I asked if people chose iPhone for the blue bubbles elsewhere a couple days ago, and while there was some good discourse on that post, the blue bubbles definitely also came up as a reason.

In my experience, when people find out my texts are green, they oftentimes would rather switch to a different platform altogether like Instagram or just not text at all.

Is this actually a deal-breaker in friendships out there?

  • evranch
    2·
    1 year ago

    Here in rural Canada we all use SMS because it’s guaranteed interoperable and more likely to be deliverable in poor service conditions. A text can be life or death or mean the difference between hours of walking and getting quick help in the case of a vehicle or tractor breakdown. I don’t know what phone the recipient may have and most of us have something ruggedized, there are even some flip phones and candy bars out there. So I actually use an aftermarket SMS app (Pulse) to avoid the chance that my phone’s native app will attempt to send the message through an incompatible protocol.

    We had terrible reliability issues in the last few years when iMessage and RCS started becoming defaults and most people I know have switched to 3rd party messaging apps or attempted to disable messaging (not always successful). It’s gotten better with the default apps falling back to SMS more reliably now, but we are still all happy with SMS.

    • skyhy@lemmy.world
      2·
      1 year ago

      I also live in rural Canada and I’m part of search and rescue so I understand the use case for SMS, if you’ve only got a feature phone and SMS is the only way to communicate, so be it. That said, messengers like Signal and iMessage are still strictly better from a security standpoint and for day to day usage for most people. It has nothing to do with tribalism.

      • evranch
        2·
        1 year ago

        I agree that messengers are a superior product in most cases and I do use several myself for different use cases. It’s just that we always fall back to SMS when out in the field or as a quick point of contact, because it works.

        My main issue with the modern crop of messengers is that they are back to walled gardens again, which does cause tribalism. Back in the day I ran multi-protocol clients to talk to my friends on every platform, and then migrated to mostly XMPP for many years as most of those protocols faded away. It had extensions to handle signing and encryption and most other use cases, and ran on every device. Then all of a sudden people started using WhatsApp and Line and Snapchat etc. and now we have a whole bunch of different messengers again, but without the option to run a multi-protocol client anymore. Even Google Chat migrated to a proprietary protocol instead of XMPP.

        Here we are discussing it on a new federated Reddit equivalent, but they killed off federated messaging years ago leaving SMS as the only truly open option with broad adoption.