Ideally we would have something like email (but of fucking course not email, because its atrocious) that doesn’t require any corporation or centralization involved, where we could run our own or choose which entity we want to host our data, and would be interoperable across entities.

Thats called jabber and it’s existed for 25 years.

I don’t think we are, at all.

I mostly say it because SMS is so ancient. Not encrypted, messages are storied by the carrier and can be requested by the government, etc… In that sense, even a corporate-controlled messaging system that offers E2EE would be a step up. After all, SMS is pretty corporate-controlled too, just different ones. But again, this is very much a European perspective, I can see why in the US this might be different.

iMessage is by far and away the most popular chat platform here, and is largely responsible for Apple’s local dominance in the smartphone market.

Ah true, iPhones are much more popular in the US. Quite interesting actually how that happened, iPhones aren’t all that popular here at all and Android phones dominate the market. I wonder why Apple hasn’t managed to copy their dominance here as well?

I’ve never heard of such a thing.

Looks like Tello, Cricket, MobileX, US Mobile and T-Mobile can offer it at least. Apparently it’s often marketed as a Tablet plan, which I suppose makes sense, but it seems a lot of carriers allow you to disable SMS in their web portals these days. I thought it’d be more niche in the US but it seems a more common option than I thought.

It’s been interesting to hear from you about your perspective on this, thanks!