Delivery reports are a convenience feature that lets the sender know if the message they sent has been received (not read) by the recipient’s device (for this, it has to be online and have sufficient storage space, though modern phones usually have so much storage the latter is no problem at all).
Every single phone I ever had, from early Nokias in the 00s to Androids and iPhones, had it disabled by default. While feature phones often delivered these reports with a pop-up and sometimes notification sound, which some people could deem annoying, this trend continues even with smartphones, which typically display it merely as an indicator in the chats list of your messaging application.
So, is there an actual reason why it’s turned off by default everywhere? The feature has to be enabled on the sender’s device to receive these and the recipient has no way of opting out of this, so it’s not a privacy thing by any means.
UPD: Apparently, carriers in some countries charge customers for receiving delivery reports as if they were sent messages. I’ve never realized this - reports always were absolutely free where I live. Thank you for your responses!
Text messages cost $0.10 each where I live. And it used to cost up to $0.35 each 20 years ago.
The delivery report would count as a message, thus, doubling your bill.
It was used exclusively to deliver news like death or wedding invitations. For other matters which usually need going back and forth, it was cheaper to just make a call.
Nowadays, we just use WhatsApp.
the markup on text messaging has always been northern of 99.999%. it costs them almost nothing.
Originally they were planned to be free. Until the providers realized how popular they are.
Even crazier is they take up almost no bandwidth because they were sent in the unused part of the control packet which was being sent anyway.
This is true. When I checked on this about five years ago (in the UK), the cost per message was about £0.00001
With the reduction in the number of SMS sent, it now costs more to bill them. In the UK, even the cheapest monthly contract has unlimited calls and texts. There a pre-pay tariffs as low as £3 a month with calls, texts and some data.
Sure, the marginal cost is basically nothing. Once you have invested billions in infrastructure.
Not saying 10 cents isn’t outrageous, just that 0.001 cents seems low
Damn wtf. People still pay per text? Wack
I get 300 SMS messages/minutes per month. I could go unlimited, but that costs a few euros per month extra (2 or 3, haven’t changed in a while).
Since nobody but SMS 2FA services send me SMS messages anyway, I’m not going to pay extra for SMS. I’m already paying €16.50 per month for 20GB of data, I’m not paying more. If people want to reach me, I have five messengers installed on my phone, four of which are end to end encrypted in some way or another, that all use my data plan (that I never use up). I haven’t met anyone who wasn’t either on WhatsApp or Signal already anyway.
SMS in inferior in every way, I don’t get why anyone still uses it even if it’d be free. I suppose it’s a good solution for people with very little data and unlimited text?
Damn that math checks out!! 16.50 for 20gb of data is wayy more worth it than unlimited text