I’m not a fan of the “war” between Android and Apple when it comes to SMS/texting. The rest of the world doesn’t use SMS/RCS/iMessage as much as WhatsApp and the like, so the US is pretty much lagging behind everyone else on this anyway.
That being said, I have to admit Android did a good job with this!
WhatsApp certainly dominates Europe but I’d love to see a universal standard to replace SMS. The less messaging apps the better. WhatsApp is owned by Meta after all…
Google Messages has been around since 2016, and Google has been shutting down their other apps and porting the features over to Google Messages. Google has shown they’re dedicated to RCS, and have not displayed any signs of shutting down Google Messages.
It’s constantly being updated to add features, like actually implementing iMessage reactions. When an iOS user sends a reaction, it converts it to an actual reaction on the Android side. When an Android user sends a reaction to an iOS user, it just says “x liked this message”. Google is doing what they can to make the experience the best.
From your 2012 timeline of iMessage, that’s only 4 years after Apple.
IRC was created by Jarkko Oikarinen in August 1988 to replace a program called MUT (MultiUser Talk) on a BBS called OuluBox at the University of Oulu in Finland, where he was working at the Department of Information Processing Science. Jarkko intended to extend the BBS software he administered, to allow news in the Usenet style, real time discussions and similar BBS features.
2005: Google Talk released.
2013: Google Hangouts released.
2015: Google announces Google Talk shutting down, encourages people to move to Hangouts.
2016: Despite Hangouts being a one stop shop for SMS and Chat, Google discourages people from using it for SMS, asking people to use the Google Messages app instead.
2016: Google Allo released.
2016: RCS adoption begins.
2017: Google Talk shuts down.
2017: Google Chat released.
2017: Hangouts is re-targeted for business and moves to some sort of consumer freemium model?
~2018(?): YouTube Chat released, a 1:1 messaging system inside of YouTube. No idea when it was discontinued but it didn't last long.
2019: Google Allo discontinued.
2022: Whatever was left of Hangouts is discontinued.
2023: RCS through Google Messenger is now default instead of SMS and group messages are finally encrypted.
Compare this to:
2011: iMessage released. As far as I can tell, it's been e2e encrypted since at least 2012 and potentially since release.
Google, you have no fucking leg to stand on. Get your shit together. If you had had a coherent messaging strategy, maybe Apple would have been amenable to working with you, but what incentive do they have right now? For all anyone knows, you'll drop RCS by 2026 in favor of moving everyone to Google Heythere, the new ridiculous app for messaging!
Adding the 2018 YouTube Chat isn’t fair. Google has products that allow communicating between users. It was never meant to be any replacement for SMS, it was simply a chat system within YouTube. You know, the same YouTube that has had DM’s since day 1?
You also said in 2016 Google encourages people to use the Google Messages app. The same app being used today.
Google also launched other apps around the same time. Apps that were in development for a while. Then they shut them down, to focus all of the features/time into Google Messages.
You’re also adding very specific apps that Google never intended to make into an SMS app. Like Google Chat or Hangouts Rebrand.
Your timeline is disingenuous. Essentially from 2016 - NOW Google has been working on making Google Messages the one stop shop. Only 5 years less than Apple has been making iMessage.
Samsung supported RCS natively in their messaging apps since about 2013, and my carrier released their own RCS+SMS messaging app around that time to bridge the gap for non-samsung android users
I def agree that there needs to be major interoperability improvements between platforms. Though I do not want to be locked into using Google Messages to get RCS. I wish they’d open their API to other apps and even more so allow self-hosting your own RCS server but I don’t foresee the latter ever happening.
Ya there’s Matrix and whatnot which I use with some people, but most everyone just wants what works by default. I like to tinker and have options, but most people don’t.
Till then, I’ll enjoy postage stamp resolution videos from my Apple friends /s
I guess the iPhone sales numbers in the US are keeping them awake. I personally think Apple will only bend if they are forced somehow by the US government, like the way EU did with type-C.
If you're using Google Messages anyway, it's true that RCS is a half-notch better than SMS. Unfortunately, it doesn't compete with any decent chat service on any front—Not signal, not Whatsapp, not Matrix, not even Telegram, and Telegram sucks ass. It's fully centralized, Google gets all of your metadata (which is not worse than Facebook getting all of your metadata, but it is something that Apple obviously won't agree to), there's only one app that does it...
have they even figured out how to encrypt group chats yet?
Telegram is literally pioneering messaging apps. Everything that other apps add, Telegram has added first. Go look at their blog post updates, and you’ll see how far ahead of the curve they are. Features that WhatsApp is getting in 2023, Telegram added back in 2016.
I am assuming you think they “suck ass”, because you’re upset the E2EE is not enabled by default, and you have to open a private E2EE chat with someone? You know, the same buttons you press to open a non-E2EE chat?
Oh, is that why they haven't figured out how to encrypt a group chat yet? Or how to sync an encrypted chat? Or how to institute any of their fucking features in an encrypted chat?
They still don't have multi-channel chat groups, do they? And there's still a limit on how big their chat groups can be, unlike Matrix / Discord / Slack, right?
Everything that other apps add, Telegram has added first.
Oh, you're talking about "broadcast channels." No, actually, Twitter added that feature first, it's called Twitter. Telegram Broadcast Channels are just a social network, except it's unmoderated, so crypto scammers can play around there with impunity. Wow, incredible feature!
But oh boy, you have lots of sticker packs!
Oh, and it looks like they added stories after Snapchat did it, and then after Facebook did it... what, ten times? fifteen? Yeah, sure, Telegram invented those.
I am assuming you think they “suck ass”, because you’re upset the E2EE is not enabled by default, and you have to open a private E2EE chat with someone? You know, the same buttons you press to open a non-E2EE chat?
That's one of the bigger issues, I'm guessing you haven't actually tried using one of those chats since you seem to be excited about all of Telegram's "features." Yeah, sorry, this untold disaster against privacy is an insult to its users' intelligence, and the users can't tell.
The rest of the world doesn’t use SMS/RCS/iMessage as much as WhatsApp and the like, so the US is pretty much lagging behind everyone else on this anyway.
Not sure I want to end up with Facebook controlling my messaging...
Thye are free now. Sms used to be a “per text” charge. Phone plans had “100 txt free/month, then $.05/each” deals, along with “300 free minutes/month.” This went on for years.
It was during this time that other countries started using “data only” apps that didn’t have per message fee, which was their killer feature, and they stuck with them.
Charging for SMS was of course brutal profit seeking. The messages have always been embedded in the largely empty “where am i” pings that cellphones have to always be sending to towers to work at all. They were 100% free for phone carriers to send and receive.
They were not always free, and when they were, they were up to a limit. Yes the limit was something absurd, but surprisingly, some people did hit them.
That’s why as soon as phones had easy access to the web and enough bandwidth to last a month, people started treating SMS like a last resort, and I have not met a single culture on Earth that didn’t think this way in the transition period up to when what you said became universally true.
Plus… People don’t want to message only their “contacts”, nor want their phone address book filled with trash. Mindblowing, know, who would have thought (other than US apple users???). Facebook’s Messenger was one of the earliest to give that to the wide public and it got heavily adopted. But people moved on from even that.
They’re limited as hell and buggy. The thing that most bothers me is the character limit and then your device sends out multiple SMSs, other devices may not understand that and instead of receiving one message you receive multiple broken ones.
Accents, anything not in the English alphabet: á ä ā ą é ê and so on, good luck with those.
Attaching media is a nightmare, basically the entire MMS protocol is broken.
You’re relying on your carrier and your recipients carriers.
International messaging is also completely broken for the reason above. You can forget any media in that case too.
Geez I don’t know if I should continue. Did you know SMS was not a feature planned in phones originally but rather it takes advantage of a bug that was never fixed?
In Brazil where I’m originally from people stopped using SMS altogether as soon as the first iPhone got in the market. Android followed shortly after. Viber was the popular choice back then, now WhatsApp is the standard.
They’re not “free”, many places still charge per SMS. Even if your country doesn’t, you NEED an SMS plan, which costs more than a basic data-only plan. SMS is extremely unsecure. They don’t work “everywhere”, especially if you’re travelling, and your country charges extreme fees to receive SMS out of country (for reference, Canadian carriers charge $15/day to use your phone outside Canada. That’s one expensive ass text…).
That being said, I think it’s crazy that a large portion of Europe has adopted WhatsApp. I wouldn’t touch that Meta garbage with a 100 kilometre pole.
If it doesn’t work everywhere, then the phone company is actively unlocking it, as it relies on the management frames in the cellular protocol - it’s embedded in cell architecture.
It is less that people use SMS and more that people just don’t use WhatsApp. I have a mix of group chats, including some with SMS and Facebook Chat. However, no one uses Whatsapp.
I would say that was the case in the UK generally about 5 years ago. But WhatsApp increasingly took over as the norm because it was clean, quick, relatively well encrypted, and made sending gifs and stickers easy and fun for the average user. Plus, the youth aren’t only wedded to iPhones unlike the US increasingly.
I use RCS, except for the handful of iPhone users that receive an SMS from me. The group is small, because more and more people are switching over to Android.
The rest of the world doesn’t use SMS/RCS/iMessage as much as WhatsApp and the like
SMSes use a standard available to any app. WhatsApp is controlled by a single company.
If you were arguing that XMPP or something like that should be used instead of SMS, okay, that's one thing, but I have a hard time favoring a walled garden.
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