[darklajid]

Ignoring my 'XMPP would be nice, but at this point is probably not succeeding' lament: I do hate the situation on mobiles so much. Everyone I know agrees that text messages are a thing of the past, useless, limited and (artificially) expensive. But the solution seems far from obvious.

WhatsApp was as close as a general solution as I've seen so far (Disclaimer: Don't have an account, didn't use it). Now people are moving off of WhatsApp and end up (back?) with Skype, Threema, Telegram, Hangout, Facebook. No, not TextSecure. That's generally unknown all around me.

Out of these services I hate Skype, Hangout and Facebook with a passion. I like the Telegram marketing, but I'm skeptical and .. probably won't ever use it. Threema is the closed [1] thing I would consider, but even that is a compromise I'm not going to make.

For a long time now I'm telling my friends to 'just email me, or call'. Yes, I do use mail like IM all the time. It works, while all of the products above don't - for my definition of 'works'.

edit: 1: I meant 'closest', but 'closed' is such a good typo in that case - I'll leave it in. It's both.

[philtar]

There's no way email work like IM. You're missing the I part, instant.

Start two conversations on two different devices, one convo using email and the other using an IM program. Look at how fast they get out of sync.

[darklajid]

My mail clients have push support.

Look, I'm not saying 'Use mail for IM' nor do I claim that this is ideal. I'm saying that this is what I resort to because that's the _only_ thing that works.

In my world, there _is_ no IM solution. I don't have the necessary clients - or my friends don't. Or a subset of the people I want to reach are on a different service (Friend A & B on Hangout, C is using WA or Threema). The IM you talk about? It doesn't exist in my world and only therefor mail qualifies as 'as good as possible, given the environment'.

And .. if that makes 'IM' less like (each * a new message)

* Hi.

* You there?

* What are you doing?

* What about a beer tonight?

and leads to

"Hey, want to have a beer tonight?"

(still 'instant', as in 'reaches me in seconds and reply might! be equally fast) - all the better.

[pjc50]

I don't think there's any technological reason why email should necessarily be slower than IM, that's something of an accident of history in the technology.

[Nullabillity]

What's wrong with Hangouts? Skype has been desyncy and slow for me, but my only issue with Hangouts so far has been that almost nobody else uses it.