- cross-posted to:
- android@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- android@lemmy.world
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.
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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.
I’ve lost track of all the messaging apps they had:
- Hangouts
- Chat
- Gmail Chat
- Google+
- Voice
I’m sure I’m forgetting a few.
Google Talk
There’s also Duo, which turned into Meet. it’s basically Google Facetime.
Google Talk was the name before it became Gmail Chat
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?
Voice is soooo frustrating. It had so much promise! But they haven’t added anything to it in what 5 years? Maybe longer
tbh I don’t know that I would remind anyone at Google that Voice exists, I think that’s just about the only thing that is keeping it alive.
They also killed YouTube DMs
Don’t forget the one that stole its name from the other one.
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.
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.
they also removed messages from aosp i believe
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.
You can’t make this stuff up
https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22406303/imessage-android-eddy-cue-emails-apple-epic-deposition
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?
The color is one part, the other is that it breaks functions in iMessage. So the elitism doubles up
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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
Can you tell me what functions? Emojis?
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.
Yeah, they are built into Gboard and work even animated over MMS.
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?
That’s all I know of based on my experience.
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.
Yes, we literally have all of that including normal quality images if Apple would just play fucking ball outside of their own ecosystem.
Reactions are a thing in most messengers. It’s just apple using proprietary code.
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.
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.
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
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.
It goes both ways. Both videos and photos from Galaxy phones end up at like 128x80 on my iphone.
It would be fixed both ways if Apple adopted rcs
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’”.
RCS is basically proprietary RCS.
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
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iOS does not allow you to use any other messaging app for SMS. This is surely intentional to lock you into iMessage.
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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.
You can turn off iMessage and you’ll be sending texts as regular SMS.
…why would you do that?
No clue, just saying you’re “allowed” to use SMS if it’s important to you. But I might have misinterpreted you!
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
The other replies answered it.
You can send SMS on iPhone with the Google voice app. Yes it would be from a different phone number than your SIM, but it works.
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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.
Kids are idiots and Apple is exploiting 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.
Apple literally created the hierarchy…
But they didn’t.
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.
No I would make it available to everyone in a fuckin’ heartbeat because I’m not a scumbag but maybe that’s why I’m not a CEO.
You can’t make this stuff up
Except that You literally made it up though? You embellished the part about poor families and cheap phones, here’s the actual quote:
I am concerned [that] iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove an obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones.
How else would you read that lol come on, now
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’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.
Uh… Apple has the iPhone. That’s all they have. They make the iPhone. One phone. What other phone do that have?
They currently offer 4 different families of iPhone for sale. The cheapest one is the SE for $429.
What else could it imply? Surely if money is not an obstacle they’d just buy the iPhone they wanted for their kids.
Since not even iPhone users in Europe use iMessage I highly doubt anyone would use it outside the US.
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.
And also as a Norwegian I don’t know a single person that uses iMessage.
Everyone I know are using Facebook messenger, Snapchat or WhatsApp.
Well but I’ll guess most of those you know use Android while most of who I know use iPhone?
Mostly iPhones actually, they do use a lot of facetime to be fair, but almost all chatting is Facebook messenger
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 do, but most people don’t
You gotta convince people to switch to Signal. That’s what I’ve been doing for a long time, and it works!
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.
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.
Unless carriers deprecate SMS/MMS.
Phone carriers should be deprecated.
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.
Not going to happen. They charge such an insanely high premium vs real cost for a very primitive messaging system, they’re not letting that go!
Friendly reminder that none of these asswipes are your friend :)
Just like actors, musicians, athletes, & authors. None of them are your friend.
I don’t know, George Orwell was a solid dude.
If he’s not there to help you when it’s time to move then he’s not your friend. So you can read Eric Arthur Blair but he’s not your friend.
solid dude
That’s not what the word friendly means
While Apple should adopt RCS, I cannot help but feel that Google is being extremely hypocritical. They complain about iMessage being proprietary, but their implementation of RCS isn’t open source, and I believe they even mentioned they have no plans to open it up for 3rd party devs to implement it into their own sms apps. This just feels like an iMessage equivalent for Android. It has rich features that are exclusive to Android as a platform (more specifically exclusive to Google Messages or whatever the app is called now)… just like iMessage within iOS/MacOS/iPadOS…
Yeah, the only issue is that RCS is actually better and the counter argument is that Apple is breaking the messaging platform by not implementing it in some way.
The other point to make here is that iMessage wouldn’t have to just disappear. They could continue to support iMessage while just allowing text messages to be better for those who just don’t want an iPhone. The whole thing is hypocritical on both sides. Apple has convinced it’s users, very successfully might I add, that it is an Android problem and instead of having choice over your phone, you should just buy an iPhone.
As someone who works in IT this is really not the answer users should get. To me, this is equivalent to, “your computer quit working? Just buy a new one.” But imagine you only had one choice and it’s because that company refuses to just improve standard text messaging for all users across the board but iPhone users don’t understand that Google has a method to fix this problem Apple just refuses to make it a better experience for everyone.
Additionally, I think RCS is an open platform. Google’s fork of it carries encryption and group messaging integration. Point being Google genuinely has a viable iMessage solution to non iMessage texts. Apple wouldn’t even have to stop using iMesaage.
While I agree, Apple is being obnoxiously stubborn and it truly only does benefit Apple users as well, it just feels disingenuous from Google. It more feels like they want to get their product onto Apple devices. If Apple could implement RCS the way they wanted to and interoperate with Google, then I think it would be a more valid argument (and I suppose they can, but Apple would be caught dead investing money into something like that). But Google clearly wants Apple to use their own version and is putting up this annoying ad campaign to mask it. (As far as I know, the standard RCS implementation doesn’t even include E2EE, rather it’s something unique to googles implementation, correct me if I’m wrong). Google uses encryption as a talking point in their ad campaigns and is honestly for me the biggest reason for it to be used in iOS. Otherwise the experience is only marginally better than sms, and I wouldn’t expect Apple to even bother with it. At least with encryption one can challenge Apple‘s stance on being a privacy focused company…
Im also a software engineer and it’s annoying as hell that Apple is stubborn, but from a business perspective, it’s a gold mine for Apple - ecosystem lock-in is just too valuable to them as a company.
Has apple tried to work with Google on the RCS version? If not, I see everything you’ve written here as an invalid false equivalency
They haven’t really. What they really should do is run their own RCS server and federate and support the e2e extension, but they don’t want to.
The most annoying part is that the imessage encryption protocol is so far behind state of art (same underlying encryption protocol with small RSA keys and no deniability since ~2011 when Signal has been around since 2010 with a better protocol). Meanwhile Google based their encryption extension on the Signal production. It would be a solid security improvement if Apple adopted it.
Google’s encryption extension is published so anybody could implement it (if you already have enough access to create your own client, like Samsung)
Google Voice still doesn’t support it!
MKBHD closed this topic for me forever. Apple is never going to open up. It provides them tremendous value. They don’t give a shit if Samsung taunts them lol. They want your teenage kids taunting their friends over their green bubbles. And it’s working.
Only happens in Muricaland. In every other countries I visited, WhatsApp rules.
WhatsApp is also addressed in that video.
It’s great in countries where it is so dominant that it is everyone’s default. (That’s not everywhere except America, BTW)
Anywhere it’s not 80%+ dominant already, you are stuck trying to convince everyone and their grandma to switch their message app and that just doesn’t work.
Plus… more Facebook on my phone? No thanks. I’m not saying any other company is an angel but Facebook is known to be the devil.
Even when WhatsApp is dominant it’s not a solution.
Everyone being forced to use a walled garden messaging app owned by a Big Tech so the can communicate with friends and family is not a solution.
WhatsApp rules
And this is unfortunate. People chose proprietary garbage like WhatsApp over FOSS apps with a proven track record like Signal.
Yep. I never use sms nor other messaging systems save for WhatsApp. Not that I’m a fan of it since it was bought by Facebook, but it is what everybody here uses, and it works quite well, reliably, and has an interesting set of features.
Imagine a world where we can adopt a scalable, secure, open communication protocol where users can use whatever app they want. Imagine humanity moving past the diaspora of special-snowflake chat apps and on to better things.
Move on? Hell you could just move back to xmpp when people were using aim, gtalk, trillian clients, digsby, nimbuzz…
Some of us are old enough to remember the golden era.
Capitalism: “No.”
But I wouldn’t earn money, as we are currently forcing people to use our services/products.
Future generations will never know our pain
We live in this world. We can adopt such a protocol. The hardest step is to convience your friends to install an app that supports it, because duopoly named Googloid and Apple iOS is not going to make it simple.
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).
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)
Great points!
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.
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.
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.
They blame Android for that for some reason. Makes no sense.
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.
Cause they don’t realize it’s a protocol issue, they just imagine that only iPhone has progressed past 2007 photo technology I guess.
First part is true, second part isn’t. Most people aren’t that dumb.
Apple users are.
That is a terrible generalization and even my less tech savvy Apple friends and family don’t think this.
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)
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.
They said in the comment that they are tech savvy enough to understand what RCS is and does.
My bad. I completely read that wrong. Could have sworn I saw a “not” in there.
Yes, until now we’ve accepted to be governed by what Big Tech can convince “average users” to use and here we are.
Internet is controlled by a handful of company who decide what you read, what you watch, how you communicate with friends and family.
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.
This isn’t about making iPhone users care per se, I really think it’s just a public perception thing.
I’d be ok with everybody adopting Signal protocol but I can safetly say no government anywhere would “allow” that
I am beyond bummed that Signal abandoned SMS support. It worked, it isn’t a constantly evolving standard. Just leave it alone, Signal!!
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.
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.
I don’t have people saved in Contacts, they are only saved in my apps directly
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 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.
Yeah, I don’t follow the details on this much and my first thought was “Signal had SMS support? WTF?”
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.
it isn’t a constantly evolving standard
lol you can say that again
You’ll notice Signal backtracked on supporting SMS as soon as they got an ex-Googler as their new leadership.
No one should be using SMS in 2023, and I’m really sorry for you Americans who are still using this ancient garbage technology.
Signal protocol is mainly an encryption protocol, not messaging.
Even if Apple adopt it, you won’t be able to talk with Apple users from Signal.
Apple is not going to change this unless legally forced to because it is quite possibly the biggest driver of iPhone sales.
A whopping 87% of American teens use an iPhone, and the green text from Android SMS is the biggest reason. At that age people will do almost anything to fit in and get a date, and the green text was chosen specifically to elicit an “eww” response. Most of those teens will likely will continue to use iPhones as adults because it’s what they know.
As someone from the EU, I’m so confused about why this would matter to people. At that age, people will just find any excuse to bully regardless of what it is, it’s why uniforms don’t work either for those purposes. Hell, if someone were to try and shame me for the fucking color of my messages I’d be thankful, they’ve shown me another cunt to avoid associating with. In that sense it might actually be useful. (also, who even uses sms anymore?)
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The green text peer pressure means nothing to me, but you are 100% spot on about the ecosystem driving sales. My whole family uses apple and I get left out of so many group chats and face times that I’ve actually considered switching to Apple even though I’m a die hard Note fan. Apples hardware may be nothing special, but they have a killer feature in their seamless, closed ecosystem, and they know it. At the end of the day, a phones job is to communicate, and Apple does that seemlessly- with other Apple devices
Be the change. You’re doing it.
It’s a slippery slope though. Unless you own a mac or pay subscribe to icloud storage tranferring photos and other files off your phone is gonna be a pain. Also, unless you get a mac with enough storage space it’s also gonna be a pain because iphotos doesn’t support direct transfer to external drives, so you gotta use image capture which is ridiculously barebones.
Wait you can’t transfer images directly to external harddrives?? Honestly I genuinely wonder why people put up with this shit
On macs, only with image capture, which is very subpar
No wonder they make people pay so much for extra storage loool
That’s what lured me in and also why I left. I wanted devices that worked together for accessibility reasons, not because I wanted to be on some over engineered chat network that only works with itself.
Very true and very ridiculous. A great deal of people will commonly do almost anything to be apart of a desirable group.
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.
Maybe don’t buy Apple hardware? Why is it the government’s job to fix every minor annoyance you have with Apple?
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.
And you want the EU to fix that?
I haven’t said anything about the EU. There’s no way the EU would address this, it’s almost exclusively a US problem.
I mean… I did and you were replying to me so… Guess you just ignored my point and posted with a “fun fact” for no reason then.
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.
You seem to think you know my point better than me.
Someone leaves me out of a group chat due to the color of my text bubble, I doubt there was any benefit to being included in the conversation anyway.
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.
- EU passes the chat interop legislation.
- Apple is forced to do RCS.
- ???
- Corpos that shout now declare victory.
First privacy, then USB, now RCS.
Only thing I know about RCS is that it has caused a few of my texts to never be sent, because the “send as normal text if RCS doesn’t work” also didn’t work. Other than that it has done nothing for me.
I don’t see this happening. Apple to/from Android are the only texts that the government can easily snoop on.
There are mandated back doors in most message apps. Messages between different message systems are normally harder to read
There are mandated back doors in most message apps.
Source?
RCS has an e2e encryption extension (created by Google)
All currently available RCS implementations are proprietary, you can’t trust the encryption if you can’t verify it.
Except the commenter above is talking about SMS/MMS which is not encrypted and very easy for a government to snoop on via the telecom company. You have no protections.
Signal is the way to go. No need to expose metadata to your mobile carrier via RCS. Also, currently you need Google’s proprietary garbage message app to make use of RCS. There’s litterally no reason to do this.
I have had Signal installed for 6months, I still have 0 contacts because nobody I know uses it and they all use messenger or whatsapp…
Need to befriend more drug dealers.
You have to convince people to use Signal.
Not the same guy but this is basically impossible. I was able to get maybe two of the dozens of people I have to contact regularly to use it, then they dropped SMS support and it’s been dead ever since for me.
That sucks
Create fake tinder profiles of hot women, match with thousands of men, and tell them “message me on signal”. Dont scam them, that would be rude.
Up to you if you have sex with them or not.
Yes, that’s the issue
I personally had a very bad experience with signal and I don’t think I’ll be using it again. Also now that they cut SMS support I think they only way I’d use it again is if an overwhelming amount of people start using it.
Why was your experience bad? Did you sign up for it when Elon Musk encouraged people to use it? Back then, so many people signed up that their servers were just overloaded. That’s to be expected with a user growth rate of 400% in one week. I’ve been relying on Signal for all of my communications for a year and a half now and I haven’t ever experienced any issues.
I signed up very early and it was based on an episode of All About Android on TWiT. Messages just weren’t going through. Mine out and others in to me. There was an emergency and someone really needed to get ahold of me and I didn’t get the message. After that I dropped signal.
Oh, that’s unfortunate. I understand why you dropped it after that experience. I can only tell you that they have massively improved and the experience is great now.
If it gets immensely popular I’d definitely consider using it again. Without SMS as a backup it isn’t very useful. I converted a few people over to it initially and after that incident we all left. I’m not really interested in playing evangelist again.
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I wish we live in an ideal world where we could have a messaging application which is like email. Anyone can run their server and can have whatever messaging client they want. And everything is interoperable.
There’s Matrix and XMPP
Tox is the way to go. Or Matrix. Jami works too.
Satan and the Devil call Lucifier.
RCS needs to happen, I’m so sick of Whatsapp.
Why not switch to something not owned by Facebook like Signal (or something on an open protocol like Element)?
No one I know uses Signal or is skilled enough to switch away from Whatsapp. 100% have WhatsApp.
Trying to switch, would be like talking people into using Linux. Not going to happen unless the current option got much worse.
skilled enough to switch away from Whatsapp
Wat? If they managed to register with WhatsApp, they can do so with literally any other messaging service.
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 https://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.
Google’s RCS is as proprietary as iMessage
But it is at least available for Apple to implement if they do choose, unlike iMessage.
No, its not available. There is no FOSS RCS app, because its not available
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.
- Google controls RCS servers. Collects data and sales it. Apple adopting RCS would mean monopoly situation
Yes, a FOSS protocol/standard would be better
Open standard is the only option
RCS is at least allowed to be used by other companies so it’s at least a small step in the right direction
…of a single company controlling major sms functions turned on by default by every phone?
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.
But we are talking about messaging standards, not messaging services.
Looks like it’s not open sources, yes.
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…
Get your parents to use Signal. It’s superior in every way.
