and do everything the web-based client lets me do).

Yes. Despite facebook being creepy, it's still miles better than super-creepy Google. After all, it's just one website and unlike Google you know when you interact with it.

I disagree with a lot of this.

iMessage always works very well for me and I love that it's integrated with SMS so cleanly. It also provides read receipts so I know if a message has been received.

I don't use WhatsApp but a competitor of its called Viber which also does calls and it works well and includes delivered and seen receipts. It also tells me if the user is online which is very useful.

Facebook messenger also works great imo and is one of my most used communication methods.

10 years ago I was also using IM a lot. I'd come home from school every day and use it until I went to bed. MSN was the Facebook of the day. Fortunately everyone I knew used MSN (it was ubiquitous with IM here). I used Adium on Linux and thought it was a nice client but I think today we're in a much better position than before. Fragmentation seems to be much worse today but handling that is as simple as installing an app for the service a specific friend uses. The fact we have push notifications means I don't need to check in with 10 apps to see if I got a message - I'm alerted when a message is received and who it's from and in what app I can view it. It would be nice to use one app but I don't think the fragmentation is too big of a user experience problem.

Personally I wish everyone would just use SMS! Most plans for smartphones come with unlimited SMS nowadays. I hate having to send my communications through so many companies with questionable privacy practices. The only place SMS is problematic is when messaging abroad but I doubt that's a major concern for most people (and they can use one of the plethora of other methods for messaging abroad anyway).

The only place SMS is problematic is when messaging abroad

Or when you don't want to give people your phone number.

When you don't have a phone number (data only cellular or WiFi only tablet).

When you don't want your messaging ID tied to a number owned by a phone company that you can't control and instead want it tied to your own domain name / email.

When you want to be able to send as different IDs (personal, work, consulting).

When you want some way to send pictures, formatted text, transfer files.

When you want to send/receive messages on your desktop, or tablet as well. Either switching between devices or using multiple devices at the same time.

When you want to send/receive more than a few characters in one message.

When you want to integrate into another service, e.g. an IRC bridge, because it's not just data there's no open API to link to. And even if your plan has unlimited SMS the days when you could email -> sms freely are pretty much gone.

(And if you don't have unlimited SMS).

SMS is terrible, the worst possible implementation of sending text between people. The only good point to it is that every phone can do it - and that doesn't even apply now in the days of iPod touches and smaller tablets that are basically smartphones /without the phone/.

have you tried email?

Agree with all your points.

For those who want to SMS from their desktop or tablet, http://mightytext.net/ solves the following problem:

|When you want to send/receive messages on your desktop, or tablet as well.

"Most plans for smartphones come with unlimited SMS nowadays..."

Ahh, but that's the reason Whatsapp took off outside the USA. An SMS costs me 29c per message, it's a big profit center for some mobile companies. But if I use Whatsapp, I get free texting from iPhone to Android (and other platforms) and my total monthly phone spend is just $5, because I only pay for data. Some of my friends are on $30 - $50/month plans... so Whatsapp (and/or Facebook Messenger) save me $300 - $540 per year by not making me switch to those plans.

Also consider that in Europe, "international" can sometimes be just a 30 minute train ride away. If you have many friends in other countries you might want free international SMS more than if your friends were all only in the same country.

I'm in Europe :) Specifically the UK. But I take your point it probably is how you describe for a lot of people.

I'm in Europe too (Denmark), and a lot of people I know here don't have free SMS, because a-la-carte plans with no monthly fee are very common, rather than monthly subscriptions. I pay $9/GB for data, $0.03/min for voice, $0.03/message for domestic SMS, and $0.35/message for international SMS.

Unlimited call/messaging subscription plans do exist, but you have to use a lot of voice and SMS for them to be worth it. My typical monthly bill is ~$10-20 (almost all of that data), and some months, e.g. when on vacation and using a foreign SIM while not using my Danish one, I pay nothing. So it wouldn't make sense to pay an up front fee on the order of $50/mo to get "free" SMS.

have you tried to have friends/family in another country? unlimited sms plans do not apply anymore.

SMS is slow and clunky, let alone MMS which takes a while longer to send, both of which is hardly "instant" in receiving.

Then trying to send a block of text will spam your friends depending on phone and service which formats it into multiple txts.

these pain points are why I only use sms for very logistical messages to family/friends and move to online platforms to share materials and communicate more effectively.

XMPP is here for a long time already. It's not ideal but it works. Yet, all those networks don't rush to become compatible and federated. Shame on them.

I disabled the Hangouts app on all my mobile devices and use Xabber (Android) instead which works fine talking to google. On the desktop I use pidgin. Both are using XMPP behind the scenes.

Google still didn't kill Talk which is XMPP conformant and even federated. But their Hangouts protocol is different and their Hangouts client doesn't use conformant XMPP. And since many users automatically got switched to it, they became cut off from their non Google XMPP contacts.

Xabber doesn't do push notifications so it eats battery.

It's basically over for XMPP, but Hangouts was a still born PoS.

XMPP has XEP-0273 http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0273.html

Nothing is over for XMPP until a better open alternative comes out. If Google see their Hangouts as a way forward, let them open the protocol and pull it through IETF to make it a standard. Oh, they are too selfish to do it? So they can get lost then, it's not an XMPP replacement.

No one else is eager to do anything like that as well, so XMPP remains the only candidate at present.

Re some of your points in the last paragraph:

* I feel like the concept of "being online" is a bit redundant. For iMessages/Hangouts when it works, messages are sent to mobile devices, which may be "available" even when the recipient isn't online and "on" the service at the moment. Also, Google Hangouts chat still supports Jabber, and does support online statuses :)

* iMessages shows delivery receipts, and opt-in read receipts. Not certain about the Hangouts app (on iOS), but it looks like there are three pulsating dots as the message is "sending" and the timestamp appears when the message is "sent".

* A good chat client goes a long way. My needs are probably different than yours, but using Messages on OS X works great for me. Integrates with iMessages, Google Hangouts chat, and FB chat. All I need!

My point was that Google Hangouts, iMessage, etc. can do some or all of those things, but only on their own silo'ed platform. I'm a Google Hangouts user so I have no good way of communicating with my iOS friends unless they download extra software onto their phones and we communicate using a third party app. I don't want to use five apps to cover my bases. I wouldn't even mind having to have a Google Hangouts, iMessage, Jabber, etc. account and be able to add ALL of those accounts to a single IM app so that I can communicate with all of those people in a consistent way.

Ah, gotcha. Unified app on mobile would be awesome — looks like iMessages is the main obstacle. But some work has been done to try to reverse-engineer the protocol

> opt-in read receipts

Has this changed? When iMessage came out, read receipts were opt-out.

Well it's because vendor lock in. Vendor X dont want you to access his messaging app from another client V, and instead of using P2P , Vendor Y uses a centralized server, with the a protocol not supported by any other vendor. But vendor U swears he supports open techs !!!

Yet another mobile app problem that was handled much by WebOS :/