SMS

I found an old screenshot of my phone’s home page from a few years ago. A few things stood out to me, but chiefly amongst them was the sheer number of messaging apps that I had. The difficulty was this: certain people wanted to use certain platforms to communicate. The only way to communicate on those platforms is to use the specific app that connects to it. As a result, if you know three people who all use a different app, you end up with three different apps for essentially the same thing.

This is ridiculous if you ask me. Messaging apps hold one common purpose: messaging. Granted, a few of them offered some features which others did not a few years ago (such as Snapchat’s stories or WhatsApp’s encryption), but most of these features are now entirely universalised. This, however, does not mean that the backend systems which drive these apps are universalised. Were that the case, I would be able to use WhatsApp to read a SnapChat message, Instagram to read something from Signal, etc. To users of the Fediverse, this will not seem an alien concept. I use Mastodon, but someone who prefers Pixelfed or Lemmy can still open the data I post to my Mastodon account from either of these platforms. They are completely independent platforms, but using open protocols they can communicate with each other.

My approach to this problem is not dissimilar, but it is still slightly different. The universal baseline for messaging, the thing which almost every mobile phone regardless of operating system or hardware specification can access is SMS. The Short(/Simple) Message(ing) Service(/System) (there’s a bit of contention around what the name actually is) is a way of sending short unencrypted text messages between devices, and has existed since some of the first cellular networks were switched on. I find that by doing this, I am able to use only one piece of software for messaging, rather than having one specific app for one specific person.

Granted, SMS is limited in terms of its technical capability, but between it and E-Mail, I think you’d be hard pressed to find something you can’t do.

Tagged as: thoughts ideas technology