Meta is Giving Up on Messenger's SMS Feature (theverge.com) 21
Seven years after updating Messenger to allow it to serve as your default Android text messaging app, the company formerly known as Facebook is quietly abandoning the feature. From a report: According to a support page, the feature will disappear after September 28th. I don't know anyone that uses it, but at least it'll be nice to have one fewer screens to tap through during setup.
"Meta" is short for "Metastasize" (Score:2)
No, they're not "going lean" - they're losing weight because the cancer has taken over.
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Signal did this, too. I'm guessing that there are problems with SMS and MMS gateways that are either insecure, or are causing excessive expense.
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More likel nobody used it. Being the default SMS app doesn't mean you pay for the gateway. It means you're the app that's called when an SMS comes in, and you have sole access to write the SMS database. Basically you take over for the SMS app UI. But the underlying sending of SMS is still done by the OS.
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I realize that, but it's also a matter of scale; somewhere this a store-and-forward server that caches messages. Signal can also suffer from constipation. Costs go up when an SMS transport rather than TCP transport fails, or when an SMS doxx can't be shielded. So far as I know, they have no front-end handling like a Cloudflare shield.
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None of that matters- the default SMS app is just a UI. They don't need to make a single web call to build one. You can do it in a few hours without a server. They may have decided to send all those texts to their servers for analysis in the advertising, but that's because they saw value in it. But the default SMS app has nothing to do with webservers, SMS transport, cloudflare, or anything like that. It's a GUI and that's it. You can find dozens of tutorials on how to make a simple one, they don't a
Was anyone using the SMS Feature? (Score:2)
I have never seen anyone using it.
It felt too meta to use sms inside a messaging app.
Too soon?
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What are the odds Meta uploaded your SMS social graph when you allowed access to your SMS database?
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I have never seen anyone using it.
Of course not: many carriers charge per SMS. These may be low prices, but sending text messages can be very expensive. In the Netherlands, for example, the cost per SMS vary between zero and €0,31.
Using a message platform over the internet (especially via WiFi) reduces these per-message costs to zero, and is thus by far the most preferred option.
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Really? You still pay per SMS within the country? They're completely unmetered in Australia, and we have a reputation for expensive phone service. Even 4G VoLTE voice calls within the country are unmetered for most people.
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That's not what the default SMS app does. It doesn't send to a gateway, the OS does that. The default SMS app allows you to replace the UI for the messaging app and allows you total access to the SMS database on the device. Basically it allows you to fully replace the built in app. It was valuable to FB because of the "full access to SMS database" part. But they would never have had to pay for an SMS, that's just done by calling SmsManager.sendTextMessage at the OS level
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Isn't SMS like an outdated WhatsApp that only banks use?
Joking... but not really joking much.
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I didn't even know it exists. I assume your mobile phone # would be req.
RCS Messaging? (like Signal) (Score:2)
I wonder if this is due to RCS messaging coming online and not having support, which is what pushed Signal to drop SMS support?
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It probably has to do with the fact that they also own Whatsapp, which currently does not support SMS. It would be a better fit if they were to allow this to be a messaging app on Android.
The whole original purpose of Messenger supporting SMS was to slurp up your phone's contact data to use on the Facebook side for either connecting people or building shadow profiles for non-users.
This is still a thing? (Score:1)
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I've never seen an advert in Messenger, and no I don't run an adblocker on my phone.
What about the announced Meta merge of their messaging apps Messenger/Whatsapp/Instagram?
No such announcement. The announcement was that Messenger is being remerged with Facebook where it started. There was never an intention to merge Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram, and if there was the EU regulator would abort that proposal in its first trimester. The only mention of such a merger is a bunch of slow news day tech sites debating whether it could theoretically be done at all.
What SMS options are left? (Score:2)
My Android phone has no native SMS app. Google are moving to RCS, and Facebook (which I'm not madly keen on) was my previous option for not having separate messaging apps all over the place since the demise of Signal.
So what's left as an ordinary, boring, (and preferably Open) SMS app?
Signal (Score:1)
I moved back to my phones standard SMS app after Signal killed the best feature they had.
I removed Signal as I had no use for it, after supporting it when it was known as TextSecure (more than 10 years ago) I never once found anyone else using it at all. Standard SMS and Whatsapp are what everyone uses.
I have 2 people on FB messenger, that it, just 2.