My friends started getting rid of Signal when Signal dropped SMS support. As soon as it stopped being the default SMS application, it got uninstalled. Nice own goal.
Now Signal only lives on for me due to the signal-cli project. Once I can find a working google-messages cli setup to send and receive reports to/from a specific device , goodbye Signal 😿
My impression was that Signal dropped SMS integration because it was being used to trick users who really needed security into thinking they were having secure chats when they really weren't. Given that enabling reliable secure chat is the reason for Signal's existence, that was a pretty bad problem.
90+% of my mobile and desktop chat with real-world friends is via Signal. I use SMS with friends who don't have modern phones, with relatives who are mentally impaired, and with businesses.
I'd rather use SMS than Whatsapp. I also use Signal and am open to use any open source alternative but most people don't and aren't so the thing we have in common is SMS.
There is also a Google messages application, that can be minimised to tray. It is just a browser wrapper, but at least saves you the hassle of opening and closing and logging in everytime.
I have Thunderbird opened constantly, so I just open Google Messages in one of the tabs in it. Only problem is that it does not show any notifications, but I get them through KDE Connect.
Most of the time I can't even send a message with it - I'll type the message out, click send and... nothing. No indication of error, no indication of success. There's also an issue with loading the message history right after launch. A lot of times it doesn't work or only works partially. App on the phone has full permissions, set to unrestricted battery, etc.
I used Google Messages directly for a while, but then a Matrix bridge that uses Google Messages was released, so now I use that. If you want to try it, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy makes it really easy to self-host, but if you don't want to do that, something like Beeper can probably do it.
For sure, I use a computer all day, the only time I touch my phone is to answer the door. I don't have access to iMessage on the PC but I only use Signal and WhatsApp for messaging anyway and they work nicely on my Linux desktop. Never need to fiddle with my phone.
I don't know what it's like in Canada, but in the US tons of people use MVNOs instead of straight subscribing to one of the big 3 carriers, so guessing what the domain name for each one, or getting everybody to text your email so you can find out, is just tedious.
Personally, I transitioned my entire family and friends to use my Google Voice number years ago. GV doesn't support RCS still, which is annoying, but otherwise it works great. When my phone broke at the beginning of this year I was still able to send and receive texts from everyone.
Obviously, if you don't trust Google this would be a non-starter though.
Yep. Google Voice is the forgotten step-child that Google only remembers exists once every few years, randomly pushing a wave of updates, and then nothing(don't let the bi-weekly bug fix updates fool you).
Though in a way I don't mind, since they're still providing the service for free, with zero ads, for over a decade. I'm convinced at this point that it's the pet project of some higher up that likes the service and manages to sweep any maintenance costs under the rug so the bean counters never try to kill it.
I had a 3g modem in my cisco router that I used to use for that, but when they shut down the 3g network I was never able to find another cheap sms-only service for the 4g version of the cisco modem. (So I switched to wifi & xmpp.)
I wrote my own software to use it, talking to the raw modem interface. Which, interestingly, uses an extension of the old "AT" modem command set. Weird.
Being able to write shell scripts that access sms is fantastic, I miss it.