Samsung has released a new video in support of Google’s #GetTheMessage campaign which calls for Apple to adopt RCS or “Rich Communication Services,” the cross-platform protocol pitched as a successor to SMS that adopts many of the features found in modern messaging apps… like Apple’s own iMessage.
Breaking news: Apple and majority of its users still don’t care.
I’d love to have RCS, but it’s not a make or break feature for me, and I’m tech savvy enough to know what it is and what it does. Good luck trying to convince the average consumer to give a fuck about invisible tech that doesn’t meaningfully change their experience.
yeah, people are use to having 10 different chat apps, and it seams to be normal, which is sad (somebody should make a standard! *insert that xkcd comic about making a better standard)
With RCS there seams to be less chance that they destroy it like they did with XMPP (google / Facebook and cie)
Well, it would change their experience. They would see improved photo quality to/from Android users via text messages. But Apple has managed to train people to think that Apple’s refusal to put iMessage on other devices is somehow a shortcoming of Android.
Considering how much time Apple users spend bitching about green text bubbles and “shitty android photos” it would meaningfully impact their experience when talking to anyone that’s not on iPhone.
Apple deliberately makes it appear that way so the competition looks bad.
They don’t really advertise the fact that they’re quietly intercepting all of their customers messages to other customers and routing them through a proprietary network.
And if you dare leave, messages from your old iPhone friends mysteriously won’t arrive unless you proactively deregister your number from iMessage or it eventually expires out.
…or when you are given a new number from the provider and dont find out it doesn’t recieve messages from iPhones.
Happened to my fiance a few months back. She got a new number, and her dad received no messages from her. (He had an iPhone) It was fathers day weekend. All plans fell through.
I’d love to have RCS if only because iMessage is literally the only reason I have an iPhone.
I got roped into it because all my friends and family refuse to change to be able to exchange media messages with essentially just one person.
Granted, as far as phones go, it’s pretty damn good and aged incredibly well. My 12 pro max performs better than any flagship I’ve owned previously would’ve at the 3 year mark.
Then you just refuse to chat with all of your friends and family. Problem solved. They don’t get to pick which phone you are going to buy because of a mere communication problem.
Let me be clear, I care more about my friends and family than I do about what kind of phone I have.
Nobody wants to use anything except the default app or maybe FB Messenger (which…just…no, for so many reasons). But Apple wants to make sure that their default app remains intrinsically incompatible with the default app on every other major brand phone.
Not that they have much of a choice. They know that if iMessage were compatible with RCS, they’d lose a handful of customers like me. And they probably wouldn’t earn any new Android customers as a result.
Supporting RCS in iMessage is the “right” thing to do, IMO, but there’s absolutely no incentive for Apple to do it, so they will probably only ever adopt it if their hand is forced.
Apple don’t want it because it removes part of their marketing strategy. (Being, if your friends have Apple, you also need apple)
Apple Users don’t know what it is.
You say you don’t know what it is or does. Yet you say you’d love to have it. That’s quite contradictory don’t you think?
And it WOULD impact their experience.
It amazes me that people like you, who don’t actually know or understand the topic, can be so vocal about your opinions and conclusions. About something you don’t know.
It’s the USB-C standard all over… “Apple and majority of their users don’t care”. And that’s still not what it’s about. It’s about setting a standard so we don’t need 9 different cables and 7 different apps, just to send a God damn picture or video.
Edit: I misread the comment. I take back what I said that’s striked over. My bad. Sorry.
It sucks because there are so many great alternatives to most big tech solutions but it doesn’t matter until you can convince people of the benefits of using those alternatives.
Gotta love how Google has spent the last, what, 10 years?, fighting iMessage and losing due to their own short-sightedness/lack of focus and incompetence. The company that dethroned MSN Messenger couldn’t win a fight against an opponent that, on a global scale, represents ~25% of the mobile market. Meanwhile, Whatsapp dominates the instant messaging world.
I really thought Facebook overspent when they bought Whatsapp for $1B but I was wrong. It took Google too long to finally get behind a single messaging strategy. That’s just poor leadership.
In order to grow a chat app you need a consistent and stable interface over a long period of time. It can’t have too much bullshit in it either.
In order to grow your career at Google you need to build ridiculous shit and then leave once you get your promo. Entire departments get reorged so someone can hit their people manager quota.
Product groups, business units, “orgs”, VPs, SVPs, it’s all just a game and “everyone’s playing except you.” This is why Google kills shit. Because Google rewards behavior that results in killing shit.
I used it too. I miss it, but i get why they removed it: it just kinda breaks the Signal user experience and trust model. This app lives and dies by the users trust their conversations will be private. By having an option to message someone in a completely unencrypted, easy to intercept mode like SMS it risks this trust for little gain (some power users like us liked it). By removing it, the app concentrates on what is expected from it and removes a big possibility for user error while fleshing out its marketing image even more. It makes perfect sense but its a tad annoying.
I understand what you’re saying, but I feel it was pretty transparent the way they handled SMS vs. Signal Messages. I suppose it’s a bit like the D.W. meme, though.
Unfortunately, in doing so, Signal became Yet Another Messaging App. It really damaged their value proposition in my eyes.
If I need a separate app for SMS, WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram, Signal, etc, it just becomes a chore to find enough friends willing to move to it exclusively.
The IM ecosystem really needs to be harmonized on the user end. I remember Trillian was this great app back in the day that brokered all your MSM, Google Chat, etc IM accounts into a single app that let you just focus on messaging people and not worrying about what platform was being used. We badly need this again.
Matrix can kinda emulate this kind of “all messages in one app” experience with bridges but you introduce a single server who decrypts all your end to end encryption so you pretty much have to self host. Also the bridges arent perfect so your msgs will sometimes look weird or not support some features.
A shared frontend would be a little more convenient, but is having multiple apps that big a deal? I think I have eight right now.
Android’s default Contacts app has buttons for each option a given contact has so there’s not even much cognitive load to pick the app you need if you start from there.
Most chat apps will sync with Contacts if you allow them to. If you don’t do that, then you have to remember which app you want for each person, which becomes inconvenient if you have a lot of contacts who use different apps.
I understand that they wanted stay true their philosophy but that decision is the reason we will never see Signal be relevant ever again. I hope they do a U turn
I always thought having SMS support in Signal created a significant risk of confusion about what kind of message the user was sending. Of course sophisticated users always knew the difference, but it’s for software that emphasizes security it’s better not to have to tell people who don’t understand the technical details “it’s secure unless…”.
It’s a valid point that it could potentially create some confusion when a user assumes that everything in Signal is secure. Unencrypted SMS threads could contain an open padlock icon and even an ominous red window border, but someone inevitably will not understand the difference.
However, my frustration has been how both convenience and security is reduced by removing SMS from Signal.
Many people will continue to use SMS for a variety of reasons, necessitating the use of an additional app. So now we have people continuing to communicate over this insecure protocol, but with the additional target vector of potential vulnerabilities in the supplemental app.
Unless the EU makes them, they’re not adopting rcs. I could see them putting out an imessage app for Android though. Probably ad supported to make the experience extra shitty for us. They’d quickly own the messaging market, at least in the US.
Internal memos explicitly stated execs were worried that if they brought iMessage to android, poor families might buy their kids cheap android phones instead of iPhones.
Ok I’ll ask, how is iMessage fundamentally any different from texting (other than this RCS stuff)? You can still text. Or is it that weird color thing or checkmark that kids are social pressured into?
This was the experience Android users had initially, then Android started parsing them and adding the reaction to the message. This is also when iMessage started getting that type of message instead of the reaction, as a sort of dig at iMessage
Images are a lot lower resolution (and no “live” photos which are cute if your mom takes a pic of their pet bunny), you can’t add people to group chats or rename them, you can’t see if someone’s read or typed your message, you can’t “like” texts without them appearing like the above post, I think there are even sound bites, little games but I haven’t played with them.
Are “custom stickers” (or whatever they’re called) a thing on Android? My dad’s been having a blast taking a bunch of goofy pictures of himself and making stickers out of them. We get a good laugh out of them whenever he sends us a pic of himself leaning into the screen giving us the finger.
Iphone users keep sending me long horribly compressed videos i can’t see at all because it’s not a problem between iPhones. And something about group chats?
And Android users send me postage-stamp sized videos I can’t see at all. Not gunning, just saying it’s a problem in both directions (and apple’s fault). Also, Android doesn’t have the same easter eggs, like automatic confetti filling my screen when someone writes the word “congratulations!” in iMessage. Oh, right - iMessage gives me in-line replies and the ability to give a thumbs up/down/heart etc. response to a single message. Don’t know if android has this feature, but android users just get a blank text if I “thumbs up” a comment, for example.
Some android messaging apps have the ability to interpret emoji reactions and display them correctly. The issue with photo and video quality is infuriating, though.
Google Messages (RCS app) does that. It even works from iMessage to Android but that is just because Google parses the SMS text that says they reacted that iMessage passive-aggressively sends and makes it appear correctly. It’s not following RCS protocol, it’s basic text parsing is all.
Incidentally, Google also started sending the same pass-aggressive reacted SMS messages to iPhone users for those using those RCS features, so now Apple gets the messages Android users had to deal with for years (and still do, if they aren’t using Messages). I don’t know is Apple is doing the same parsing or not as Google, if they aren’t then somewhat ironically to Apple’s intention Android now has the better react experience.
It’s a lot of things, and Apple kinda backed into the lock-in aspect I think by mistake. At the time it debuted, you mainly used SMS when mobile texting, and SMS is garbage. It’s not encrypted, was limited to a small number of characters, etc. Picture/video messaging also isn’t part of the standard, so MMS was tacked on with massive limits, because the thing about SMS is that it wasn’t really designed with it’s own bandwidth in mind and instead piggybacked on the carrier signal in idle time (I’m real fuzzy on the details because it’s been so long, if someone knows exactly that would be helpful context.) Most importantly, in the US at least, SMS was a fee carriers absolutely scalped you for. When iMessage came out, carriers were still charging absolutely stupid prices for a package of like 200 texts and per text after, and receiving also counted towards that.
Apple says “hey we have the internet on this thing, let’s make it a feature that when you send to other iPhone users it doesn’t count against your text package” and then built a “modern” text platform. E2E, rich image/video support, the stuff you mention, etc. They made it so that you didn’t have to worry about whether your friend was on iPhone, you could send a message to their number and Apple would figure it out. The green bubble thing initially was just “btw you’re paying for this one.” The reason I say they kinda backed into the lock-in thing is because obviously the idea here was “buy an iPhone and stop paying stupid carrier fees” which is obviously a lock-in strategy, but that aspect of the carrier plans basically collapsed as Facebook released Messenger that same year, so it quickly became “unlimited for $20” and then just “it’s all in your plan (which we’re just being less obvious bout gouging you on.)”
The green bubble thing sticks around though in the US largely because the US is one of the few places where iMessage becomes a major player in the messaging space, probably because the US market sees a larger share of iPhone sales due to economics and Apple not really having a low-end strategy except “buy an older iPhone.” Other places go to WhatsApp or WeChat or whatever, but Apple continues to grow (I think around 55% in the US?) and now it’s an annoyance for everyone. I don’t think I’ve ever really seen anyone care about the green bubble other than “shit now I have to figure out how to send them this video of the whatever.” At least for younger generations, this just means that the primary text method becomes Snap (me and my wife are about the only people my kids open the Messages app instead of Snap for) while the olds all use Facebook Messenger, and those who refuse just spend more of their day annoyed.
Anyway, it was a nice convenience when it launched. Personally, I think Apple has little reason to develop and process messaging for free for Android and businesses don’t do things to be nice, but they’re all about service revenue, so I think they should release an Android app, and make it easy to buy stickers and shit like that, send money via Apple Pay, etc. iMessage has already subtly shifted that direction on iPhone and I know at least in my friend/family group we pass money around like that all the time, and this becomes another thing that’s sort of annoying when we hang out with someone who isn’t on iOS. also, probably obviously, but it’s not even like “oh we’re hanging out with the poor friend on Android” or anything, he is also holding a $900-$1200 phone, so the lack of interop on these types of things that should probably just be a protocol is annoying af.
Yes, having to figure out how to send a video is super annoying. The easiest default is FB messenger because everyone has it, but fuck I don’t like giving my private messages to meta.
My go-to is just to send an iCloud link. I technically have a Facebook account, but for various social reasons I don’t tell anyone and basically only use it for occasionally browsing marketplace. Even that is more data than I like to give Facebook.
Wikipedia sais WhatsApp was released 2009, two years before iMessage. So the idea wasn’t new and they most likely didn’t lock out Android users by accident.
Of course the idea wasn’t new. That’s very nearly Apple’s business model - they’re rarely first to market with a technology. I’m sure if I go look, AIM was probably in there pretty close the App Store launch. But Apple’s implementation was quite new. Everyone in the US at least was texting with the phone number as the identifier. Apple made it so that no one had to change any habits, use the same method for texting you have been literally in the same app you always have, and if you text another iPhone it just works better. They didn’t make it worse on Android.
I’m not sure how this is “lockout.” I already made the argument it’s a lock-in tactic, but like when Tesla came out with the supercharger network, should I be mad that it doesn’t gas up my Honda? Why would we expect that Apple is going to develop and maintain an app for Android for free and the massive amount of infrastructure that goes with it any more than I would expect Tesla to have added a gas pump to the supercharger network? And similar, it’s not like superchargers existing means all of the gas stations are gone.
It’s also worth noting that RCS functionally didn’t exist during development of iMessage (I think they were forming a committee to decide which committee will implement committee structure votes or something) and that even now RCS implementation is questionable at best between not having E2E as a requirement and the fragmentation that exists even across Android and most especially carriers (lots of examples of RCS being iffy in this thread alone) so it wasn’t like Apple looked at a fully-formed SMS/MMS replacement and chose to do their own thing.
Then you tack on 10 years of Google absolutely fumbling the bag with their messaging strategy (everyone reading is thinking of a different one - you’re all correct) and now we end up in the situation we’re in where not only did iMessage lock-in work for Apple, it worked better than they hoped and it’s not just keeping people on iPhone, it’s actively attracting people.
My optimistic take on this is that I hope they decide the lock-in isn’t worth it in favor of the type of model where they monetize through Apple Pay and stuff and build an Android app because I sincerely doubt there is any other way toward unified messaging, in much the same as Tesla now licensing superchargers to other EV makers. As it stands, Apple could give a shit about Samsung’s ads, and aside from the lock-in, a core of their brand is privacy/security so RCS as-is will be a non-starter. Well covered in this thread, but the EU isn’t coming to save us and the US has congress that can’t even regulate it’s own bowel movements, so
The Tesla comparison would work better this way: while you’re driving to another Tesla owner’s place, you’re having a smooth ride, no bumps, car works as expected. Then you put your other friends address into into the navigation and the radio switches to noisy FM and one of the headlights starts to flicker. It’s lock-out because no non-iphone user can join that club. It’s not lock-in, because every iphone user could easily switch to one of the “cross-platform” messangers. Not that I like Google. They’re both sh*t. But just opening up your infrastructure for others doesn’t mean you have to develop and maintain apps for other OSes.
SMS works the same as it ever has. Apple hasn’t broken anything, they’re not polluting SMS, it’s always been shit. The Tesla (probably touching a little more on real life) shipped with shitty QA that gave you a crap light and bad stereo. If you take Apple completely out of the equation and just process standard SMS between two Android phones, it’s still going to be garbage. If you add an iPhone, nothing changes. When you add iMessage into the mix, it’s still not breaking anything, only adding a shim on top of SMS, which admittedly sucks, but I think users would rather see “float liked your message” rather than no acknowledgement. This is also what’s happening on Android (and also iOS) a lot of the time.
But just opening up your infrastructure
“Just” is doing a frick-ton of work in that sentence. At a minimum, they would have had to build and maintain data centers, or at the very least add a lot of capacity to existing centers to support potentially quite likely a few hundred million to a billion Android users. Now you have to design and document APIs for other people’s use. This alone is why I said just build the app themselves, believe it or not it’s probably easier/less headache in the long term. And then there is supporting the API, the users on non-Apple platforms…
And why do they want to do that? We’re talking about many millions in expenditure per year for Apple for which they get nothing except less competitive advantage.
I can only tell you about Europe, because nobody here seems to use imessage. SMS are basically dead since the first generation of smartphones came out. They are used for OTP codes from banks sometimes but that’s it. The only reason why people use SMS in the US seems to be Apple. They didn’t make SMS worse than they were (which would be hard to achieve), but they basically force people to keep using them. Well, or abandon their apple friends. For the API, I think Apple could afford that, honestly. They don’t have to handle the data between Android phones if they support some form of federation. Only between Apple and Apple, and Apple and Android. Your operator also handles SMS when they go to or come from other operators. I think Apple just likes the peer pressure they seem to create with that app in the US. From a business perspective that might be smart, sure. Still, very malicious behavior. I’m glad there’s more and more regulation coming up (at least in the EU). If imessage wasn’t a niche here, they’d have to comply.
The only reason why people use SMS in the US seems to be Apple. They didn’t make SMS worse than they were (which would be hard to achieve), but they basically force people to keep using them.
I can’t explain why, but the default in the US is still to exchange phone numbers, and that means SMS. We have all of the same options, but moving to another messaging service just didn’t happen here. Even adjusting for time frame - iMessage had little power until at least 2013-14, which I’m by that time was probably long enough to move on in the EU and quite a lot of the rest of the world, and we were still using phone numbers.
Only between Apple and Apple, and Apple and Android.
This isn’t a standard that can be enshrined in law. I want to create NightOS on the NightPhone (which honestly sounds rad) this basically locks me out of doing that.
They don’t have to handle the data between Android phones if they support some form of federation.
Again, “support” doing a lot of work. You don’t just “support” a billion users. Huge time, attention, cost, even if you’re not storing the data.
Still, very malicious behavior.
“Malicious” implies intent. You can not like it, my post doesn’t even indicate that I like it (back to the original, I highlight a business case that makes sense for Apple to open this up) but just saying “I don’t feel like supporting your OS” is not malicious. Companies do it all. the. time. Any modern iOS device is many times more powerful than a Nintendo Switch or a Playstation 4, is every developer that doesn’t support iOS “malicious?” Even just regular people do this all of the time - me being on some social media but not others is not malicious, it’s just because I decide where my attention goes. We’re all making trade offs. The game companies don’t support Apple because the effort to profit ratio is too low. I don’t go on Facebook or reddit because as trivial, my ad impressions are actual money and I don’t want to support those companies. Apple so far hasn’t put iMessage on Android because it just doesn’t make sense for them to do it.
Your basic supposition comes down to “Apple should do a lot of work for less than free.”
It doesn’t make sense for them to do because their customers don’t seem to care.
“Malicious” implies intent.
It’s just a guess but all of Googles failed messengers were probably available for iOS, too. Apple on the other hand is known to intentionally make things incompatible with other brands.
Right, the customers who pay them to make the products they buy don’t care. Why would they put the immense amount of effort and money into building something for people who are not their customers? Apple isn’t a non-profit or a government program paid for by taxes.
Yes, Google’s messengers were available everywhere because that’s their business model. Google sells your eyeballs and is an advertising company. They’re not messaging, they’re not video, they’re not even search - those are just products to support their actual business which is to sell ads. Ad companies by default benefit from being anywhere that people who have eyes are.
Apple is not an ad company, they sell hardware. They gain nothing from making something for free for other platforms. They make stuff that enhances their products and provide them a competitive advantage. Like, basically every company ever. They do make things occasionally for other platforms, but only when it actually makes sense. The iPod, for example, launched as a Mac-only product, because at launch they thought this was an accessory that would sell Macs. When it turned out the iPod was a runaway success, they built iTunes and the iTunes Store for Windows and opened up compatibility. In modern times, AppleTV+ or Apple Music launched as Apple-only services. Then they decided to move to other things, so you can now watch AppleTV+ on a Fire Stick or Vizio TV, and Music is on Android…
Apple on the other hand is known to intentionally make things incompatible with other brands.
This is simply false. Not making something for everyone is not the same as making it deliberately incompatible. Even the only actual examples of Apple choosing something deliberately incompatible is often a trade-off that where Apple (and usually their customers) decide the trade-off is worth losing compatibility. The largest example is Lightning, and when it was invented it was the best connector available. Even now, I’d make a lot of argument it’s the best connector available, but the drop off to USB-C is no longer worth the trade-off of incompatibility. MagSafe (the MacBook kind) is another such, where Apple tried to drop their proprietary charger early in favor of USB-C and there was enough customer outcry they had to bring it back because it offers something USB-C does not.
Outside of these few rare examples, Apple actually has had to put in a large amount of effort in order to ensure compatibility. Most obvious example is things like working with Microsoft so Office would run on Macs, who actually do a lot of the things you claim about Apple. Through the 90s-2000s, MS couldn’t even be counted on to keep compatibility between it’s own Office versions so you’d be forced into buying a new license.
More relevant to today, Apple is the major reason why the web hasn’t developed into just Google Chrome, and other standards-based browsers like Firefox can still exist. Fortunately Apple is large enough that as long as they continue to run their own browser and engine (Webkit, which they contribute heavily to open-source) the web can’t simply fall into Google’s hands. Which, is another example of actual deliberate incompatibility, as Chrome/Chromium tends to only follow standards when it feels like it. Or even more simply, just run Firefox and see how Google’s products perform compared to just changing your user-agent. Or many other “chrome only” web apps. MS gave up and now runs Chromium, pretty much every other goddamn browser is Chromium based (Brave, Vivaldi, Arc, etc) and Firefox is now not relevant enough to stem the tide of Google. It’s just Apple and the few billion iOS devices that are keeping the open web, well, open. Because as previously described, Apple is not an ad company, and their benefit comes in continuing to sell devices that their customers like, which means a good web browser that isn’t spying on them.
Anyway, I’m out after this one. You can not like Apple or Google or whoever all you want, but best to stick to factual reasons that kind of make sense, at least. It’s like, I have another tab open where people are trying to argue with a straight face that Google should basically just make Youtube, which costs billions a year to operate, totally free with no ads and no fees. I obviously am not a fan of Google (I actually kinda hope they took the advice, Google dying would be a good thing for the web and privacy in general) but do people not understand that companies exist to make money and are by definition not charities?
iMessage is basically proprietary RCS. SMS doesn’t support images, for example. When you send an image via “sms” you’re really probably using “mms” behind the scenes, which has severe limits to quality. If you send an image with imessage, RCS, or any of a variety of custom messaging protocols, you can get the full-quality image.
They also support gimmicks like “reacting” to messages which get overlaid in-line with a heart icon. On SMS it is sent as “MooseBoys loved ‘be right there’”.
They also support gimmicks like “reacting” to messages which get overlaid in-line with a heart icon. On SMS it is sent as “MooseBoys loved ‘be right there’”.
Technically, yes SMS doesn’t support reactions. But you can do what Google does and just parse that text and “turn” it into a reaction for viewing purposes.
If an iPhone user sends me a reaction it looks fine to me, but funnily enough now when I send one back it looks the exact way Apple sends it to non Apple devices.
It is not open, it is controlled by the telcos, and google has been pushing their own proprietary version of RCS to the telcos.
It’s no better than iMessage. This isn’t a problem in the rest of the world, they just all use WhatsApp.
This is a legacy of the US being out in front of adoption of SMS, and it still being ingrained. It’s largely only a US problem. And it’s not even really a problem.
I love iMessage, but I have WhatsApp and signal and like 19 other apps that offer messaging for people who prefer it.
but I have WhatsApp and signal and like 19 other apps that offer messaging
That’s the problem. Maybe it’s a cultural thing, but Americans seem to be quite averse to downloading a new app or signing up for a new service just to communicate with someone if I have their phone number. As a result, it needs to be supported by default on all phones as shipped. Today, the only thing that fits that is SMS.
I guess. I’m American and interact with plenty of friends via discord, instagram and others. My friend group has a private discord and I use DMs instead of iMessage all the time.
how is iMessage fundamentally any different from texting
Not entirely sure what you’re asking but
iOS does not allow you to use any other messaging app for SMS. This is surely intentional to lock you into iMessage.
If you’re messaging iOS --> iOS your “text” messages (SMS) are automatically upgraded to the iMessage protocol, and there are a wide variety of features that are enabled without the user downloading any other apps or switching the protocol. It just happens.
Above commenter was saying that you’re not allowed to use any other app besides the default messages app to send SMS on an iPhone, so a third party can’t just come in with an SMS app that also implements RCS so everyone can be happy
Kids might want an Android phone for another reason than “we’re poor”. For a while, there were plenty of apps you could get on an Android that you couldn’t get on an iPhone. Customization was a big deal back when I was in highschool. All the cool kids had these shitty custom launchers that made their phone borderline unusable if you didn’t know how they were setup, but that was the cool thing to do back then.
I’ve got the money to buy an iPhone, but prefer Android for customization and app reasons still. Apple is far too restrictive of a phone that you own. I like the ability to side load apps, and I play a lot of emulated GBA/DS games, and apple doesn’t allow emulator apps on their store.
I can afford an iPhone 15 but I run a used OnePlus 6T I got on eBay for $100 because postmarketOS runs well on it. I ran a $200 PinePhone for a while before that. Bring on the phones that put the user’s control ahead of the profits.
I’d read it the way it was written. Apple has less expensive phones for people who want them, and honestly most poor families just get their phones through their carrier at a monthly rate, so your assertion isn’t really a necessary tactic.
Do you think the problem lies with Apple, or the idiot kids that somehow created a hierarchy around a text bubble color?
And let’s face it- if you owned/ran a company that was making fuck-tons of money because idiot kids rallied around exclusive text bubble colors, you’d want to keep that going as well. Don’t even try lying about it.
No, they’re not. They didn’t make the kids rally around bubble colors. They didn’t create the hierarchy. Nor did they create any enticements or reward those that used it. It just happened. Not doing anything to stop it isn’t exploiting it.
And expecting any company to cater to the stupidity of its or it’s competitor’s user base is fucking ignorant.
As I said- you k ow damn well you’d do the exact same thing about it- which is nothing. And collect tons of cash.
It’s not just the bubble color. The bubble color means it will be more difficult to exchange photos/videos (they get sent in MMS and compressed to hell) or use stickers/reactions properly.
So? Why is that Apple’s problem to fix? Whining about this is the same as whining to your neighbors because their kids have nicer sneakers than your kids do- and then expecting them to fix the problem.
If you want to have the features of an iPhone- GET AN IPHONE.
SMS isold and shitty, but its supported on every phone model. Apple stacked iMessage on top of it for rich media when both endpoints support iMessage. android and others stacked RCS on top of SMS for the same rich media purposes. When incompatible devices communicate (iOS<->non-iOS), they fall back to crappy SMS. You’re saying you like the separate-system status quo and if you want to communicate with one group or the other (iOS or non-iOS), switch devices. We’re saying why can’t we all just have one rich-media format that works for everybody?" I don’t care if Apple switches to RCS or opens up full-featured iMessage to everybody. I just want to be able to talk to all my friends without us having to buy the same hardware. Are you just being intentionally obtuse?
I have an iPhone, and the primary reason why is because 90% of my friends and family will not adopt another app for messaging. Why should they when literally everyone else they communicate with can take iMessages?
But when everyone is passing around photos and videos, the one person who greatly prefers open-standards gets (and sends) potato quality.
And that is really Apples “fault”. Not really, though, because it’s not an accident that they have an amazing messaging platform that is the system default and just so happens to be proprietary. And as such they have no incentive to fix it, because it will only lead to people like me leaving iPhone.
Yeah. I’m done arguing with these clowns. They think they’re entitled to something without having to pay for it. Apple’s messaging platform is superior.
End of story.
And why should they take a proprietary product and make it accessible to other platforms because a bunch of kids decided to create some bullshit ‘*Lord of the Flies-*like idolatry about it. I swear- they think Android is so superior to apple, and then cry about how Apple won’t they them have iMessage? ROFL!
I feel Europe is a lot more diverse than you think. In Norway, which have a fairly high percentage of iPhone users, iMessage is the most used - or at least I don’t know anyone who doesn’t use it by default.
A few friends chat are on Messenger or Snapchat. Signal / Telegram / WhatsApp etc are extremely rare.
Under new EU laws, Apple will be forced to allow interoperability with iMessage in the future. That doesn’t necessarily mean them adopting RCS or bringing iMessage to non-Apple platforms, but it does mean they’ll need to at the very least publish an API allowing external software or services to use iMessage.
I think they found imessage not to be a leading platform so AFAIK this isn’t the case for now. Maybe if more people start using it they’ll revisit the question.
Is there any precedent to ads in Apple products (apart from their store)? Although they’ll surely find other ways to annoy non-Apple users, I don’t think ads are “in style” for them.
I tried using the Apple app on Android for tracking the tracking thingies. Horrible, horrible app. I will not be trusting anything put out by Apple for Android unless they do a Microsoft and go all in. Otherwise, they will always have a reason to make the Android experience worse than the iPhone experience.
This is what I believe Google is actually trying to get carriers to do, and I suspect carriers (in some shape or form) will actually do this, just not in the way you think.
RCS will eventually become the dominant messaging standard, however, I think they’re actually working on a backwards compatibility for SMS and MMS in some capacity. In this way, phones (like the iPhone or older Android phones) will still be capable of sending and receiving SMS and MMS in typical elitist walled-garden fashion, but the carrier will receive it as an RCS message and relay it to an RCS-compatible device as an RCS message.
In this way, group chats with four Android users and two iPhone users will still allow those Android users to benefit from RCS from each other (typing indicators, reactions, potentially some level of E2E, support for large media, etc), while the iPhones in the group chat will actually be the ones having a negative experience (no typing indicators, reactions appearing as text messages, no E2E, obnoxious green bubbles) since Apple refuses to integrate RCS into their Messaging application. Of course Apple will continue to gaslight their customers through high contrast green bubble dark patterns, and continued refusal of adopting RCS or creating iMessage for Android. As they’ve made clear, they don’t care about giving their customers the best possible experience, and prefer to maintain market control for as long as possible.
The #GetTheMessage ads are likely gearing up for the eventuality of this change, and the Pixel x iPhone ads are all “buddy buddy, kill them with kindness” so they can out Apple as the hostile ones when they refuse to acknowledge the existence of other smartphones either through its aggressive marketing, or through refusal to adopt open standards.
If this were all to happen, depending on how well the RCS backwards compatibility worked and its ability to out Apple as the shut ins that they are, I could (crazy talk) foresee Apple creating a standalone iMessage app to, at the very minimum, keep Android users talking within their iMessage ecosystem.
RCS isn’t a good solution. As long as all RCS implementations are proprietary and Google doesn’t even include an RCS client in AOSP and doesn’t let you use a third-party client it’s just as shitty as iMessage. Just use Signal, it’s FOSS, cross-plattform and stores as little data about you as possible. It’s also not run by some garbage big tech corporation.
I lost half the people I’d gotten on signal when they removed sms. People liked it well enough when they could do all their messaging from one app on Android.
Why is it so hard for Americans to use multiple chat apps? Here in Europe, most people (especially those with friends/family in a different European country, because we use different apps in every country) have an entire folder full of chat apps on their phone. Sure, that’s not great, but pretty much everyone accepts it when I “force” them to use Signal.
Why would anyone want to stop using iMessage? It’s honestly quite good and the app integrations are great. Honestly the only iPhone users I know who don’t use iMessage are due to network effects (families in foreign countries where Whatsapp dominates).
It’s not about people wanting to stop using iMessage. It’s that over half of the mobile customer base CANNOT use iMessage because apple refuses to allow it. If Apple had created a solid Android app for iMessage, RCS would never have been created.
Transport Layer Security, or TLS, is a widely adopted security protocol designed to facilitate privacy and data security for communications over the Internet. A primary use case of TLS is encrypting the communication between web applications and servers, such as web browsers loading a website.
iMessage doesn’t ‘work’ unless you’re on an Apple device. Then it’s just falling back to using SMS, at which point Apple fanboys/girls start bitching because the text bubbles are ‘the wrong color’ which it’s seriously the most ridiculous first-world problem I’ve ever heard of.
RCS is an attempt to provide similar functionality to EVERYONE without the walled-garden lock-in.
While I’d much rather a fully open (inl source), non-proprietary solution exist, until such time RCS is at least an attempt at a step in the right direction.
Insert meme: You (iMessage user) can’t use RCS because Apple won’t let you. I (Android User) can’t use iMessage because Apple won’t let me. We are not the same…
at which point Apple fanboys/girls start bitching because the text bubbles are ‘the wrong color’ which it’s seriously the most ridiculous first-world problem I’ve ever heard of.
Wait…… isn’t this the whole point of the article? Samsung and Google are bitching because they don’t want to be green bubbles. Don’t make it out like this is all iPhone users. Google has had I can’t count how many substandard messaging apps, but now they’ve developed their own proprietary format and are crying for Apple to support it.
So let me get this straight, Google & Samsung want Apple to be forced to do something that will cost Apple sales and increase sales for their competitors. Good luck with that.
I’ve never originally seen, heard, or read anyone complaining about the wrong color bubbles except for iMessage users.
The article is just about Samsung and Google poking fun at Apple about it.
What I want is for all of the companies to, use a common (preferably open) standard for messaging as a default. I don’t give a shit which it is.
Ideally they would all do so voluntarily because it’s the right thing to do for their users. Since Apple refuses to let anyone else use iMessage, RCS was created, and made available to be used, even by Apple.
But apparently Apple can’t be bothered to play nice with others no matter what because all they care about is squeezing every possible dollar they can out of their suckers, I mean users.
What I want is for all of the companies to, use a common (preferably open) standard for messaging as a default. I don’t give a shit which it is. Ideally they would all do so voluntarily because it’s the right thing to do for their users. Since Apple refuses to let anyone else use iMessage, RCS was created, and made available to be used, even by Apple.
So Apple came up with a great system that encourages people to stay in the ecosystem, and Google is mad about it. So Google comes up with an iMessage clone, and now they’re pitching a fit that everybody won’t jump onto their implementation. Which, while RCS is open, Google’s implementation is not. “Apple is locking everyone into their system! Make them stop so we can get them locked into ours!”
But apparently Apple can’t be bothered to play nice with others no matter what because all they care about is squeezing every possible dollar they can out of their suckers, I mean users.
Wait… wait… you think Apple (or any other company for that matter) should do what’s best for those that aren’t they’re customers?? So I’m going to say this again a little louder for the people in the back - Apple is under no obligation to modify the way their products work to promote the competition, which will lose them sales. And as an Apple stockholder, I’m beyond fine with that.
So does 4G. Imagine if apple refused to support 5G? Yes the end consumer might not notice but apple refusing RCS is them refusing to update an old standard to it’s next version. I guess they dragged their feet with USC C and kept with a old USB 2.0 lighting cable for so long…
They could adopt RCS. But still keep iMessage users using their iMessage service backend and have the green/blue bubble thing still.
That pretty much only affected the small percentage of American users that used Signal for the SMS integration. For everyone else it literally made no difference whatsoever. Besides, it is completely in line with their vision to not include SMS since it is an insecure protocol.
I'd argue the percentage wasn't small. The available population was Android users with SMS contacts.
Either way, it was an unforced error by the Signal leadership that gave away their competitive advantage in their home field to mainly Google and Facebook apps.
There is no way to convince me to go back to supporting Signal after that blunder. They destroyed my secure contacts network in less than two months after the announcement.
True, however it’s not as polished as Signal and not as noob friendly. I’ve been using Matrix daily for a couple years using Fluffychat and Element and not much has changed.
Phone number resolution is already a feature with identity servers but most servers don’t implement it.
Also have to choose a server increases the barrier of entry. I guess element works around that by defaulting to matrix.org although that’s not a great solution.
Because the technical part has been solved for a while and this has moved into being a social problem. My kids only use iMessage/SMS for people over thirty, and use Snap with all of their friends. In family groups, you standardize on on whatever. Most of my extended family decided on FB Messenger a while ago (I don’t participate, but my wife does and can fill me in.) My immediate family just uses iMessage. Friend groups I’ve seen generally do the same. They pick Telegram or WhatsApp or whatever, and then the quilting club just uses that. This also seems a very US centric issue - basically everywhere else is either on whatsapp or Line or WeChat or whatever.
Why should anyone care about RCS? The trend has been to get everything into data instead of carrier owned services for two decades now, we don’t need another SMS (it will likely always be a fallback). What we should move onto is a carrier and device type angnostic universal standard protocol over TCP / QUIC like XMPP or Matrix, with SMS as the backup.
When you get a phone you can get an phone system account and a telephone number already. Modern apps in the Google ecosystem should already recognize you are already signed in with Google and sync your contacts. Since almost everyone is already in the Google ecosystem, if Google supported it they could have extended their XMPP implementation in Hangouts to allow messaging directly via XMPP to those contacts and SMS for anyone not yet in the system (similar to how Signal did, Apple does, and Google does now with RCS). Unlike Apple, since its just XMPP, users can still add friends and be added by friends on other XMPP servers (ex. their ISPs, their own, or a third party). They could have supported or jumpstarted a new very simple open source alternative app for that portion for AOSP if the EU complained. Eventually Carriers could have supported passthroughs for those still on feature phones and other users of SMS to use the number@carrier accounts to hit XMPP users with generated SMS numbers for non-SMS users (pushed either by business necessity or part of a government / teleco org like GSMA staged removal of SMS and telephone numbers). It’s all data at the end of the day.
Instead, they developed a whole new protocol to fluff the telecos and keep the now badly managed telephone number system even more necessary allowing spammers and allow the problems of legacy SMS to continue.
Apple, Google, and Samsung should all be shamed for not supporting fully open protocols and necessitating dependency on user harming stacks.
This sounds nice at a superficial level, but there’s a lot of reliability and backwards compatibility issues being ignored. During natural disasters and emergency situations, internet and cellular data are the first to fail. It’s not casual. For the phone and SMS (GSMA) protocols are sturdy enough that they can operate with very simple, low energy consuming and highly reliable machines. Internet data services on the other hand consume way more electricity (more expensive to have them operate with backup generators, for example) and are more delicate and prone to failure. They also need to be replaced more often. 100% of national emergencies systems run on phone and SMS tech, that could reliably operate for several decades with little maintenance that would cost billions to replace them with internet based system that were as reliable and durable. And then on top of it all, wired phones can even operate without electricity and connect with cellular terminals to contact other phones and cellphones. Only the tower needs to have power. There’s just a lot banked of that reliability that most modern conveniences don’t have.
I totally agree we can’t simply drop SMS immediately, but what am I missing in supporting backwards compatibility (for example via my pseudo number solution, like how VOIP works) preventing us from moving forward during a stagged shutdown in the span of decades? MMS and RCS both would also fail under cellular data loss, and SMS itself hasn’t always been available during major disasters. I’m not sure I buy the argument you can’t have similarly low energy towers (even with net neutrality states, you can still cap all bandwidth per user), and a simpler tower that only does data should be far more reliable than a tower that provides multiple carrier services given the simplicity (and it’s very rare to have towers that only do voice + SMS anymore).
I don’t know for certain. But one point to consider is that you have to qualify your “simply” statements with the fact that we are talking about millions of towers and hundreds of millions of repeaters over millions of square miles. While RCS works on top of the backbone that’s already there and fallsback to SMS by design. So it might actually be simpler. The big up is that the server is on the carrier, not centralized, which makes it entirely different than what you are talking about and giving it more resilience.
and SMS itself hasn’t always been available during major disasters.
Neither has running water or electricity. And SMS isn’t actually the last fall-back (over here), that’s FM radio which has better reach and crank-powered receivers start at like 10 bucks. Also there’s a ton of generator-powered receivers around (called cars). Oh, dang, no, that’s not actually the last fall-back that’d be megaphone trucks and cars practically all emergency service vehicles have some kind of PA system.
Solar storm killed the electrics of the new vehicles? There’s a 60-year old Unimog still standing around getting moved once a year to keep it operational and I bet you’ll find an analog megaphone in storage somewhere. It’s astonishing how little stuff gets thrown away, we once stumbled across a stash of field telephones, half of them with swastikas ground off, the others still intact. Those require a crank and a copper cable to operate, nothing more. We used them to organise parking for a summer camp before the days of mobile flatrates.
The actual upside of plain ole GSM is that practically everyone carries around a receiver all the time, and there’s reception literally everywhere. Better reach and better signal bandwidth than sirens, though of course nothing beats the oh fuck oh fuck hear it in your marrow aspect of sirens.
Catastrophe relief isn’t an area where you ever want to have a single strategy because absolutely nothing is 100% fail-safe. In principle something like TETRA would be better than GSM but civilian phones don’t speak it. (TETRA uses mesh networking, you can do direct handset to handset calls, drive around base stations in trucks to extend reach, etc)
Apple will never listen, but maybe the EU could decide it's important enough issue for them to force it. It's starting to feel like we should just go to them, first. I'd like to imagine we have another candidate problem for regulation enforced fixing, with Mac laptops' long-standing displayport multistream problem. Macs will only mirror and never extend to an nth monitor over displayport splitting ... but the availability of thunderbolt adapters as a workaround takes some of the "oomph" out of that argument. That one's been around like ten or more years.
The other issue alluded to by another commenter, though, is that rcs is not low-level in Android os quite like SMS is. Like the API to get the information into other competing apps is not there, so it seems a little bit hypocritical.
The EU could have had an effect on it via the DMA, but it seems that not many people use iMessage in the EU. People use Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger way more here, so those are forced into opening up.
iMessage message bubble colors seem to be an US problem.
Most people complaining about imessage are people who bought Android devices. In places where imessage use is prevalent, people with iphones tend to leave their android owning friends out of group chats and complain about their text bubble color being green if they text an android phone.
Well they aren’t leaving you out because of the color of the text bubble. It’s because having a phone that isn’t an iPhone in the group causes it to fallback to using MMS instead of imessage. They lose a lot of the features that iPhone users love about imessage and the quality of shared images and video is much worse. The moment someone tries to share a video and everyone just gets a blurry smudge of pixels is the moment all the iPhone users get their own group together.
Oh, I see the problem. You seem to have forgotten that you wrote:
Maybe don’t buy Apple hardware?
I was responding to your point. You appeared to be arguing that this was a problem that could just be solved by just buying a different phone. I was saying that the people complaining are already the ones buying different phones.
They are incompetent enough. They also see no reason to switch. They will tell you that other apps will also use your data and that Whatsapp is working fine for what they do with it. Doesn’t matter if it’s true.
Some even use the status to share stuff like Instagram and are addicted to it.
They’ll tell you that there’s no point in installing two apps. I’ve had that topic often enough.
Yeah that’s a big problem that I’m trying to research solutions for myself too. It was way better when I could tell people to just install Signal and it’d replace their SMS app but be secure when others use it, but unfortunately Signal dropped SMS. Currently I just have all the apps, but since Signal does contact discovery (like Whatsapp) I follow a Signal, Whatsapp, FB Messenger, RCS (via Google Messenger), then SMS pattern and stopping when I can contact someone. Obviously, this has the issue that all these apps are getting far more data than they need and I’d like to look into a multiplatform app that does e2e. From what I’ve researched so far, Matrix bridges (servers that connect your Matrix account to a third party messaging service) might be the answer.
I haven’t tried it yet but there is a Matrix bridge that you can host if you are selfhosting a Matrix server (or use a commercial Matrix provider that already hosts it) that will allow you to connect to your Whatsapp friends without needing the Whatsapp app yourself that could be interesting for at least that use case docs.mau.fi/bridges/go/setup.html?bridge=whatsapp .
A few years ago I thought so as well, but today, everyone of my friends and family is on Signal. Also, it’s not complicated to use, it’s basically the exact same user experience as on WhatsApp or Telegram. If normies can figure out WhatsApp, they can figure out Signal.
I didn’t say it was FOSS. I said that unlike iMessage, which Apple refuses to allow Android to use, RCS is available to be used by Apple if it so chooses.
Yes, a FOSS protocol/standard would be better, and I hope we have one done day that is actually available and used by default by both iOS and Android (and any other future players in the field). But until that happens, RCS is at least allowed to be used by other companies so it’s at least a small step in the right direction, even if Apple continues to stubbornly refuse to use it.
Signal is also available on every platform, you don’t need to use whatever chat app your phone’s manufacturer wants you to use, it’s your choice. And Signal is probably the best choice right now.
The only way something replaces WhatsApp is if WhatsApp stops existing.
Besides, RCS is not in any shape or form ready to the general public, considering all the blatant inconsistencies and instabilities, let alone replace one of the most used, tried and tested messaging platforms out there.
I switched my parents group chat to RCS from whatsapp after pestering them for ages.
Over the span of 2 months we had 4-5 inconsistencies where I would recieve a message from my mum or dad in the group that would be in another language or clearly not be written by them. It wouldn’t show up on her phone but my brother and dad would see it.
Here’s the proof of the last occassion it happened. They’re never going to switch now…
Okay, Samsung is the party with some credibility here. It’s a lot harder to hear Google whine about messaging standards when their churn in messaging has been hilarious and embarrassing.
Hangouts was so close to perfect before they blew it all up.
Now I’m using a mix of Chat and Voice and it’s terrible for everyone. Voice doesn’t even support RCS from what I can tell, and all my messages with iPhone users are full of reactions. It’s so annoying. I’ve had the same Google Voice number for over a decade, why is this so frustrating?
Samsung’s record on RCS isn’t great. Their Samsung Messages app didn’t work across networks for most of last year. Like RCS only worked on t-mobile, but only for t-mobile branded phones, and for some time they couldn’t send to AT&T. Not sure if Google Messages was much better during that time period.
Samsung has 0 credibility here because they just use Google messages and Google’s Jibe implementation of RCS.
If Google drops Jibe for something else, it means Samsung is as well.
RCS isn’t really a standard anymore either. Once Google put out their own proprietary Jibe implementation, everyone just adopted that instead of putting in the work to implement it themselves. All the carriers in the US use Jibe as their RCS backend, and Samsung moved to using Google Messages as their default messenger. And all RCS messages go through Google servers.
If Google decides to do something else and drop Jibe, like they have with every other messaging service they have had, that’s it for RCS.
AFAIK there is no open source messaging app that support RCS yet. It’s not even included in android AOSP (or is it? I can’t find any reference). It would help with adoption if google actually open-sourced the RCS client app.
Forgive me if I’m mistaken but did Signal adopt RCS? I they abandoned SMS for RC- if I recall - couldn’t SMS my friends on it anymore and abandoned ship lol
Fundamentally the problem is that SMS is rather dated and doesn’t support a lot of features expected of a modern messaging app. Apple decided to do what Apple does and made their own proprietary protocol that runs parallel to SMS. When you send a “text message” on iMessage it checks if the person you’re talking to is also using iMessage and if so sends the message via Apples private service. If they aren’t using iMessage it dumbs things down and send it via SMS as a fallback.
Google came along and more or less did the same thing but made their protocol (RCS) licensable which makes them slighty better than Apple, but it’s still not as good as an actual open standard.
Signal is yet another solution, but they were primarily focused on security and encryption rather than new features, but fundamentally they did the same thing as iMessage initially. About a year or two ago Signal dropped the option to fallback to SMS so now you can only send Signal messages between Signal users. Unlike Apple or Google, signals protocol is open, but Signal itself is closed source and I don’t believe they allow interop with their service so I’m not sure their protocol being open actually does much good.
Basically everyone sucks in their own way, but if you want SMS interop then the least bad option is RCS currently.
Well that’s interesting. I didn’t think they had made their server source available, but I just checked their github and it does actually have a repo for their server.
The simple fact that iMessage has 0 interoperability makes it much worse than everything else.
So I doubt RCS could be as bad except if they remove the ability to operate with other RCS clients. And even for Google and Samsung that would be extremely stupid.
I’ve just been googling a bit because I haven’t read about RCS in a while, but I remember thinking then that the show stopping thing is that it’s not E2E, and Apple would be dumb to move to since iMessage is. It seems now that E2E is supported but requires clients to support it, which tbh seems the worst of all worlds. At least today I know blue = encrypted, green = not encrypted. If it’s optional and we end up in a “is this encrypted? we’ll see ¯*(ツ)*/¯” type of world that is honestly terrible. I also don’t know how great it would be if you have to rely on the client vendor to accurately report encryption status because there are some I trust, and especially when it comes to “just download whatever RCS client you want” I absolutely would not trust that.
“Enable” is incorrect, and why I was warning you about it. It’s on by default, so you need to “disable” it if you want E2E encryption
A blue bubble is unlikely to mean a message is E2E encrypted. That may not matter for your threat model, but Apple almost certainly has the decryption keys for your messages
Also very good point. My threat model is I don’t want script kiddies with shit that they can get (optionally) off of eBay to be able to read my messages because too many places still default 2fa and other identifiers to SMS. Until RCS defaults to E2E at least in transit, that’s tough. From there it’s still going to be the mercy of what the OS vendor decides, like Apple in this case. That said, if I were worried about government actors or a targeted attack, I would 1000% used advanced data protection.
Anyway, upvoting your comments as much as I can (+1) because you’re totally right and it’s a consideration you should have.
RCS predates iMessage, but it was never widely adopted. Google has been running with it, but it’s been with Google-specific changes to the protocol
If they can get others to adopt their extensions as a standard and offer an open source example implementation, it could probably be better than iMessage
Google has a problem getting other people to use standards they work on because they drop support for them all the time, though
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