301–310 of 965 posts
I just donated $10 to Signal. Here's how to do so on iPhone in less than a minute: 1. Open Signal and click on your user icon in the upper left. 2. Go to "Settings" --> "Donate to Signal". 3. Click "Donate", select your donation options, and pay with Apple Pay.
Wish they provided some numbers of actual messages, type etc. per day. Seems like a good game plan would be. 1) Get off the major cloud providers that charge insane egress fees. 2) Remove SMS verification. A simple solution might be the app gives you a code and then you dial in to them and punch in the code to them. Like a reverse voice based authentication. 3) Remove voice and video calling for non donating users. 3…
So, you can't trust the address in the "From" on an SMS or the "From" of a phone call.
That means a voice call to Signal would not work to validate phone numbers.
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Messages inflexible reliance on SMS for communication to non-Apple devices is definitely an Apple issue, in my opinion. Apple has made it clear that they continue to default to SMS for non-iPhone communication solely because it's unpleasant for everyone involved.
https://www.android.com/get-the-message/
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In case one isn't aware, you can get a $1/month throwaway phone number from Twilio for that purpose.
That's a neat workaround for the people that can figure that out, but doesn't change the underlying problem for the majority of users at all.
I'd prefer a federated solution, but XMPP doesn't yet have decent support for group chat that doesn't depend on being connected. https://xmpp.org/extensions/attic/xep-0369-0.1.html is still experimental. Bravo to Signal for being easy enough for my family to use!
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I really wonder why it’s so expensive to run. I always hear things about scaling but I used to run a top 500 alexia website and it was just a php app running on a mutualized offer for $5/month. Lots of manual caching though but still. My wild guess is that either the stack is not really optimal (last I heard it was java) or they do other costly things at scale (sgx?)
You can't send an sms yourself like you can an email. Instead of setting up a server, you have to work with a telco provider (an aggregator specifically). Any SMS service eventually hands off to one of these. Many SaaS SMS providers are just frontends for legacy telco services. They charge insane fees because they can, that is all there is to it. Sending mass email is still difficult. Its probably easier to pay a pro…
I worked on an automated SMS marketing system back in the day so I have seen this in action, at scale. This would be stuff like "text LAKERS to 12345 for Lakers updates"- we didn't handle the Lakers but we did handle many sports teams. Though I wasn't privvy to the financial side, I got the sense that the per-text cost ended up being manageable at scale, but this is because we were one organization who would apply the rules onto our own customers, and if we failed to do so properly we risked losing the interconnects to the various carriers. We typically used a single contracted "aggregator" service which provided a unified API for the carriers. When I left, we were using OpenMarket.
When you have a self-service SaaS offering such as Twilio, the per-text costs are going to go up because the barriers for sending unwanted texts (or fail to follow the rest of the rules mandated by the TCPA) is so much lower, and Twilio has to address that organizationally which adds cost.
Additionally, Twilio does not purchase short codes (ie 12345) which means its harder for the carriers to track bad behavior across their network. There is an initial cost (fairly high) to acquiring a short code, though you can also share short codes across customers in some cases. Acquiring a single short code and sending all messages from that short code would likely reduce costs.
I would love to see more detail from Signal about what sort of SMS interconnection they are using, because directly connecting with an aggregator instead of a SaaS offering (if they haven't already) could save a lot of money, and they are definitely at the scale that would allow for it. And given that they only use it for account verification and are a non-profit, it seems likely they could get a good deal since the risk of TCPA violations is effectively zero.
I just donated $10 to Signal. Here's how to do so on iPhone in less than a minute: 1. Open Signal and click on your user icon in the upper left. 2. Go to "Settings" --> "Donate to Signal". 3. Click "Donate", select your donation options, and pay with Apple Pay.
I just donated $10 to Signal. Here's how to do so on iPhone in less than a minute: 1. Open Signal and click on your user icon in the upper left. 2. Go to "Settings" --> "Donate to Signal". 3. Click "Donate", select your donation options, and pay with Apple Pay.
Does this entail a 30% cut to Apple/Google?
Easy google , but no it doesn't
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> stubbornly use iMessange. Personally, I prefer it over downloading yet another client, dealing with additional credentials, wondering about who can access my messages, and so on and so forth… And all that just to message the handful of people that I know who use .
If only someone would release a universal protocol that the app's native messaging apps could utilize to eliminate the need for these 3rd party messaging apps. Oh, right, it's called RCS and Apple refuses to support it.
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That's a neat workaround for the people that can figure that out, but doesn't change the underlying problem for the majority of users at all.
Majority of users don't have phone numbers?
Some of these will be willing and able to pay $1/month to Twilio for a workaround, but most probably won't.