SMS is still very widely used by parties who don't know each other. In theory, anybody with a phone number can receive an SMS (though not always in reality, because SMS is a bag of suck). So your pharmacy can SMS you when your prescription is ready, your mechanic can SMS you when your car is fixed, etc.

I don't personally know anybody who still uses SMS to communicate directly with friends or frequent real-world contacts. But I also don't know anybody who still watches real-time broadcast TV with ads. I assume there are still a lot of both out there in the world, however.

> In theory, anybody with a phone number can receive an SMS

Basic landlines are still a thing, and cannot, even in theory, recieve SMS.

When someone sends an SMS to my landline, the phone rings and there's some kind of automated service that reads it out to me. It's even pretty intelligible, usually.

This isn't something I ever signed up for explicitly. But maybe it's just my provider?

Actually, depending on your phone carrier, it might be possible to send SMS even to landline: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08/05/bt_land_text/

A remember seeing a national landline operator accepting SMS sent to its numbers, and reading them to the user after converting them to speech. The result was not exactly exciting, but the idea wasn't half bad.

Aren't landline and mobile number formats clearly distinct in the US? Afaik in the entirety of Europe mobile numbers have a different prefix than landlines.

> Basic landlines are still a thing

Oh yeah, LOL, I quite honestly forgot about the existence of those haha

Where are you based ? Here in France, SMS / MMS are still the most widely used. More than any other third party app. Most of phone carriers plans here offer unlimited sms / mms for free now, so it's pretty much THE default. It would be interesting to see a messaging apps usage comparison, country by country.

I am in Australia, and just going back through my messages list on my phone, I can see that my wife, my massage therapist and doctor/dentist etc. are mainly who sends me texts these days, oh, and my telco also does voice to text translations and send the transcripts to me via SMS.

I do recall that my doctors office did offer the option of Snapchat recently, I believe, for appointment alerts. Also, the voice to text thing, I have been thinking of writing my own little app connected to my SIP phone system and Amazon AWS to try and achieve the same thing, just as a little programming exercise.

If I have to be honest, if my SMS was turned off tomorrow, there would be very little impact on my life (as long as I installed Telegram or Snapchat on my wife's phone).

I'm also in Australia. Most of my messaging goes through other apps, mostly WhatsApp or FB messenger. I do have a few friends that are holding out on SMS but mostly I just treat it as a backup service for when I don't have data.

SMS has already been replaced by far more secure and mature apps. It's good to have it there as a primitive option though.

> Here in France, SMS / MMS are still the most widely used

What, which part? Over here SMS is used only as a last resort: interoperability when people aren't using the same set of messaging apps, or no data due to bad network conditions. Everyone is using Messenger (when mutually added), WhatsApp, Telegram, or iMessage, the latter three automatically populating when phone numbers are added to contact lists, which people happily upload.

Very interesting since here, south of the Pyrenees, it's mostly the opposite. Carriers charge per SMS, and therefore they are only used by automated services such as 2FA, etc. I haven't received an SMS from an actual human in years. Most people use WhatsApp et al. instead, even companies and business communicating with clients.

In many parts of the world SMS is still very popular (most popular?) and upgrading that experience seems a net win. I wish there was a push for end to end encryption but I doubt the carriers would have agreed to that given that in many countries they are legally obligated to hand over data when a court deems it necessary.

Your wife is a smart woman. We'd all be better off if we were like her.