"Modern" (i.e. Apple-chasing) design seems to be hellbent on wasting as much screen space as possible.

To prove yourself as a executive you have to make the company do stuff, so people come up with reasons to do wasteful things. It's all a circle of shit people being shitty to get ahead.

Lmao same.

bloody annoying and ugly

Just like their search engine, every version of Android gets worse.

I've been reading articles for years about how Google say they're going to open the RCS API to 3rd-Party apps but they have yet to do so.

Nothing can without the blessing of Google, and so far that's limited to Google Messages and Samsung Messages (whatever it's called)

How do I turn this off? Google search results are of no help 🤔

Almost certainly the answer. Same reason they just hobbled their "ok Google" by not letting you access it with the screen off anymore. They're going to switch engines and they want to reintroduce the same features all over again but make it feel like an upgrade.

Then maybe they should make it an option instead of ruining it for the rest of us because wasting space is the new hip thing.

Wouldn't be an SMS discussion without someone patting themselves on the back because they use use some corpo app.

It's not a choice, here, so much as it is the result of our smartphone culture.

In the US, using the default messaging app on your phone is the norm for most people. Third party messaging apps like WhatsApp simply never caught on over here, so we've let Apple, Google, Samsung, etc determine how we talk to each other. Vendor lock-in tactics run rampant, with barely any regulation.

The default messaging apps on iPhone is iMessage. It's locked down and can not communicate with any other messaging app except via SMS. Therefore the other apps have to use it to communicate with iPhone users.

Conversely, Google has a messaging protocol they're trying to get Apple to adopt called RCS, but Google also refuses to let RCS be used by third party apps. So SMS becomes the fallback for communication between them.

It's partially corporate bickering, partially consumers being tech illiterate and staunchly opposed to using anything third party. Particularly in the case of iPhone users, there's a strong culture of entrenchment in the Apple ecosystem, and for some people, not being in it is actually seen as worthy of derision. There's actual cases of bullying in schools if a kid doesn't use iPhone, and that's having an increasingly detrimental effect on the market.

You have to appreciate, in Europe, you're mostly using Android, a (somewhat) open ecosystem, and that mentality is stronger over there.

But here in the states, iPhones are extremely prominent, and with them comes the mentality that Apple has spent decades programming into its consumers: don't use anything non-Apple, and if that creates problems for other people, too bad, they should just buy Apple too.

I'm in France and I still use sms. Unlimited sms became the norm well before data plans and messaging apps, and it's much easier I can just text someone without having to look on which plateform they have an account. It's like voice calls, for sure you can call someone on messenger or Whatsapp but why bother when I can just make a regular phone call?

The US seems to primarily still use sms. I've heard it's tied to having unlimited messaging phone plans being the norm, so people weren't as drawn to other platforms.

UK here, I still use SMS for people who aren't on Signal.

I don't use WhatsApp and I'm on Android, so no iMessage, so SMS is the great leveller that will always work.

It's a shame Signal dropped SMS fallback as it was really useful.

From what I noticed they only added an emoji button though. This already is on my keyboard area. Maybe I'm missing something but at least you enjoy it.