Not surprising considering iMessage is nearly irrelevant outside the US.
US is still stuck on SMS, so much that they even made an upgrade to it with RCS.
It felt like an upgrade to the DVD disk when you have the Internet.
IMHO, I’ll gladly take RCS over the world’s most popular messaging clients - Meta products.
I don’t know why people have more faith in cellular providers. They have been selling all of your data before Meta was a thing.
Which is why I said RCS and not SMS or MMS.
Once we get that new open end to end encrypted RCS protocol, that’s the thing to migrate to. Fuck SMS, MMS, Meta products, WeChat, etc. One end to end encrypted standard, that can be used by any messaging client, on any mobile OS.
RCS only increased the meta-data the cellular providers and messaging apps is selling on you.
They don’t care about the content in your message, so e2ee is useless in this case.
They’re selling who you message, when, and where you are when you do it. They collect data on which cellular tower transmitted your message. And now with RCS they also know when you read the message.
Which means RCS is just as useless in terms of privacy. They only enriched the data. So it’s probably worse.
The Nordics are an exception to this - SMS and iMessage are prevalent here.
Sms prevalent? Where? All I see is WhatsApp and people get annoyed if you don’t have that.
I may have been speaking too broadly when mentioning Nordics - I’ve only heard some rumors from Norway from an acquaintance that lives there, but for Sweden it’s definitely the case. I have not found WhatsApp-use to be common here.
Where in Sweden have you not found WhatsApp common? Or what age group? In Sthlm and nearby towns (ages 25-45) all I ever hear is WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Since I don’t use any of those people roll their eyes, sigh and reluctantly agree to SMS, since they don’t use any proper messaging apps.
I’m in Stockholm as well, no one outside ‘expat communities’ has attempted to communicate with me using WhatsApp.
Who knows though, maybe I’m not in tune with the general public any more. I know that basically all of my extended family run on iMessage, and some friends use Facebook Messenger as their lowest common denominator.
To be fair I’m not really in tune with the general public either, but every time I’ve had to link up with someone, whether old friends, classmates or co-workers they’ve always gone for WhatsApp immediately. I think iMessage is very popular, too, but I’ve never heard people mention it by name. Probably because it’s just the default iPhone-only SMS replacement.
Just to provide some perspective on the Nordics claim, since I’m Norwegian and worked in a phone store for six years. In my experience, practically no one here uses Whatsapp, except for communicating with people in other countries. It’s either Facebook messenger, Snapchat or SMS/iMessage.
Too irrelevant to be covered by the law
I have been following the DMA closely, and so far it has been a big disappointment, just as I expected.
The way the EU approaches this walled garden problem, is to try and offer ways for other competitors to tap into the user base of the bigger players instead of trying to allow all EU citizens to chat with any other EU citizen who uses META Products regardless of their host platform. meaning “us” people who wish to self host an xmpp or Matrix servers and chat with facebook friends, It won’t be straight forward or entirely possible for us to do so. unless maybe by doing a KYC with META. and signing up very stringent service agreements.
Meta will be creating all sorts of hurdles the DMA laws will allow them to, to cripple interoperability, from making other plateform signing up to special permissions from Meta, to hiding interoperability settings and making them opt-in, and building a scary rhetoric why you shouldn’t be allowing other people outside of META to get in contact with you. There are some valid concerns, but I suspect Meta will implement the most spiteful procedures they can get away with, then spin up a rhetoric about proving their users being massing against interoperability.
That’s a very bad call from them. I’m disappointed.
