No, please no.
As bad as facebook mesenger and whatsapp ar for privacy, anything that both google and the mobile operators love would be much much worse.
Anon, as I also have to eat and work for these companies.
Google has opened up a major new communications channel for businesses – sending multimedia messages to mobiles using interoperable standards. Any business can now join Google's Jibe programme following a closed beta last year. As well as blast out simple text confirmations, organisations will be able to use Rich Communication …
Let's all use a messaging system which charges you by the message!
Jokes aside, I wonder how many people still use SMS by default and don't use or even know about WhatsApp/Messenger. I suspect it's not much. Facebook claimed in 2016 that Messenger and Whatsapp together had three times as much traffic as SMS worldwide. And I'm pretty sure SMS has lost ground since then...
And how many of these are sent from an iPhone to an Android, since that's what iMessage does in this situation?
I thought most people now had all-you-can eat SMS on their deals. Or often they limit you to something ludicrous like 3,000 per month - to stop you running marketing on consumer tariffs.
But you do have to pay for MMS still. And that's a standard that's pretty much died. Half the handsets never seemed to implement the standard properly anyway, £1 a go is insane and so it was another reason to use Whatsapp. Plus lots of people are chatting to more than one person at once.
I had to get Whatsapp as there's a family group. Which is really useful to organise events and is also full of cat, dog and baby pictures. Which is actually the lesser of two evils, as it means I don't have to go on Facebook for all that.
@I ain't Spartacus
"I had to get Whatsapp as there's a family group. Which is really useful to organise events and is also full of cat, dog and baby pictures."
my whats app started out as useful for family things bit has now descended to a never ending tirade of p0rn, funnies or vids of people making a fool of themselves. In fact its like what people used to email to each other in the 90's and early 00's before it was frowned upon to do so to your work account and before people had email at home with a decent amount of storage.
@I ain't Spartacus - "But you do have to pay for MMS still. A.... £1 a go is insane"
Its simple really - the networks greed got the better of them.. competition is pretty none existent and they operate as a cartel (in everything, but name). Their motto to change (or threat to their income) is "waaaa waaaaa waaaaa...."
Whilst people kick the EU... what they've done for consumers (and getting costs down etc) has been nothing short of spectacular... will be interesting to see what happens in the UK in the coming years on this front.
We run a commercial dog walking business, one of about fifty companies in our locale. For nearly a decade operators relied on group text messaging in emergencies.
Open text message app, select "dog walkers" group from Contacts, send message.
Somewhere around Honeycomb Google introduced a hard coded limit to the number of recipients of a text message.
One text to sixty people became multiple texts to ten or fifteen member groups.
Bug reports ensued, answered only with "because spam."
Which is why everyone now uses WhatsApp.
Well, except for the lone BlackBerry user....
Trust me, this will NOT end well.
SMS still has its advantages, such as not needing a data a connection, but one of the main ones was lost when the networks stopped worrying about delivering. I know I can't send my brother SMS any more.
But interoperability remains a problem. I have Allo, Signal, BBM, Telegram, Hangouts and Wire installed and still can't talk to everyone. Anyone who relies on a single network is a fool.
"Let's all use a messaging system which charges you by the message!"
Don't think I've paid 'per message' in a decade. SMS just come bundled, I've had unlimited on my last few contracts and ludicrously high limits before that.
Multimedia messaging on the other hand costs and if nice cuddly google starts trying to push messages over the data channel they could send me over my data cap.
Which perfectly explains why RCS is only available on Android Messages on Rogers and Fido (biggest Canada carriers, and only RCS carriers here.) (apps like Samsung Messages support RCS without feeding Google with even more of your private info). Am I the only one thinking we should deny any future "innovations" of Google?