But you're stuck in a world where apps are segregated that way. But if I were Google, I'd change android to make their messaging app backend-agnostic and able to send information to any app with a unified frontend. I'd ban from the store if not.

Done, nobody cares anymore, for real and features will come from Google :D We're so stuck on using 2 apps instead of 2 networks we forget mobile phone providers had to agree together to do SMS decades ago, and it went fine with dumbed down feature.

And let's be honest, the only killer feature that made me finally adopt whatsapp like 6 years ago was that it used the data plan that works on WIFI rather than the phone plan. We were all fine with SMSes before.

It's weird to hear you say that, because SMS is terrible. Unreliable delivery, delivery receipts that come back even if the recipient's phone is turned off, no media (MMS is also terrible, just try to send a video over it and watch the pixelated garbage that comes out the other side), no privacy or security to speak of, carrier interop issues (character encodings, message length, shortcode support), identity tied to your phone number, no ability to send/receive messages without being tethered to the phone (to be fair, Signal and WhatsApp also have this problem)... I could go on.

Interesting. I guess the issues you see as a user depend on where you life / which carrier you are using?

I had more issues with iMessage delivery then I ever had with SMS in my whole life. I dont even remember a single incident with SMS delivery. And I consider your "missing media" point an advantage. Sending stupid videos from phone to phone is a disease that I dont want to deal with.

> no ability to send/receive messages without being tethered to the phone (to be fair, Signal and WhatsApp also have this problem)

Signal actually has a desktop app. It requires having installed signal on a phone before, and linking the accounts, but it doesn't depend on the phone after that I believe.

As for SMS, it works on pretty much any device and network, with the caveats that it's the first and lowest common denominator messaging service.

  >Signal actually has a desktop app.

So does Telegram. And it works independently of whether or not you've got the app installed on your phone.

SMS and MMS are telco standards whose progress and maintenance depends on the willingness of operators to patch and upgrade their infrastructure equipment (good luck with that)

So yeah, while saddening I don’t expect SMS to make much progress as its lifecycle is tied to the worst one in the industry.

XMPP had a better chance, but unfortunately chatting service is the bait for other purposes... so an interop standard has no chance to survive without regulation.

Back in the day when Google had "don't be evil" as their motto, they released something called GTalk. It was a desktop instant messaging app, because that was before the smartphone era.

They based it on the decentralized protocol Jabber (or XMPP) and even open their servers to others. Meaning you could discuss with people using other servers than GTalk, just like email.

Google closed their servers to federalization, rebranded GTalk to Hangout and made bad decision after bad decision (but always in the direction of closing up instead of supporting open standards), lost the fight for messaging despite controlling the dominant mobile OS.

tl;dr I have no faith in Google to (1) do the right thing for open standards and (2) manage to get any sort of market share on messaging

>Google closed their servers to federalization, rebranded GTalk to Hangout

rewording your sentence: Google stop volunteering time & resources on efforts that help others make money, and focused on only Google making money. I don't own any Google (AlphaBet) stocks, but if I was a shareholder, and someone would have told me that "we have a line item that is -50m on our statement, but hey, it is good for the competitors", I would like that line item gone.

I have faith in Google that they will try their best to make money. They may lose 1 here and make 50 there, but that -1 will be gone after a certain time. And this is a good business decision. Otherwise they would have one cash cow and 100 losers and they would be a break-even business, which is not a Business because Business = profit.

I get it, capitalism is fucking us up. The open standards we take for granted today were created by hippies researchers in the 20th century. That's not happening in today's world.

That's how messaging worked on Maemo/MeeGo on the Nokia N900 and N9.

You just added a bunch of accounts and all you messages and conversations (SMS, Skype, Jabber, etc.) were in one unified place.

Its still effectively this way on modern SailfishOS but as new IM services are effectively app based silos with no public API this system needs, you are not really able to make use of it.