Eli5 what os the difference between iMessage and text message and why it even matters?
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SMS came about almost by accident. It uses a spare channel on the cellular network. Originally this channel was used by engineers to communicate between cell sites. This was adapted to be SMS. The cool thing about SMS is that its available on all devices and cell networks. The bad news is thats it’s incredibly unreliable and difficult to use for sending multimedia, although in modern networks they’ve figured it out.
iMessage is proprietary and doesn’t use a special channel. It uses TCP/IP to transfer data “in band” to deliver messages. The TCP part allows for quality of service and retransmission which is great for multimedia.
The only thing that makes iMessage different than other messaging apps is that its integrated into the phones operating system. A drawback is that its a private service, if you want to use the network beyond what they offer, you have to pay apple.
The company I work for does incident communications. SMS is a royal pain, everyone wants to use it to send really important messages, but there’s no way to guarantee delivery and they often get lost or arrive late. We’ve tried to get access to iMessage directly but apple makes it really hard and expensive. Google has an equivalent messaging protocol to iMessage. It gets too complicated so we built our own app for messaging.
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