Privacy-focused messaging app Signal is adding new features for video calls, including links, reactions and a calls tab, in a bid to pose as an alternative to Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams.
Privacy-focused messaging app Signal is adding new features for video calls, including links, reactions and a calls tab, in a bid to pose as an alternative to Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams.
Great. Now can we get text messaging back so that it’s possible to convince people to use it again?
Security risk, by their own admissal.
No, that was an excuse. They claimed people could mistakenly send unencrypted messages. Easily resolved by changing the color of conversations and send buttons to flag SMS as insecure.
It was really about moving development resources to features like this one. Unfortunately, it makes it much harder to convince people to use (or keep using) Signal, meaning more messages that go by insecure messaging instead.
Is that a US thing? I don‘t know anyone who still uses SMS. Or do you mean something else?
Nailed it. Yes, it’s a US thing.
The U.S. lagged adoption of SMS compared to Europe (relatively high prices for texting in the early days while relatively low prices for calling in the same era) but now SMS/RCS/iMessage are the dominant mobile messaging method in the U.S. There’s much lower adoption of third-party services like WhatsApp compared to the rest of the world because basically everyone has those services (SMS/RCS) already on their phone, they don’t have to sign up for a service that not everyone might use, and it’s basically free on every phone in the U.S. now.
SMS and especially MMS sucks ass though.
Yup, I spent years begging my family to stop sending family photos from gatherings through text messages, to no avail. I eventually switched to iPhone and see that it’s fine if we’re all on iMessage, but many of my aunts/uncles/cousins are on Android so if they’re in the picture then it gets sent as MMS and we get terrible images again.