SMS Should Be The Fallback, Not The Default
Short Messaging Service (SMS) has been around for 25+ years. It's the technology behind text messages that are sent between phone numbers on the telephone network. It works. But what's the problem with it? Well, unfortunately SMS possesses a lot of flaws that prevent it from being recommended as the default method of messaging from . These include but are not limited to the following:
- Lack of support for high-quality media attachments. Photos and videos that exceed the 300kb, or whatever the threshold that's set by your cellular carrier, are received blurry and compressed after they're sent.
- Text messages have a limit of 160 characters. If they contain a Unicode character, then that limit is shrunken down to 70 characters.
- You can't text people across the world without incurring additional charges.
- Insecure by default. No end-to-end encryption present. Your messages can be easily intercepted by malicious actors, which puts your financial and other accounts at risk. Your cellular carrier can see the contents of the messages you're sending and receiving. Any collected records could be subpoenaed in legal proceedings. Authorities can deploy stingrays to snoop on the contents of text messages in an area. Scammers can try to steal your cell phone number by tricking your cellular provider's customer service staff.
Yet even with all these flaws, SMS still stubbornly refuses to die. But why? From my own personal observations in my country, cellular carriers continually advertise unlimited texting in their phone plans. Because of this, people are encouraged to continue using SMS as their default choice of texting and not pursue more secure alternatives of communication. Frankly I find this reality sad because it puts us far behind many other countries, where their respective populations are using more secure instant messengers. Not only that, I want to help protect my innocuous conversations with my family and friends from prying eyes by switching them to something like Signal, but they'd rather have me buy an iPhone and use iMessage with them instead. I'm not going to spend than $1000 on a phone just to use iMessage. That's insane! And a complete waste of money too! For that reason alone, I am forced to use SMS with them.
Although I acknowledge that SMS isn't going away anytime soon due to the existence of phone numbers and the telephone network, I honestly think the only way I can see people move away from using SMS as the default method of texting is if cellular carriers start adding limits to how many texts you can send in a month or something. I'm not holding my breath though.
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