LLMs are really fucking bad at math. They’re trying to find the statistical close answer, not doing computation. It’s rather mind-numbingly dumb.

Can add too, until it can send in almost any wireless situation like SMS can, it isn’t worth bothering with. SMS can send on LTE even when a phone doesn’t have a data connection available to the userspace. (Bars but no G icon.) It can send on 2G or above practically instantly. (Although once T-Mobile turns off 2G next year, less of a concern in the US.) SMS is just a raw simple control channel message. RCS is, as others mentioned, just another over-the-top messenger with all the network stack overhead, and a buggy one.

One can fire off an emergency SMS on the side of a mountain with barely usable signal that won’t even work for a voice call. RCS would fail in such an environment.

MMS, of course, requires a carrier APN data connection to work, and is a bit slower and more finicky. RCS would definitely be an improvement there.

And they thought Y2K was fun!

The removal of SMS will be necessary because Google is cutting out third party apps from being able to access the messaging framework, including RCS. Google’s closing the walls around their garden.

Even then, the large phones are so flat thin, human fingers can’t bend at those angles easily. Thick cases generally help with that, but if the phone were a normal size, it would be easier to hold, could have a larger battery, and not need a case.

Also, since the manufacturers are all anti-bezel now, there’s no safe place to set one’s fingers without delicately holding the phone by both sides or side+back in some balancing act. Razr 5G 2020 was a neat combo, pretty thin borders, (but a notch), but the traditional old Razr bump at the bottom for nostalgia, which gave the phone a chin one could easily grab onto without fear of hitting touch buttons.

These companies quest for a thin sheet of touchscreen as the entire device and completely discard the fact that human hands have to interact with the device.

What was the Motorola mobile arm is now owned by Lenovo, so…ehhhhh… That being said, the Razr reboot line has been pretty neat. Although the lack of OS updates is absolutely terrible.

It’s easy for the service to know if the user account has listened to the podcast, and equally easy to track listens in a webapp. The line between webapp and app is very thin these days anyway.

…that’s hilarious, as Google Home is a terrible husk of an app that feels like some beta thing written by an intern 5 years ago and they’ve never went back to actually flesh it out. Settings buried in random menus, no UI consistency, is it a … menu or a gear to get to settings? Is it for the device or the routine? Oh, how do you get to your camera? How do you reboot your camera? Wait, it controls the thermostat like the Nest app but doesn’t quite do all the features of the Nest app? Media controls, sorta! Maybe your TV shows up, maybe your neighbor’s Google product asks to join when you launch the app. It’s just a mess.

Thanks for that! I actually hadn’t bothered checking in on the app’s lineage in a few years. One must apparently always stay vigilant anymore.

Maps.me is pretty functional, powered by OpenStreetMaps, and has a not too expensive annual charge to remove ads. It allows one to store entire countries offline on your phone. Although it seems to be plugging some “pro” feature now so not sure if they’ve become enshittified. It also has an option to not use Play Services in settings.

You may want to try going into Maps settings->Navigation settings and turn off “Prefer fuel-efficient routes” as it tries to pick poor routes to keep speed down to save gas, and it is enabled by default.

Their navigation was already mediocre at mapping successfully to a destination, now they’re trying to map down secondary roads they have even less knowledge about to pretend to be “green” annnd…stupidity ensues.

They won’t. It’s part of their “slowly-closed-source-all-of-Android” plan. The old messaging app used to be part of AOSP and you could read the source, how delightful that was.

Would be a good time for a contender to start the third OS. In a few years, more of the population would have interest enough that it might actually get traction.

Point 1 is 100% one consistent behavior across mobile platforms the last decade and change that has really been annoying.

I remember when BBOS went to “every icon is chrome” as an example of similar past mistakes.

No longer could one go, “I want Internet, click on blue/green circle.” “I want messaging, click on blurple-dotted-weird-shape.” It’s much faster to identify an application by distinct colors and shapes than wasting brain cycles to read text on the screen through a monochromatic monoshaped boring UI.

The tech industry’s desperate attempts to constantly “innovate” and get people to interact with their apps to drive false interaction metrics by pointlessly changing things seems to always lead down this path of mediocrity.

None will, Google is slowly closed-sourcing the entire platform. Messaging was one of the next steps. Also why apps like Signal won’t be seeing carrier messaging in the future.

No, they’re up to 20 grams now! Isn’t that great!?

RCS was an idiotic take from the start.

It’s origin came from a good place. The wireless industry, not Google, started driving the standard to retire/replace SMS/MMS. However, then the wireless industry was reduced to a duo-culture and Google decided to drive RCS after many years of carriers/manufacturers trying to do their own thing to little success.

Another route: MMS could be enhanced to have some modern features while still being backwards-compatible. The datagrams are just XML and the syntax is akin to E-Mail. Larger message sizes could be supported, while the gateways still handle resize/reformat for older device backwards compatibility. There was even a format for a few minutes in the early aughts called EMS that had some promise but it died from disuse. Message delivery confirmation has existed since GSM and CDMA.

There’s even a standard for IMS video calls that has been in the 3GPP stack since the 1999 release that would’ve allowed universal standard video calls. Since carriers hated building data networks and consumers weren’t ready for video calls, it just sat stagnant until iChat AV/FaceTime came along and popularized video calls. It’s still there, it could still be used.

Somewhere along the way, standards-based universal calls, video, and messaging took a back seat to tech bros and their proprietary stacks, and governments (at least the US) were too stupid and incompetent to understand what regulation was necessary to correct this path we are now on. Hopefully the EU can continue to help fix this.

For people in North American countries, Fairphone doesn’t have support for a handful of bands like 13, 14, 25, 26, 30. The lack of low-band specifically will harm rural coverage. Much better than previous iterations though.

And every OS update tries to dark-pattern trick you into enabling iCloud for all your services. And System Settings constantly nag you about setting up Apple Pay or other Apple services you aren’t using. Apple has less ads, but they still have nagware traps all over the place. They also place the free tier of iCloud just big enough to get you hooked, and just small enough you’ll overflow it sooner than later. For most consumers, paying $2/mon to make the nag go away is easier than finding out why they are running out of storage. Annnd…profit.

Or that they would de-duplicate photo storage. Currently, if you upload one from phone+tablet+computer or some other combo of devices, the photos all count towards your storage limit rather than storing one object and having references to that same one object. It is a problem already solved multiple ways.

IRC, AIM, and BBM did ok without it. We humans like talking to each other. We figure it out.