- cross-posted to:
- android@lemmy.world
- technews@radiation.party
- cross-posted to:
- android@lemmy.world
- technews@radiation.party
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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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.
They won’t let any third party apps use it so they are basically as bad as imessage.
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.
At least it sends standard SMS to everyone without an iPhone. Wouldn’t call that 0 interoperability
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.
iMessage is only E2E encrypted if both users have iCloud disabled or have gone into their iCloud settings and enabled “Advanced Data Protection”
Wow, thanks. Always assumed E2E was enabled by default. That sucks.
The message transit encryption is on but backups are unencrypted by default, which makes it quite pointless
Fair point. It looks more specifically they’re not if you enable “messages in iCloud” or iCloud backup with messages.
“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
So essentially they’re just as bad as RCS. Both hamstrung by the limitations of their encryptions interoperability
The RCS e2e extension is client controlled, the client app knows if it’s active
RCS is only interoperable with apps and carriers that adopt the Jibe protocol, so not much has changed.
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
Edit: wait, I don’t think signal is open source
I don’t know what you’re talking about. Signal does not use RCS and it is open source.
ASFAIK Signal doesn’t support RCS, only Signal protocol, after they dropped SMS.
This seems to be the mistake I made - thank you for clarifying :)
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Signal is open source. The only part that isn’t is the server side spam filtering.
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.
Allo
Duo
begging they bring back whisperSHOUT from Allo to Google Messages :(
that was awesome
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
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Duo (videocalling app)
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.
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.
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.
There is a FOSS app for that https://github.com/seemoo-lab/AirGuard
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 just expect them to make the interoperability as shitty as possible
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.
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.
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!
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…
Their implementation is closed source, not the protocol. They can’t change the protocol unilaterally whenever they want, etc.
Big difference.
Okay but their implementation is what they are touting. The standard RCS protocol is only marginally better than sms. Google constantly uses encryption in their ad campaigns for RCS, which is exclusive to to googles implementation. There is no way anyone is going to get Apple to work on an implementation that interoperates with Google
Any open source Android RCS SMS apps then?
No idea, but that has nothing to do with anything. Considering that the standard is public and free (unlike ISO stuff bte), that most relevant telecoms support it, and that a lot of phone manufacturers have a custom client that does support it, it’s not remotely close to being closed sourced, and service-authentication-gated like iMessages.
However access to each carrier gateway is very guarded …
Not sure what your point is, but ok?
Probably. Have a look on FDroid.
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Believe it or not you might need to pay for something that you like and use. Wierd fuckin notion I know.
You are confusing open source with free-as-in-price. Open source is a development philosophy, not a price tag.
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The “Free” in “Free and Open Source Software” is, famously, “free as in speech, not free as in beer.”
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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.
Google’s encryption extension is published so anybody could implement it (if you already have enough access to create your own client, like Samsung)
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 Voice still doesn’t support it!
Its just trillion dollar companies doing trillion dollar things.
Haha fair enough 😂
It doesn’t seem like you understand what a protocol is
I do, but if you pay attention to the ad-campaign, Google is touting features such as E2EE as a benefit to bringing it to iOS, which is NOT part of the rcs protocol, rather part of googles implementation.
The RCS protocol by itself is only marginally better than SMS.
“Marginally better than SMS”
I don’t mean to be rude, but I agree with the sentiment of not knowing what a protocol is. RCS is significantly better than SMS and, encryption wise not entirely feature wise (depending on what you consider a feature that you care about), better than iMessage.
First, the way an SMS is delivered is a big part of the problem that RCS has fixed and it is a problem that still plagues SMS and MMS and that is message length.
The SMS and MMS protocol send your messages in layers and not always in order, hence why you can still get SMS text messages out of ordered, or that SMS that gets converted to MMS based on the length of the text fails to send. This doesn’t even begin to touch group messaging sending images, encryption, etc.
https://www.androidauthority.com/rcs-vs-sms-3330098/
If you really want to learn and this honestly is a genuine conversation and you are willing to talk about it then I will let that article be your read. There are massive benefits over RCS the largest one being encryption while still being able to send larger text messages, way better video and image quality as well as different and more types of image types and RCS has the ability to just continue to get better, more secure, and continue to grow.
Apple has a tendency to stick to what you know because their customers stick to what they know. While Apple has a viable and continued method. That doesn’t mean their method is great. Consider the USB-C standard on the iPhone being a forced change. Apple made an argument that forcing the iPhone to USB-C ruined the creative and innovative market. While there is probably some reasonable argument to be made there then the question becomes why weren’t they working on these methods for all other products that they believed were better off with USB-C. Point being Apple is an example of only changing when they are forced to or have no other way out. This is a bad model to allow the continuance of what they are arguing against. RCS isn’t worse it’s better and more than marginally. The problem is Apple won’t change unless forced to and that is bad for you as a consumer and innovation that they swear they believe in.
RCS should just be the standard and Apple should get on board and there is zero reason for them not to other than to push the iMessage agenda and that makes them money. They don’t care about the consumer. That doesn’t mean Google does either but Google at the very least wants all messaging to just be fluid across what ever platform you choose and Apple just wants you to buy an iPhone. You tell me which sounds better to you, because I will take Google’s approach no matter how you feel about Google.
Ok bro we get it
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I may be the only person on this thread old enough to remember that this has long been Apple’s MO, walled gardens and such.
And also the only person couldn’t give less of a shit about blue or green bubbles. Both platforms are shit compared to numerous free dedicated third party communications apps.
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.
Messaging with Google is a funny story thought. They had something that worked and destroyed it by defederating it
After that they had like what 10 more apps, and multiple one not link together from their own services
Google photo has its own, google Drive too, probably other as well, and then there’s Google Meet…,
Wasn’t it a crazier number—like $15 billion or something?
Edit: Siri says $19 billion [pinkie to corner of lips]
My memory was waaaaay off
Yes, 16
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.
Facebook bought Instagram for a billion. WhatsApp was 16 billion (and additional 3 billion in restricted stock units).
Ahh yes my memory isn’t great anyways. Thanks
iMessage will have to open up bridges to other messaging services soon regardless thanks to being a Gatekeeper under the EU Digital Markets App.
bad news, imassage was not classified a gatekeeper because in europe they have to few users
But for the same reason nobody cares about iMessage. I don’t know anyone who uses it.
Even Apple users in my country are using WhatsApp.
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.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
closed this topic for me forever
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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.
In case of emergency it runs or it doesn’t run. No matter if cellular or data.
Best were something like Briar’s local wifi mesh standardized for emergency anyway.
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!
There is so much nonsense being said about RCS, it will not fail under “cellular data loss”.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
This isn’t about making iPhone users care per se, I really think it’s just a public perception thing.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
Meanwhile outside of the United States basically no one uses iMessage. Precisely because it’s so terrible it interfacing with non-apple devices. Everyone just uses WhatsApp which will work with anything.
Of course WhatsApp’s quite a crap program as well missing basic functionality but at least it’s not device specific.
I can still send text messages to anyone from my Samsung phone, it’s all just dumb.
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?)
It’s because of everyone’s need to fit in. Teenagers are in that weird limbo state where they have a need to fit in but don’t have the maturity to say, “No, I don’t need an iPhone just because Billy has one.” And they generally have access to the money required to fit in, either because their parents will buy it for them or because they worked enough to get one.
For the record, I don’t blame teenagers for this. The decision-making part of the brain (the prefrontal cortex) doesn’t even finish maturing until their mid-20s. The part of the brain that deals with emotions (the amygdala) matures way before then, so they’re impulsive, emotional, and not rational (or at least not even close to how rational the average adult should be).
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
You’ll notice Signal backtracked on supporting SMS as soon as they got an ex-Googler as their new leadership.
it isn’t a constantly evolving standard
lol you can say that again
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.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
The video, titled “Green bubbles and blue bubbles want to be together,” shows a Romeo and Juliet-style conversation between two users who want to be together, but who are kept apart by one of their “parents.”
The “bubbles,” of course, are a reference to Apple’s iMessage interface which shows feature-rich blue bubbles for messages sent between Apple users, and discordant green SMS bubbles with reduced functionality when Android users participate in the chat.
This two-class system is especially frustrating in countries like the US where about half the population is using an iPhone and the other half is running Android on a Samsung device.
Apple, of course, has every incentive keep the status quo as a form of ecosystem lock-in, but it might be forced to open up its messaging service as a result of the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA).
Regulators are currently investigating whether iMessage meets the bar to be considered a “core platform service” under the rules, which would compel Apple to offer interoperability with other messaging services.
The original article contains 232 words, the summary contains 218 words. Saved 6%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Bad bot
Why?
6% reduction isn’t a summary
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 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 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 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.
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.
Maybe don’t buy Apple hardware? Why is it the government’s job to fix every minor annoyance you have with Apple?
This public shaming bullshit reminds me of Epic’s Fortnite debacle and it’s not a good look, especially from Samsung who usually mocks Apple on Monday and is copying them by Friday (see “no CD drives in laptops” or “no headphone jack” or “no removable batteries in the phone”). I know they’re completely different issues but whining is whining.
