Delivery reports are a convenience feature that lets the sender know if the message they sent has been received (not read) by the recipient’s device (for this, it has to be online and have sufficient storage space, though modern phones usually have so much storage the latter is no problem at all).
Every single phone I ever had, from early Nokias in the 00s to Androids and iPhones, had it disabled by default. While feature phones often delivered these reports with a pop-up and sometimes notification sound, which some people could deem annoying, this trend continues even with smartphones, which typically display it merely as an indicator in the chats list of your messaging application.
So, is there an actual reason why it’s turned off by default everywhere? The feature has to be enabled on the sender’s device to receive these and the recipient has no way of opting out of this, so it’s not a privacy thing by any means.
UPD: Apparently, carriers in some countries charge customers for receiving delivery reports as if they were sent messages. I’ve never realized this - reports always were absolutely free where I live. Thank you for your responses!
Even though many phone plans today have unlimited texts, some still don’t. A delivery report is basically a second SMS, that you then have to pay for, so I think that is why it is an opt-in feature.
Yeah, but it’s an incoming SMS? Are there still any tariffs with paid incoming messages (possibly except when roaming)?
clarification: it is sent by the network, not by the recipient’s handset, so they pay nothing for it
Back in the day, I paid for every single received text, network provided or not. If some asshat decided to mass text me, it could easily run my phone bill up real fast.