You’re correct. EU users didn’t adopt, or at least continue to utilize, SMS based messaging like users in the US did. This is not a problem for anyone using web based messaging like the ones you mentioned.
I’m quite surprised by the reaction this comment has received, are Americans genuinely still using SMS? Don’t they need to have group chats, send pictures, transfer files, make audio and video calls, or make use of encryption?
Yes we mainly use SMS and then if both users are on compatible devices they’ll switch to RCS or some other protocol. But most of my texts including spam messages are just plain SMS.
I don’t know for sure but my guess is that a lot of US users thought you were wrong because they don’t know that SMS / MMS is essentially dead in the EU. It’s still the primary text based communication method in the US.
MMS supports all the things you mentioned (albeit in a shittier way) except encryption. RCS adds a new layer that is more like Signal in that it supports encryption and emojis and a few other things but it is controlled by Google and there are no open source alternatives currently.
Does MMS support all that? From my brief research it basically just sends an SMS with a link to the media to be downloaded by your WAP browser, so while a client could implement group chats etc I’m not aware that it’s actually built in. Not that I can check, my network doesn’t even seem to support MMS anymore!
You’re correct. EU users didn’t adopt, or at least continue to utilize, SMS based messaging like users in the US did. This is not a problem for anyone using web based messaging like the ones you mentioned.
I’m quite surprised by the reaction this comment has received, are Americans genuinely still using SMS? Don’t they need to have group chats, send pictures, transfer files, make audio and video calls, or make use of encryption?
Yes we mainly use SMS and then if both users are on compatible devices they’ll switch to RCS or some other protocol. But most of my texts including spam messages are just plain SMS.
For phone calls i make a phone call.
I don’t know for sure but my guess is that a lot of US users thought you were wrong because they don’t know that SMS / MMS is essentially dead in the EU. It’s still the primary text based communication method in the US.
MMS supports all the things you mentioned (albeit in a shittier way) except encryption. RCS adds a new layer that is more like Signal in that it supports encryption and emojis and a few other things but it is controlled by Google and there are no open source alternatives currently.
Does MMS support all that? From my brief research it basically just sends an SMS with a link to the media to be downloaded by your WAP browser, so while a client could implement group chats etc I’m not aware that it’s actually built in. Not that I can check, my network doesn’t even seem to support MMS anymore!