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My American friends, we are weird.

The United States is one of the few major countries where SMS, the messaging technology that emerged in the 1980s, remains the standard way of chatting.

In many other countries, text messaging takes place via a smartphone app like WhatsApp from Meta, the company formerly called Facebook. WeChat is popular in China and Line in Japan. These messages travel over the internet rather than phone lines like SMS texts.

America’s SMS exceptionalism has its pros and cons. The biggest benefits of SMS are that it works on almost any phone and we are not tied to a single company’s communications world. The drag is that SMS has security flaws and lacks the features of modern chat apps like notifications that your friend has read your message or the ability to initiate a video call from a text.

The continued prevalence of SMS in the US is one of the most flexible technologies. not necessarily the best. At the same time the other way America’s smartphone habits are unlike the rest of the world in ways that can help but also hold us back.

I know a lot of Americans use whatever text app they use on their phone and don’t think too much about it. Good! But let me explain why we need to give some thought to this communication technology.

If you’re an American with an iPhone, you probably use iMessage. These messages flow over the internet like you watch on Netflix – unless you’re texting someone with an Android phone and then your messages are SMS. Clean as mud? And if you’re texting from an Android phone… it’s complicated, but you’re probably using some form of SMS.

As a result, the US uses SMS in a volume that most other countries do not.

Here’s an example: In 2020, one trillion personal and business messages traveled in the US via complementary display technology known as SMS or MMS. According to an analysis by mobile research company Strategy Analytics, the figure in Germany was eight billion.

When writing messages, Germans tend to use WhatsApp, which is also the chat method in India, England, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, France and many other countries.

What’s the matter if America’s messaging relies on phone lines? Well, SMS is an old and weak technology awkwardly crammed into new ones.

WeChat, WhatsApp, Signal, and other modern messaging apps often allow users to see which of their friends are online, send high-resolution images and animations, share physical locations with people they’re messaging, and send money by connecting directly to apps in chats. or do other tasks.

Nearly half of US smartphone owners have iPhones and live in this modern chat world as long as they don’t communicate with Android phone users. SMS performs most of the above functions with difficulty.

Maybe basic texts are fine in many situations, but SMS also has security limitations. In new TV commercials, WhatsApp emphasizes that SMS is vulnerable to snoopers or criminals reading our messages. Similar apps like WhatsApp and Signal use technology that locks texts from prying eyes. This encryption technology he has also been criticized for hiding messages from law enforcement.

I want to insist a little on the simple beauty of SMS. You cannot use WhatsApp to message your friend who uses iMessage, but SMS is universal. And it bothers me to suggest that everyone should use WhatsApp and make a Big Tech company the gateway to all our digital communications.

I asked Nitesh PatelIf there’s a middle ground between America’s reliance on SMS and an enterprise app like WhatsApp becoming the digital front door, says director of wireless media research at Strategy Analytics. Patel cited the more updated cousin of SMS, known as RCS or rich communication services. (I know, the jargon is terrible.)

RCS is a mess, but it has more modern features than SMS and is pretty secure. Like SMS, it is a shared technology that is not controlled by a single company. Google pushed RCS, and has replaced SMS messaging on some Android phones. But Apple will likely never go with itwhich means that RCS will never be a universal messaging technology.

The good news about America’s messaging situation is that it’s one of the few tech areas where a corporate giant doesn’t dominate our choices. Now we need to receive SMS to be a little cooler.

Before you go …

• Google’s parent company made a lot of money. Still.

  Also, Adam Satariano reports Until smartphones with Google as the default search option spread all over the place, at a web search company called Seznam in the Czech Republic, which beat Google. Now Seznam is promoting a legal debate in Europe about whether big tech companies are unfairly narrowing the space for competition.

• Testing several places in Japan Digital monitoring for people with cognitive decline. My colleagues Ben Dooley and Hisako Ueno say that some people think this electronic monitoring is Orwellian transcending, and others believe it’s a response to maintaining independence and security for an aging population.

  Related: The New York Times wants to hear about your experiences with productivity monitoring technology in the workplace. Please fill out this form to help us learn more..

• Would you buy a $700 vacuum cleaner with a laser that highlights how dirty your floors are? Or a meticulous mop robot? Coworker Brian X. Chen tried them.

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Dillon Helbig, 8, from Idaho He wrote his own book and kept it on the shelf at a local public library. It was a big hit.

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