I think you’re right to target your ire at telecoms dropping the ball. When Apple first launched the iPhone a lot of the things they did and fought for should have been in place years before. The UI for merging calls or putting people on hold, visual voicemail, etc. Part of that was touchscreens but most of it was laziness and greediness.
iMessages didn’t come along until 4-5 years later. Text messages weren’t unlimited and MMS messages were limited in size. Today you still see “text messaging rates apply.” You still can’t do things like remove yourself from group messages. Whenever I asked about reaching people overseas I get “Do they all have iPhones? FaceTime and iMessage. No? WeChat, WhatsApp, or whatever you can convince them to sign up for.” I guess you can blame Apple for not making these an open standard, but today there aren’t great open alternatives. I’d like to think if it weren’t for patent trolls FaceTime would be open.
A few months ago I was flying to a different country. The hotel I was staying at said, “oh, we just text you instructions the day you check in.” Great. Can I accept a foreign text message? Will I get it when I’m in that country? How much will that cost?
