They really didn’t have to redesign a text box. Please stop reinventing the wheel. I don’t need another pop up in my life.
It’s impressive how modern companies with thousands of professional designers manage to make increasingly goofy designs lol
“Modern” (i.e. Apple-chasing) design seems to be hellbent on wasting as much screen space as possible.
Apples actually generally pretty good at not wasting much screen space.
To prove yourself as a executive you have to make the company do stuff, so people come up with reasons to do wasteful things. It’s all a circle of shit people being shitty to get ahead.
Okay, so I’m not crazy. I started seeing this today, and I had to stop and think “Wait, was this always here?”
Lmao same.
bloody annoying and ugly
Until I saw this post I thought my phone was just being buggy.
Does anyone else feel like the quality of the keyboard swipe auto-complete has completely tanked as well?
Just out of curiosity, how much people still use SMS? I can’t remember last time I sent SMS.
Here in Finland we use mainly Whatsapp, FB Messenger, Telegram or Signal for messaging. Almost no one I know has sent SMS in the last 10 years.
Wouldn’t be an SMS discussion without someone patting themselves on the back because they use use some corpo app.
FB Messenger and Telegram are worse solutions, but Whatsapp is really no different from Google RCS. And Signal has almost no downside.
It’s not a choice, here, so much as it is the result of our smartphone culture.
In the US, using the default messaging app on your phone is the norm for most people. Third party messaging apps like WhatsApp simply never caught on over here, so we’ve let Apple, Google, Samsung, etc determine how we talk to each other. Vendor lock-in tactics run rampant, with barely any regulation.
The default messaging apps on iPhone is iMessage. It’s locked down and can not communicate with any other messaging app except via SMS. Therefore the other apps have to use it to communicate with iPhone users.
Conversely, Google has a messaging protocol they’re trying to get Apple to adopt called RCS, but Google also refuses to let RCS be used by third party apps. So SMS becomes the fallback for communication between them.
It’s partially corporate bickering, partially consumers being tech illiterate and staunchly opposed to using anything third party. Particularly in the case of iPhone users, there’s a strong culture of entrenchment in the Apple ecosystem, and for some people, not being in it is actually seen as worthy of derision. There’s actual cases of bullying in schools if a kid doesn’t use iPhone, and that’s having an increasingly detrimental effect on the market.
You have to appreciate, in Europe, you’re mostly using Android, a (somewhat) open ecosystem, and that mentality is stronger over there.
But here in the states, iPhones are extremely prominent, and with them comes the mentality that Apple has spent decades programming into its consumers: don’t use anything non-Apple, and if that creates problems for other people, too bad, they should just buy Apple too.
The default messaging apps on iPhone is iMessage. It’s locked down and can not communicate with any other messaging app except via SMS. Therefore the other apps have to use it to communicate with iPhone users, who you will never, ever convince to download a third party messaging app
One other thing is that none of the third party messaging apps can even use SMS. iOS is designed so that only Apple can use SMS.
Using SMS is largely because it’s been free on most vendors since about 2008. Just before smartphones took off, with everyone getting data plans which would enable proper messaging systems.
I’ve been running XMPP on my phone since 2010.
I am familiar with the whole topic, but your summary is the best I’ve found, tackling objectively all the points of the issue.
if that creates problems for other people, too bad, they should just buy Apple too.
I believe this is a real quote from Tim Cook when prompted about RCS in iMessage.
I’m in France and I still use sms. Unlimited sms became the norm well before data plans and messaging apps, and it’s much easier I can just text someone without having to look on which plateform they have an account. It’s like voice calls, for sure you can call someone on messenger or Whatsapp but why bother when I can just make a regular phone call?
For voice calls, most use regular phone calls here, it just works better (and VoLTE/VoWiFi is great addition to sound quality). Apps are only used when you are making video calls.
As for messages, it’s much easier to send images/videos via whatsapp/signal than it’s via SMS. + replies/reactions. Probably main reason why people use apps instead SMS (even while many/most of our plans include unlimited data/sms/calls). RCS added those features IIRC, but why switch to another solution while apps works just fine and most of people already are used to Whatsapp 🤷♂️
And most of the people here has Whatsapp installed, so usually you don’t have to guess what app to use :P
Video calls, sending files though.
The US seems to primarily still use sms. I’ve heard it’s tied to having unlimited messaging phone plans being the norm, so people weren’t as drawn to other platforms.
And US still has very expensive data plans compared to Finland (I pay 21e/month for unlimited 200mbps data, calls, sms). That could also be one factor why SMS is still used there so much 🤔
It’s really that SMS has been free since about 2008.
I don’t even think about my data usage, really. My plan is 10gb. That’s a lot for a phone, and I let it connect to certain wifi networks while out and about. Plus it uses a VPN and my apps encrypt data so it’s not really a concern.
Also, you don’t even need a platform at all. Just a phone and a phone number.
I think the real question is, why hasn’t there been a successful effort to properly modernize SMS. Having a standard service capable of messaging any mobile device without using a corporate crufty app the corps can glean all your data from seems the more logical choice. SMS itself will send even if you have a weak cellular connection without Internet data.
Universal standards are good for open communication. Every phone should be supporting the IMS video calling that has existed in the 3GPP spec since rel 99. (1999) as well.
How we got to this selective app hellscape instead of standard voice, video, text messaging is the real problem needing a solution.
Because the era of open communication is over. The era of proprietary tracking is here.
UK here, I still use SMS for people who aren’t on Signal.
I don’t use WhatsApp and I’m on Android, so no iMessage, so SMS is the great leveller that will always work.
It’s a shame Signal dropped SMS fallback as it was really useful.
One of the issues they explained when they dropped SMS is that it was misleading to users to have unencrypted communications in an app that promotes privacy over all.
Yeah, and to be fair, I see their point.
But I feel they could have done more to communicate to users that “this message will be encrypted” or “this message won’t be encrypted”. It’s their app though, so up to them I guess.
I use the default Google messaging app, and am in the US. When sending to other Android users it uses RCS. The only time it sends as SMS/MMS is when messaging iPhones because Apple won’t support RCS
If I’m not mistaken then Apple can’t support RCS until Google opens it up. It’s a closed protocol tied to the Google Messaging app. Go look for another Android app that supports RCS. There are none. Okay, there’s one from an unknown company, with a bunch of bad reviews.
It’s weird because it is a standard but Google’s implementation is not really the standard. For insurance, the standard does not use end to end encryption, Google does. Their implementation also runs over their own Jibe servers rather than carrier stuff. You gotta be a Google bestie with muscle like Samsung to get your rcs client on Android seems like.
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Well that’s out-fucking-standing!
Edit:
RCS will instead replace SMS and MMS and “exist separately from iMessage when available.”
Well, that’s kind of concerning for iMessage users. Will they completely lose SMS and MMS support? What about when the iMessage or RCS servers are unreachable?
Edit 2:
and it’s planning to file an appeal against the government’s regulation of its App Store
Does this mean they may not actually roll this feature out, or may yank it if they win their appeal?
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Their implementation will not feature E2E encryption.
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i thought rcs was developed by openwhisper for signal
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This app also supports MMS and RCS, which are used by hundreds of millions of people every day.
I’m hoping RCS takes off. We need to step away from WhatsApp now it’s owned by Meta.
RCS will never take off as long as it is tied solely to Google Messages. If they want that to be the standard then they need to open it up.
Personally, as long as 1GB of data costs me an extra $10-15 a month and SMS is free, I ain’t switching to RCS.
I only use SMS/RCS to talk to friends and family in text format here in the US.
in Estonia i occasionally send sms
You use 4 different apps to send messages while we mostly use one. Not sure that’s the win you think it is.
Just to be clear, never said that I used all of those. Just made quick list of most popular apps to use here :P If I had to guess, over 95% of people here just use WhatsApp.
They all have pretty much same functionality what traditional sms is missing.
I don’t know how to edit the main post on mobile so I’ll just add this comment. The message I typed in the screenshot populates in a “pop up bar”. The message no longer gets entered where you think it should go and it looks like shit and takes up extra screen space for no reason. I really dislike this change.
They fixed it. It’s back to normal now.
Fuckin annoying tbh. Can’t stand when giga corps do this and sense it’s required for rcs I can’t just go get a better foss alternative sense none of the people I text are tech savvy or able/willing to switch to something else and rcs is pretty essential for me knowing if someone read it or not.
If I could I would ditch all google and giga corps products but I’m way to poor to do that. And it’s so ingrained into society it’s hard to find anything that works with these proprietary shit.
Linux is free ig
Linux on mobile is no good, and the devices it does run on do not support the proper bands and modes for usable coverage, if the carriers even allow the devices on their networks. (A more US problem all around.)
dude, i was talking about desktop linux
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Pinephone pro had awesome cell coverage. Better than my pixel 4 xl even. Now battery life is a totally different story. I’d last I tried was pretty awful too as phosh wasn’t amazing and plasma mobile would kill itself often. It’s been at least a year since I last used any of it though since I left it 5 states away.
Bear in mind, the signal “bars” are a relative measurement, the only way to be sure is to look at radio debug and see signal strength across all bands the phone is connected to at the time.
According to the FCC SAR report: https://files.pine64.org/doc/cert/PinePhonePro SAR Evaluation Report-S21101902806001.pdf it only supports LTE bands 2,4,5,12,13,41 in the US, which overall isn’t terrible.
However, that leaves out 14,25(superset of 2),26,29,30,46,48,66(superset of 4),71.
14 and 71 are necessary on AT&T or T-Mobile respectively for low band coverage in some markets where they don’t own band 12 spectrum, the others are more capacity bands on the various carriers, but with the shift to 5G, they’re more important on a phone that doesn’t support 5G like Pinephone Pro.
It’s free as in money, but certainly not in time spent.
linux mint exists btw
My comment still applies, unless you just use some basic software and a browser, it takes more time investment to get things working and maintain it.
the og comment is from a self clamed ‘tech savvy person’
I don’t understand how is it essential to know if someone read your message. Shouldn’t they reply to you if they need to let you know?
Read confirmation is the first feature I disable on every instant messaging platform. Also delivery confirmation is implemented in standard SMS.
It’s not just read receipts. It’s reactions, replies, and immensely better image quality.
The comment I replied to listed read confirmation as the only essential feature to them, that forbids them to drop Google Messages.
My brain omitted that context for some reason, fair enough.
Mainly because some of the people I know read it and don’t respond, for instance my partner coming home from work and me needing something at the store and she’s driving and can’t respond but pops up on her messages so she knows but can’t respond. It’s really helpful knowing they read it then me not sure wtf is going on.
Just a scenario riddled with probably lots of flaws but hopefully you get the point.
If she is driving she cannot click on the message or on “mark message as read” either.
Legally.
Some car features allow you to connect your phone and you can have a message read aloud to you through voice command.
These cars would support Speech-To-Text too though, wouldn’t they
I paid for Textra over a decade ago, and it’s easily the best money I’ve ever spent. It’s the best texting app I’ve ever used and I highly recommend everyone check it out. They still churn out updates regularly and the features are above and beyond most messaging apps.
The text lines up with the recipient’s text bubbles. It’s on the left, and it’s left justified, so it’s under the other person’s messages, rather than mine.
I could have sworn the old UI had the text entry closer to the right.
I will just drop this here:
Please dont let Google also scan your Messages?
How do I turn this off? Google search results are of no help 🤔
Use a regular SMS app
Like this one: https://github.com/FossifyOrg/Messages
I also like Deku SMS, its basically like “Silence” which implemented the Signal Protocol for SMS, but silence is unmaintained.
Both partners need to use the app to use encryption, but SMS are often accessible when cell data is used up or in areas with nearly no coverage.
Is there an alternative RCS App?
RCS is a very incomplete protocol, so the only good implementations are partly proprietary. Also it relies on centralized infrastructure afaik, and weird bureaucratical agreements with carriers.
No, and it seems pretty unlikely.
I hate this new layout. Why is the box smaller than the width of the screen? It was already too small. If anything they should have made it taller and kept it the same width it was before
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Is there any foss messaging app that support RCS though?
not yet
Not ever, unless Google is forced to open it up.
source?
Source: Google is not using standard RCS.
Can Textra handle RCS yet? I bought it ages ago but ditched it when it couldn’t handle RCS
I’ve been reading articles for years about how Google say they’re going to open the RCS API to 3rd-Party apps but they have yet to do so.
This is why I scoff every time Google takes jabs at Apple about iMessage. Pot, meet kettle. Until I can use rcs with Textra, they got no room to talk
They’re proobably working on how to track messages on the way, like “hey, wanna use RCS? here’s our com.google.rcs library”, which by coincidence sends every message to Google.
Your cynicism is warranted but a big part of the advertised value is that their rcs implementation is end to end encrypted. Or they say it is, which presumably someone (not me!) would be able to verify.
Nothing can without the blessing of Google, and so far that’s limited to Google Messages and Samsung Messages (whatever it’s called)
Great standard you got there. Fucking hell
FOSS SMS > Google RCS
Or use signal like a civilized person.
It’s so bad I uninstalled all updates and went back to the version that shipped with the phone. That got rid of it.
I tried to install other versions from apkmirror but the design has been in there a while and they turned it on server side. My P8 shipped with
messages.android _20230529_03_RCO1
and it’s gone for me.
Weird. My version is from 2 weeks ago and I don’t see it.
Verizon US Pixel 8 🤷🏻
I think it’s an improvement, particularly for folks like my grandfather that have the UI/font scale increased.
On his phone there was basically 1-2 words that would fit in that old text box …
so his text message preview looked like thisThen maybe they should make it an option instead of ruining it for the rest of us because wasting space is the new hip thing.
