Or at least, they don't care enough about it to vote with their wallet.
There might be some solution needed to let iMessage interoperate with Android, but pretending RCS is a standard just like SMS that Apple was not supporting is wishful thinking.
Though AFAIK, it's only on the Moto G family, which isn't a flagship series, so it won't be as capable as a Galaxy, Pixel, or iPhone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei_Mate_60
Removable storage NM card 256GB
SIM
Card slot 1: NANO-SIM
Card slot 2: Choose one of the two NANO-SIM or NM memory card"
What's next? My iphone coming preinstalled with whatsapp with 5 norton antivirus refund rooms already prejoined?
Besides, I think you mean UP to Android's level.
It's pressure to adhere to standards. Maybe you can't see it, but it's a good thing.
Uh no, considering RCS is seriously flawed in design and implementation and doesn't encrypt messages end-to-end or even in flight.
> It's pressure to adhere to standards. Maybe you can't see it, but it's a good thing.
Calling RCS a standard is loaded. It was all but abandoned for years until google started forcing it on users and tacking proprietary extensions on top of it.
Apple has no reason to change the color from green and let users know that they shouldn't care as much as they used to.
In particular, they should color messages green if they can be forged by intermediaries / collected for bulk surveillance / used for ad targeting / sold to third parties by your carrier / etc.
Yay! I can send gym memes to my iphone friend!
Oh wait they still cant open .webm without a half dozen steps. Oh well. Lols for us Androids only. Maybe iphones can open webms by 2028.
Keeping SMS green would be good for purely transactional type SMS messages, and using another color for RCS would be good.
I do not know anyone who uses RCS who didn't end up on WhatsApp or Telegram pretty quickly afterwards.
Besides, some of the examples you mention I'd rather have via email instead of text for record-keeping purposes.
So far, yeah I have been. Android users don't seem to use RCS for anything advanced, they use WhatsApp. Anyway, iPhones already let you toggle MMS, so RCS might be togglable too.
It worked just fine.
I would absolutely not want to do business with a contractor that uses an android phone. That's a serious red flag for someone doing work on a (usually very expensive) home to be using cheap tools.
and you can also add your plumber or realtor on whatsapp. there's no reason not to. it's just a messaging app, i've got all kinds of customers and vendors on my whatsapp.
Probably a pain to set up, but should be possible. Since it's based on IMS which in turn is based on SIP, Open Source SIP servers could be the used, e.g. https://www.opensips.org/Documentation/Tutorials-RCS-Managin....
Also, will they allow using URI's instead of phone numbers for contacts?
Photos, videos, group messaging are all a significantly better experience with iMessage in my experience. This is not to say that other apps don't offer a similar experience, you can achieve much of the same functionality on Telegram or WhatsApp. It's just that it's built into the phone.
Google might have achieved similar success with their own messaging platform had they'd not constantly thrown it under the bus and created a new one every month. Allo, Duo, Meet, Google+, Google Chat etc....
Enabling MMS requires a somewhat convoluted set of changes to the phone's cellular settings, and despite having done them correctly I periodically get a "we couldn't send you all your texts, fix your settings" warning SMS from Google.
Yes. Most Android users with either the Google or Samsung Messages app are already using RCS without noticing when they message each other.
> Does the carrier sell you an RCS package?
No, it's yet another OTT service, even if your messaging app is provisioned by your carrier to use its own RCS infrastructure (which is Google Jibe in all cases).
It also enabled read messages notification to the sender as well as realtime typing notification to the peer.
I know E2E encryption isn't a part of it, but was having trouble finding information about whether the Universal Profile includes other features like replies, read receipts, typing indicators, reactions, voice messages, etc.
As an aside, this is huge but the media is really milking the clickbait when reporting "the end of green bubble shame" - even if Apple were to support all of the above features in their RCS implementation, I'm sure they'll keep the bubbles green. They've always been adept at designing for user psychology.
The teenage market share is 87% currently. just a couple more years is all they need.
First, not every iPhone user can be iMessage-only and SMS is a shitty experience. In most non-US countries, they’re not winning the iMessage shame battle, they’re driving people to WhatsApp. They’d probably rather people use the built in messaging app, which will incentivize you to use iMessage.
Secondly, getting more involved gives them opportunities to embrace/extinguish rcs (they said they won’t extend it). If they can use their market to force encryption on everyone, for example, that makes them look like the good guys against android makers. I could also see them trying to genuinely push UX improvements (eg stickers) on RCS and exiting iMessage from European Markets entirely.
Finally, If the EU forces open iMessage, it’ll probably force open other messaging services, which gives RCS an opportunity to grow. See point 1 about them losing already in Europe. Or gives Apple a horse in the race even if they simply withdraw iMessage instead of opening it up.
Apple only has to comply with the law. The issue is that the EC is on a high right now trying to see how far they can enforce control over US tech companies, so they might just go back and double down with more legislation if Apple finds a way to comply with the law without complying with the outcome the EC actually wanted.
Also I don’t know how they’re doing that, but I’m more than willing to bet Apple will make sure it doesn’t work very long at all.
3 of at the time 4 carriers tried to adopt RCS and push it into the market a few years ago. They called it "joyn" but nobody ever used it. Everybody is using WhatsApp, except for some privacy conscious folks.
So Apple is just trying to bridge the technology gap here. iMessages is pretty dated.
I also don't see every business relying on SMS for B2C messaging (and in particular for SMS-OTP) switching to RCS anytime soon.
b) Apple won't stop users from using a particular carrier because of commercial considerations. It would be a clear breach of anti-competition laws.
c) Many carriers don't have relationships with Apple to sell the iPhone. And in many places internationally the iPhone is not even that popular. What matters is whether you can buy a SIM and install it into your phone.
Maybe for consumer facing use but I think it’s here to stay for our lifetime
Does this mean giving an RCS message a "thumbs up" (or heart, or "haha") will now be supported from iOS and vice versa?
[1]: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Category:xkcd_Pho...
My kid doesn’t want a phone but wants to text his friends. Are there any options or will there be after this?
Specifically in Google Voice which for some perplexing reason does not support it.
Currently one has to disable Fi cloud sync losing a lot of features.
or if you're like my parents, and pay for a plan with plenty of data but leave it switched off at all times just because you don't want to accidentally go over your cap.
Any messaging app that permits spam is user hostile. Spam takes up more of my time than I would ever want to give on Whatsapp/Messenger/Text. iMessage has prevented me from contacting precisely zero people. If I were to walk away from my iPhone I would lose nothing after exporting some messages.
The barrier to entry to other potential users of $100s is well worth it for me.
Also, you realize there are android phones that are plenty expensive right?
If they “broke in” somehow Apple will fix it and cut them off again.
> Finally, Apple says it will work with the GSMA members on ways to further improve the RCS protocol. This particularly includes improving the security and encryption of RCS messages. Apple also told 9to5Mac that it will not use any sort of proprietary end-to-end encryption on top of RCS. Its focus is on improving the RCS standard itself.
> For comparison’s sake, Google’s implementation of end-to-end encryption is part of the Messages app on Android rather than the RCS spec itself.
I am a millennial though.
But that said, how do you know nobody stopped talking to you because of it? One of my friends (who is early 40s) said his family started leaving one of their family members out of the group chats because it "degraded the whole experience" and I doubt he ever told the person he was being left out, let alone why. I would imagine it's kind of like telling somebody that you aren't going to date them anymore because they're not attractive enough. Not something you want to admit, and even though it obviously happens, I've never heard of somebody actually being told this.
But, yeah, who knows. Probably nothing lost.
Also, end-to-end encryption is not part of the RCS specification, but is a proprietary extension to RCS that Google has made exclusive to Messages by Google.[1] This feature should be made open and added to the actual RCS specification so that Apple and other vendors can make use of it.
(Notes: There is a proprietary RCS API which Google only allows Samsung apps to use to communicate with Messages by Google.[2] Verizon has an app called Verizon Messages or Message+ that uses RCS to some extent, but this is an incomplete implementation that only works on Samsung devices on the Verizon network with no cross-carrier compatibility.[3])
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/google-enables-end-t...
[2] https://www.xda-developers.com/google-messages-rcs-api-third...
Does this mean that now if you send a message to someone from an iPhone that doesn't go through iMessage, it will instead go through Google's servers? Sure the service will hopefully be better than SMS but at the cost of giving Google the keys to pretending they're a "standard."
Having beaten Apple with the RCS stick for the last year, Google might find themselves now getting beaten back.
[0] Google Fi integrates with Messages for Web to allow you to use your phone number even if your phone is damaged or destroyed. It's absolutely amazing. I've used this (back when it was Hangouts integration) to use my number on an iPod touch and it worked surprisingly well when I was waiting for a replacement on my Nexus 6P that I had shattered. I also have Messages for Web pinned to my iPad dock for similar reasons.
But the point to me is that I don't care whether it's "bad faith" or not, just that (again, to me) it's actually the correct point of view. Messaging integration between iOS and Android, in the US at least, is not just fundamentally broken, but the presence of a single Android user in an iMessage group chat can break the experience for everyone (e.g. potato quality video), and if you are the "odd man out" on the Android people start resenting your presence in the chat (and, to be clear, I'm middle aged, not in middle school). For an example, see https://www.instagram.com/p/CwLKeGRLieb/
There is no reason for there to be such messaging incompatibility between iOS and Android. My feeling is that Apple knows the regulatory winds are shifting very much against anticompetitive behavior, and their iMessage incompatibility was just looking like the blatant protectionism that it is.
Google is literally operating an RCS SaaS company for marketers and telcos, so I'd take any of their statements in support for RCS with a grain of salt: https://jibe.google.com/
Everyone can make his own app, it's just that he would need to develop a whole RCS-client for it to interact with (Google's or carriers') RCS-Servers as well. So what is missing is Google offering their RCS-client with open API's for other apps (than Google Messages) to use.
To be fair, maintaining interoperability of those apps with the underlying client would then be a huge endeavour, Google Messages itself is already updating quite frequently...
Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has an app called DND which lets you register your phone number to opt out of marketing and promotional SMSes. It works really well and in case someone sends you a promotional SMS despite opting out, you can report them to your SIM provider (or carrier) and they are legally required to take an action.
But as soon as RCS is enabled, you will magically start receiving a lot of spam messages with rich text and link previews. Unfortunately, the DND app cannot see or detect those messages which means you cannot report them.
That might be country dependent, in the UK the four largest networks do officially support RCS I believe (combined market share of around 85-90%).
Google did, Apple will, what stops other companies from doing it aside from effort and money ?
> and there's barely any carrier adoption
Expecting carriers to do adopt new technologies is usually a losing bet.
I suspect that Google's RCS is proprietary as a blunt instrument to prevent carriers from trying to either (a) undermine e2ee in some weasely way or (b) have the ability to pick and choose the pieces of the implementation they want to support. You either get the whole thing, with e2ee that you don't control, or nothing.
Sadly the lesson from Google, Apple, and Whatsapp here appears to be "cooperating with telecom carriers is a fool's errand".
It's absolutely bizarre to me they didn't iterate on that. I'm kind of glad they didn't.
Reminder that carriers have lawful intercept mandates through legal statutes: it may actually be illegal for them to implement E2EE.
I'd have much rather iMessage only open up interoperability with E2EE platforms like signal or even Whatsapp (because Facebook is somehow the lesser evil in this corner of the privacy world).
Plus, unless they fixed it, if you enable RCS and then regret it and disable it again, anybody who texted with you via RCS will no longer be able to text you at all. Things won't revert to SMS.
This bit me pretty hard, but I finally fixed it by changing my phone number.
https://messages.google.com/disable-chat
This is similar to Apple's iMessage deregistration page.[1]
Google has been funneling RCS messages through its own servers to bypass wireless carriers, which were slow or unwilling to directly support RCS.[2] Unfortunately, this has centralized RCS communications through Google and allowed Google to make end-to-end encryption available to RCS users as a proprietary extension that Google never contributed back to the RCS Universal Profile specification.[3]
For RCS on Android to be decentralized again, your wireless carrier would need to support RCS on the network level and Android would also need to implement RCS in a way that does not require interaction with Google servers. This would make deregistration unnecessary.
[1] https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage/
[2] https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/302020-google-will-bypass...
[3] https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/11/16/apples-flavor-of-...
Frankly, I expect Google to fix their mistake before the telecom support people figure it out. It'll be a nightmarish headache for all involved.
On a relative's phone, the messages app simply enabled RCS automatically without asking (and displayed a screen proudly saying it did so). Does that means that this phone will never receive SMS again from RCS users, even though we have carefully always answered "no" when it asked whether it should enable RCS (and quickly disabled it again once it enabled automatically)?
That same "bug" existed for years with iMessage, for anyone switching from an iPhone to a non-iPhone.
It still exists in some form, albeit less severely, because Apple finally implemented a timeout and a way to manually deregister a number, but it took years.
At this point, anything messaging platform or financial transaction platform that doesn't implement post-quantum encryption + classic computer encryption ECC (such as superdilithium) should NOT be consider as a standard for messaging for the public. All that ought to be part of the messaging protocol, so we don't end up with GSM 64 bit encryption mess.
I thought it is based on Signal protocol? Maybe some commercial wrapper around it.
What's the point of a standard that has 5 different ways it's fragmented on the same base platform?
Or maybe Apple will just implement it exactly as the spec says with no frills.
Why would you want to use another messaging app? Your data is more safe with some randos than Google?
The RCS proprietary encryption bit is very sad. Oh well.
And which prompts you every bloody time you open it to enable RCS, ignoring the last thousand times you clicked the tiny 'skip for now' font.
The reason why 3rd party native SMS/RCS don’t exist is mobile platform wanting to prevent spam.
Imagine a rogue 3rd party SMS app blasting all your friends unauthorized texts, from your device.
[1] QKSMS: https://github.com/moezbhatti/qksms
[2] Simple SMS Messenger: https://github.com/SimpleMobileTools/Simple-SMS-Messenger
This is a win for RCS, ultimately. Maybe this will kick carriers into high gear to up their messaging standard support game and have standard interop.
I don't think this will lead to a decline in iMessage usage, nor do I think it will be catalyst enough to get people to move to Android, because there are still things RCS won't be able to support[0] but its a big step forward for a more pleasant experience between iOS and Android.
[0]: Memojis, reactions (tapbacks I think their called) and I'm curious about threaded messages. Also, at this time the actual RCS standard does not specificy that messages must be end to end encrypted. iMessage on the other hand has robust E2EE encryption (and you can get even more robust encryption by enabling Advanced Data Protection)
How did carriers fuck it up so badly that, a decade later, it's barely a blip on the messaging landscape? The were so desperate to stop OTT (over the top) services that they... locked everything down in the hope that customers wouldn't churn. It backfired spectacularly.
Note that the green bubble could be kept for other reasons: RCS is a major improvement over SMS/MMS, but there could still be functionality that isn't on par with a completely in-house system like 'iMessage'.
The green/blue distinction may still be useful for setting certain expectations on how things work.
The EU may mandate interoperability, but I don't see them mandating bubble color...
So no end to end encryption and the bubbles will most still likely be green.
Even with the mutterings about improving security etc it's unlikely that the GSM Association will ever sign off on any encryption scheme that isn't weak or backdoored.
And good grief, get over the bubble color thing. Of course RCS isn't going to have blue bubbles; those specifically indicate an iMessage message. Maybe they'll be green, or maybe they'll be purple, orange, or red, to differentiate them from SMS. That's all the different colors are for: a useful indication of what messaging system that user is currently using.
If Apple didn't color the bubbles differently, you'd see people moaning and complaining that there's no way to tell who you can and can't make a group chat with, or whether you can send them stickers and reactions.
I agree it is stupid, but there most definitely is a "status thing" going on with the whole green vs. blue as well.
Very important.
I DO have an issue with them intentionally doing a shit job of integrating with a telecommunications standard and then slapping a green bubble on it to get their oblivious users to ostracize people's kids.
It gets even worse; last week, on a relative's phone, after weeks of clicking "not now" it just force-enabled RCS, and displayed something like a "we automatically enabled RCS for you, here's what you should do if you want to disable it again" (completely confusing said non-technical relative). Needless to say, I quickly went into the settings and disabled it again; I just hope that it having been enabled for a few minutes doesn't mean it will no longer be able to receive messages from RCS users (like the rumors I heard many years ago of people who enabled iMessage and later changed back to Android no longer receiving any SMS from iMessage users).
Some people don't have data but Google doesn't care, they force clueless users to enable RCS anyway and then they're on their own to figure out why they don't receive messages anymore!
AIUI, what Google/Android does is have their own extension, with the Content-Type of the message being "application/vnd.google.rcs.encrypted":
* https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf
This is kind of like, with (E)SMTP/IMAP, having your own capability of "X-GOOG-ENCRYPT" if the standards-based "STARTTLS" was not around.
So while RCS gives many other improvement over SMS/MMS, encryption is not one of them.
(Personally I have an iPhone, but don't conect 'iMessage', and generally stick with SMS/MMS.)
https://thehackernews.com/2023/07/google-messages-getting-cr...
E2EE is like both sending and receiving parties agreeing to use PGP. The servers aren't involved with the details; they just move the opaque bytes.
I could be wrong but I don’t see anything here to suggest non-iMessages will no longer have the “green bubble” like the author assumes.
I agree with you that they’re likely to have green bubbles. Green equals not iMessage, blue equals iMessage. It seems unlikely they would introduce a third color and it would never be blue because it doesn’t support all the same features.
especially w young ppl, where i think like 90% have iphones. if i had a nickel for every time a gal mentioned green bubbles give her the ick, i wouldn't be rich but could probably buy a solid steak dinner off it.
I mean, I guess I would be grateful to have such an earlier indicator that someone is not worth pursuing. Truly, who cares.
I'm betting the non-Apple bubbles will remain green... and remain a bit stigmatized.
It was never about the resolution of pictures and even technical limitations around group chat was just part of it. It's a social thing and the technical protocol is incidental.
Dr. Seuss probably explained it best in The Sneetches.
Edit: it was not an acquisition but a partnership
RCS offers such a rich environment that Apple could finally truly integrate most stuff transparently with iMessage. Send a video to the group chat? Everyone gets it at full quality. Make a poll? Everyone can vote.
But I do wonder if the timing is completely coincidental.
The first one is that, despite the EU’s blatant attempt to carve the rules around the likes of Apple while simultaneously trying to shield EU companies, they've overestimated the amount of iMessage users, excluding iMessage from the DMA rules.
The other one, which is more important in this discussion, is that the EU kept the definitions of services rather broad to the degree that Apple’s adoption of RCS will automatically fulfill the interoperability requirement.
I wouldn't say "never". DMA is inherently political at its heart and designed to target US big techs precisely. Apple is not immune and EU gave the regulation board enough flexibility to target all of US big techs. Apple knows this and they decided to support RCS for this exact reason to gain public supports.
> The other one, which is more important in this discussion, is that the EU kept the definitions of services rather broad to the degree that Apple’s adoption of RCS will automatically fulfill the interoperability requirement.
EU already has defined iMessage as a separate core platform service from iOS and Apple hasn't argued against it because it would give them a chance to exclude iMessage from the scope of the regulation. Hence, OS level support for RCS won't cover iMessage if it's also designated as a gatekeeper.
I tried to find info for example about RCS in Australia, and saw a piece about Telstra launching RCS in 2017... but now it's apparently turned off and customers are expected to use the Google RCS service?
I really don't want spammy users to start seeing read receipts, etc.
Even my elderly relatives use WhatsApp, it's that popular. My local village has a chat group on it.
Nothing Phone says it will hack into iMessage, bring blue bubbles to Android
Telcos live in the Stone Age. A little disruption is well overdue.
Though the real losers here are potentially WhatsApp, Telegram and other third-party services (assuming that Apple will implement E2E encryption). Since iPhone is not as dominant in other countries as the US, WhatsApp and some other messaging services have become dominant outside the US. They are not really necessary anymore once there is a proper standard across platforms.
RCS is unfortunately a step backwards from that idea.
And regarding Google's motivations for that campaign: They have acquired a company offering RCS services to telcos and marketers... https://jibe.google.com/
I thought RCS was still a Telco-based service? Don't you have to have a telephone number to use it, at least? I keep hoping we go away from POTS, instead of continuing to invent reasons to be stuck with it.
Also, will iMessage support for RCS include e2ee?
> Finally, Apple says it will work with the GSMA members on ways to further improve the RCS protocol. This particularly includes improving the security and encryption of RCS messages.
I doubt anything has changed since 2020 in terms of China, Cuba, Iran or Russia but I couldn't find any news one way or the other
https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf?sj...
Proposed.
And it's both ridiculous and sad that in 2023 we are going to see a messaging standard without E2EE built into the spec.
Governments and their intelligence organisations are what matters.
And countries like UK will be pushing as hard as possible to make E2EE optional.
This is pretty moot now. Google has effectively turned RCS into a proprietary protocol, they fully control the only relevant server implementation, carriers that want to interconnect have no choice but to deploy Jibe or use Jibe as a service.
Apple supporting RCS could create enough interest that it breaks their de facto control of the standard
That's not true. Mavenir offers an RCS platform that T-Mobile has been using up until recently. A renewed interest in RCS due to Apple supporting it might end up with their platform being more sellable.
https://www.lightreading.com/mobile-core/mavenir-t-mobile-co...
Can telcos actually offer E2EE given the various lawful intercept statutes that they are usually subject to?
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/google-messa...
It's been terrible for all the poor people I know who rarely have working data on their phones, but RCS enabled by default. They can't figure out why they're not sending or receiving any messages and I have to keep disabling it for them.
And of course the prompt has a large blue button to enable, and a very small text underneath to dismiss, making it easy to accidentally enable it. It happened to me a few times already.
It also tells you nothing about the downsides (that you need a data connection, mainly) that would make RCS unusable to certain people... So they trick users into subscribing then users begin experiencing difficulties receiving or sending texts and they don't understand why.
Thank you, Google.
RCS is such carrier-dependent crap.
Looking at / selling message contents is a large potential revenue source for all the other major players.
Yes, it was as ridiculous as it sounds. There used to be news articles about kids racking up hundreds of dollars on their phone bill.
Here's one from the same year the iphone was released:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/0...
In the EU for instance, the reverse was true. Particularly, unlimited data was cheap and affordable, where as SMS was quite costly (even more than in the US in some cases) so data heavy apps were easier to adopt. Hence, WhatsApp, Telegram etc. gaining so much popularity. iMessage was introduced much later to the rich messaging market than these apps in those countries (because mobile messaging apps were cheap to adopt in markets where mobile data is cheap).
There is much more competition in those countries with cheap mobile data in the rich messaging services space. In the US, unlimited data has had a more sordid history, and SMS / MMS had a much bigger adoption rate early on
It was definitely a factor in the EU, though: SMS still aren't free on many prepaid plans there. WhatsApp was the first popular application supporting unlimited messaging on mobile phones for many.
However, international SMS/MMS was extremely expensive, and that was the main impetus for WhatsApp. It required no password or making accounts or remembering all of that, hence all non tech savvy people could easily use it. And it worked flawlessly, with zero exorbitant international charges, because you knew everything was going via data.
US users quickly had access to unlimited SMS and calling on most phone plans, which is why Whatsapp never took root.
iMessage "won" because it was the default for iPhone users in the US. Similarly, Whatsapp is the default nowhere and I don't know anyone who uses it, but that might be a generational thing. Whatsapp has always struck me as common in Europe, but rare in the US. We just use text and FB Messenger.
The cable television industry did the exact same thing. If they’d been willing to go OTT a decade ago and not force agreements based on geolocation, a lot of the streaming services that exist wouldn’t even need to exist today.
Kinda but not really. The cable providers were and continue to be hamstrung by the networks who force the cable providers to buy channel packages. Cable never had the leverage to, say, tell Disney that they only want to offer ESPN but not the 10 other Disney branded networks being offered. It was often all or nothing.
So each major device-vendor developed his client-app, and ended up with interoperability issues not only with the RCS-servers used by a given carrier, but also with devices of OTHER vendors. And that doesn't even begin to cover the issues on inter-carrier messaging...
The situation was only resolved after Google acquired Jibe Mobile (the biggest player in developing RCS server/client applications for carriers) and basically created a single RCS-client/server implementation using their Android Messages app and a Google-owned server.
But when you were working on RCS back in 2012, you may remember that at that time, RCS didn't even support store&forward (!!).
So if the receiving device was not available when a message was delivered (because it had no network or client wasn't running on a device, which happened alot especially on iOS because the client was in a constant fight with the OS), the message wasn't queued anywhere.
Apart from the obvious issue of missing messages, it caused the even worse UX-impact that the entire conversation looked different on sender/receiver.
--
Ah yes, and: RCS was originally designed with per-message billing in mind (of course). At the time it was launched it was finally clear to the carriers that those times are over, but the whole architecture had quite a chunk of billing architecture in it as well...
Thank you for highlighting this. This important piece of information often gets lost in the "green bubble" discussion.
Google has significant incentives for pushing RCS for more than one reason.
RCS is (was) the prime example of Apple's anticompetitive behavior, after the App Store exclusivity, preventing side loading, and disallowing alternative browsers.
It's now some badge of shame Apple users discriminate against the blue vs green windows if a friend or relative doesn't have an i-thing, and Apple loves it all the way to the bank.
SMS revenues to hit $67B - 2007
https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/metric-sms-revenues-...
They used to love using SMS to take as much money as possible from their customers. Imagine texting "Hey" to a friend and getting charged $0.20 for it.
People have to know if they are using free iMessages when talking to other people or if they are using up their SMS/MMS/RCS quota.
Edit: Maybe charging for SMSs is not a thing in your country but it is in mine. If I see a green bubble I would be mindful of the number of messages I send because after 200 SMSs I going to get charged per SMS.
Almost everyone in India with a smartphone uses WhatsApp. SMS is for receiving OTPs, transaction messages, marketing messages, spam, phishing messages, etc.
[1]: https://trai.gov.in/notifications/press-release/trai-extends...
[2]: https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/200-sms-per-day...
[3]: https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-techn...
If you are on mobile data, it just doesn't use your quota...
If they truly cared about sec, they would use something like Signal.
> I’ve had a couple girlfriends in their 40s mildly judge me negatively for having an Android phone […]
I have an iPhone but don't tie it into Apple services so every fellow iPhone users have green-bubble interactions with me. :)
Over the years/decades I've lived through ICQ, MSN Messenger, BBM, and probably some other proprietary systems. I've managed to avoid tying into any of them so far.
That’s ridiculous!
If it were up to me, encrypted RCS would be blue and not-encrypted RCS would be green.
I think they’re quite happy with “iMessage“ and “everything else“.
RCS will stay in the second bucket with the same green color.
I personally see no limit to what arbitrary nonsense regulation the EU is willing to push.
> even if it is still far from where it should be.
Where do you reckon it should be? Do you think they should let developers do/access whatever they want, or do you mean something else? Do you personally use an android or ios device (or maybe some niche os)?
Whether there are more beneficiaries than advertisers or other mega companies is another easy one to answer: sure, people benefit more than advertisers/epic/etc by being able to use RCS (or hopefully iMessage) across platforms, as do other areas of opening up the Apple ecosystem. Does this hold in every case of opening up anything? Probably not, e.g. requiring the permissions model be allowed to have alternatives would very likely benefit shady actors a lot but the users extremely little.
Your last point is, in my opinion, the much more lively and core debate: at which point is the ecosystem opened the right amount? For me, still a bit farther than this, but not infinitely open.
As for which brand ecosystem for me: all the above. Windows for home, Linux+macOS for work, iPhone for phone, Android for tablet.
That's why it being actual free market competition where consumers have a choice is the real test. If 100% of people on iOS want to stick exclusively with the Apple App Store, then it being forced open won't matter because all other stores will fail when no user installs them.
On the other hand, if users are willing to use those other stores, maybe iOS users don't actually care about using exclusively Apple's App Store. Then the only one who benefits from blocking that is Apple to charge their extra fees. Look at their reasoning for removing Fortnite from the store: because Epic added an additional payment processor that wasn't Apple. It's not like they removed Apple payment as an option either. So users had the benefit of more choices!
It can be about both. It’s really nice to know when the images you sent are gonna be potato-quality and you need to find some other channel to send them, or that message reliability and capabilities in general are being limited to SMS (or RCS!) levels. I don’t give a shit about the social aspects, it’s valuable as a UI affordance.
Sure, to some degree, but I'm not convinced all or most of the shame is only the iphone cachet -- the quality is incredibly bad, like shockingly bad. It's unusable, particularly for videos. As those things change, I can't help but feel like the shame moderates.
But I don't have a teenager, so I don't have that perspective first hand.
More, probably, because if they just mention it and you block them, that's disproportionate.
But the reality is that the Millennial and Gen Z bubble culture has been a big driver behind their market share increase in the US. And if Gen Alpha adopts the same culture (and doesn't rebel against norms created by prior generations like young people tend to do) then Apple will have a near monopoly in in the US in 15 years.
Not to mention, Apple's security is so terrible, I imagine corporations are going to be banning iphones. Its never going to be a monopoly or a near monopoly.
Apple's positioning is targeted to people who buy Veblen goods. As long as there is a market for phones that are high quality, Apple will never get a 'near' monopoly.
This was quite a while ago. They may very well have fixed the issue since then.
And yes, I noticed they enable RCS by default. Since then, the first thing I have done with new phones is to disable RCS. If you do that before sending/receiving any texts, then there is no issue.
I really do think it was living on life support for years and around 2014[1] or so it really seemed like any day it would get shut down or merged into one of their halfassed messaging apps but they couldn't do it since the underlying infra was outside their own. It seemed like at some point around 2018 a manager woke up and decided they'd have the interface rewritten 80% and the legacy interface stuck around like the old Windows 'add font' menu until earlier this year.
[1] https://9to5google.com/2014/03/18/google-plans-kill-google-v...
What's really changed about their core products in the last 10 years? (maps, mail, ads, YouTube, docs/gsuite) some of them have gotten some nice QoL improvements but nothing has really been added to that list because they keep killing products off.
They actually seemed to be working on it, but Apple was quickly hit with a patent suit from some company over FaceTime. I believe they had to re-architect how it worked to get around the patent.
They haven’t done anything about it since then. I wonder if they simply can’t because of patents. Either way by now I think they’ve decided it’s a strategic advantage and they wouldn’t do it by choice.
i didn't say they were directed at me
What I object to is people insisting that the "status thing" some people have going on with it is Apple's responsibility to fix by removing useful indicators of who's using what messaging services, or that Apple is deliberately and maliciously making people not using iMessage somehow look worse.
(On the other hand, I think there's a perfectly legitimate argument that Apple could and should open iMessage, and is choosing not to do so for relatively selfish reasons. I don't have a strong opinion on that one either way.)
(Ditto for Apple, if that's still an issue over there with iMessage as well.)
The "monopoly" argument feels like vague hand waiving to me. It's probably a complex and costly situation, but nothing close to why we don't have different browser engines on iOS for instance.
Working against a single server implementation with a standardized client provisioning mechanism is much easier too.
I work at a carrier that deployed a solution provided by WIT. Then around 2019-2020 Google decided they weren't interested in an open and interconnected RCS backend anymore.
That’s just the quality of pictures/video MMS carries.
https://www.verizon.com/about/privacy/full-privacy-policy
They definitely sell things like your real-time location (you can opt out by turning your phone off, or if they're legally obligated to let you), who you contact, what websites you visit, what DNS entries your phone looks up, your subscriber information (assuming they can link it to an advertising ID that other apps are using), and what TV shows you watch, joined with all the stuff you use your broadband and phone for.
As for communications content, it's fuzzy.
My reading of it says that they can aggregate that all together in a way that is only personally identifiable to their internal marketing team and their partners (i.e., anyone that pays them and also signs a contract), so I guess it's not "for sale"? So, for instance, they could take all the RCS messages in the US, cluster them, and sell the cluster to, say, meta. Then, meta could use it for ad targeting of third party ads, but they wouldn't be able to resell the raw data unless they first de-anonymized it.
I could be wrong though. The privacy policy is very long and incredibly vague. Maybe they don't share the contents of your private communications with their "trusted partners" or internal advertising division yet.
The only way this sort of crap will get better is if the US passes a right to privacy constitutional amendment. (Of course, congress is more likely to pass laws that somehow make it worse.)
There will be some ridiculous loophole like leasing will be allowed of all vowels on Mondays, and all consonants on Tuesdays.
SMS is certainly long overdue to be replaced, but I don't want it replaced with a Google service. Hopefully the iPhone adoption will be some incentive for carriers to implement RCS properly.
As antiquated as SMS is, at least all carriers support it, and people largely don't need to worry about their existing conversation threads being interrupted when they switch carriers.
I believe that that's not true for RCS at least for group conversations.
Apple and Google ARE NOT PEOPLE. They do NOT HAVE FEELINGS you need to defend. Jesus.
Being able to send a rich message from iPhone to Android and back (including location, pictures, videos) is really not something that will cause you pain and Apple won't lash out and punish you for it.
# Chrome
## Better Browsing for Everyone
Web browsing changed the way we communicate, but it’s out of date. Today we want a web browser that lets us do things like watch videos, edit documents in real time, notify us of breaking news, or make video calls.
Google Chromium and V8 makes all this possible, and now the browser industry is coming together to bring it to users everywhere.
## The universal Web application
While Web applications were designed to move Web browsing beyond reading documents, different approaches made it difficult and costly for websites to bring it to users.
By aligning on the W3C's universal Web standards - with the Google Chrome client app - websites can now provide Web applications across the browser ecosystem.
I know from a friend that Facebook was looking into integrating RCS to Messenger (not Whatsapp somehow) and willing to be part of the Google federated RCS network, that also fell through, but I don't why.
I've been trying to gain some insight on why Google is not making it easy (possible?) to implement a third-party RCS app for Android and was reading about these APIs (clearly intended for OEMs).
> This means that third party apps aren't allowed to access RCS single registration APIs as they require carrier certification on the device.
Could just be Google passing the buck here, but this does sound like something the carriers would do, if given the chance.
I don’t expect Apple to graduate RCS to a blue bubble, as it’s advantageous to keep the blue bubble “special”. I’ll be interested to see if society adapts and starts treating whatever RCS gets categorized as as “acceptable” or if we’re too far down the classism path for that to happen.
Why do you feel Signal is better security wise?
Even if you turn on e2ee for iCloud (“Advanced Data Protection”), your endpoint keys will stop being escrowed in a way readable to Apple in your backup, but the endpoint keys for everyone you message with will still be escrowed because they have not enabled Advanced Data Protection (because it’s off by default), so Apple will still be able to read all of your iMessage traffic.
99.9%+ of iMessages pass through Apple servers encrypted with keys that Apple has copies of (thanks to the insecure non-e2ee default nature of iCloud Backup). If the middle transit service has the private keys, it’s not e2ee.
The carriers (full members of GSMA) came up with RCS as a replacement for SMS/MMS at a network level and then didn't have the appetite to implement it.
Instead, they either A) adopted Google’s Messages as is, B) adopted Google’s Messages in white label form, slapping their logo on it, or C) made “their own thing” running on Google’s Jibe servers.
With very few exceptions, it all goes through Google. And Google uses this to pretend that their proprietary iMessage competitor is “the” RCS standard.
The actual RCS standard is dead for all intents and purposes because nobody uses it like that, except for Apple in the short term.
Apple adopting RCS means that there is another player to balance this field. A much-needed player, and the only one that's relevant (other than maybe WeChat and WhatsApp)-
> With very few exceptions, it all goes through Google.
Yeah, because the mobile end-device for RCS is currently always an Android device. If there would be support from Apple, an RCS-server of Apple could handle the communication to Apple-Devices.
The idea of every carrier owning his own RCS-server was anyway already dead before the first client was released. The number of carriers never increased after the initial rollout of the major working-group members, simply because there is no way to charge for the service and monetization of such a small userbase with other services was not sustainable.
It's worth to put this into time-context here: When work on RCS (or "RCS-e") was initiated, WhatsApp was already well-established and leading the European market.
Clarification - many of the carriers are using Google-hosted RCS servers as well. I don't think Apple especially likes the idea of iPhone user metadata (and message contents) going through Google-hosted chat servers every time they message an Android user.
> If there would be support from Apple, an RCS-server of Apple could handle the communication to Apple-Devices.
The issue there is you need something that authoritatively resolves a phone number as being routable via a particular server, and (ideally) to a public key for encryption.
This is the hard problem for chat services - knowing how to route and how to protect data. If there is a problem, then you have some other party monitoring your communications or even manipulating them.
If the same phone number could be authoritative to either Google or Apple RCS servers, then some other component has to make that call.
Maybe that will change now that Apple is adding support.
RCS is still standardized and maintained by the GSMA
https://www.engadget.com/att-starts-using-googles-jibe-platf...
This is applicable ESPECIALLY to large-scale carriers of US, which are big enough to customize every spec and force their suppliers to adopt it.
The only reason why Google's RCS works better than any attempt before that, is that Google is forced to unify the implementation. It's not their spec, they are part of the RCS working-group like everyone else, but by stepping in they instantly reached a cross-carrier rollout-scale where they can't comply to every custom requirement of ATT, Verizon, Vodafone, T-Mobile unless they all agree to make it part of the standard.
Only if both users in a 1:1 chat are using Google Messages. E2EE is not possible even with Samsung Messages, so I highly doubt it.
iMessage was free once you had a smartphone plan.
And no, smartphone plans didn’t automatically come with unlimited SMS. I had to “upgrade” for that.
Unless you went over your data limit.
Start sending any kind of media and all bets are off.
Okay. The main incentive is to create a competitive method for messaging which allows rich communication with everyone, regardless of platform or ecosystem just via their phone number.
Name five more.
Google doesn't own the RCS-specification, the spec is still defined and maintained by GSMA, with Google just having one of the seats at the table (along with carriers and device manufacturers).
Apple is also a member of GSMA, them adopting RCS means that they just take another seat at the table of the RCS working group.
--
> Google has significant incentives for pushing RCS for more than one reason.
I don't know if you mean to imply some hidden Agenda. The incentive is to standardize "rich communication" across mobile platforms. "Green bubble" is one manifestation of the bigger issue that 27 years after the creation of SMS there is still no other universal method for me to send a text to your phone number today.
The main reason for that is, that several players still hope to own this communication channel to the user with their proprietary app, become the "Western WeChat" and sell access to the users.
RCS could be an universal non-proprietary method, open to be adopted by Apple, Facebook, WhatsApp and whoever wants to build a Message ecosystem. It has the potential to end this hassle and allow me to send a text to your number and reach you regardless of your OS and application of preference.
I can’t imagine all of the carriers cooperating on key management. That’s probably why some carriers have opted to use Google’s solution instead of their own. I would guess encryption isn’t an option if your carrier isn’t in this group.
FWIW, the 350+ page standard is here: https://www.gsma.com/futurenetworks/wp-content/uploads/2019/...
If even Apple says iMessage isn’t used by at least 45 million EU citizens… (to qualify for gatekeeper status)
What do you mean? If Apple includes RCS like they did SMS then it would operate as follows:
Is target an iPhone with iMessage enabled? Yes? Use iMessage. No? Fallback to RCS. RCS doesn’t work? Fallback to SMS.
Even carriers that supported RCS, like Vodafone, have shut it down https://9to5google.com/2023/03/27/vodafone-rcs-messages-andr...
Apple won't make the iPhone fall back to sending RCS though Google servers (like Android does) if there isn't carrier support for it, they'll just say "there is no RCS support on your carrier" and go for SMS.
But I guess it was worth to try this instead of directly opening iMessage for interop, for business reasons.
Of course, eliminating someone for “green bubbles” after you had already developed some interest in is way too much and is indeed a trait that would make one not worth pursuing.
Every time an iPhone user sends an SMS or MMS to an Android user, it ends up on an Android phone, which Google could snoop on if they so desired.
And, regardless, if Apple implements Google's E2EE extension to RCS, it doesn't really matter whose servers they go through.
As far as your second point, well… I guess that’s precisely the attitude I was addressing. I definitely don’t agree that a phone brand is as strong an indicator of personality traits as the example you offer. If I was say, hiring a UI designer, I’d perhaps care about their choice of OS. For relationships, I don’t really care if they’re passionate about mobile phones. I understand that most of us on HN are keyed in to tech and UI. The average person, though, sees a phone as a utilitarian item, and owns one as a means to accomplish specific tasks. That way of thinking is like, if someone was a mechanic and thought poorly of a someone they met because they drove a Ford instead of a Mazda and the mechanic believed Mazda had more elegant engine designs.
iPhones: so exclusive that hordes of unemployed teenagers have them.
Nothing will still have a feature and an edge by offering a "blue bubble" on Android, but this announcement would reduce my excitement a little bit if I were them.
The social stigma stems from iMessage giving Apple users advanced and integrated messaging for free since the very beginning, which “spoiled” people into not wanting to deal with pure SMS chats.
It doesn't do this on my phones.
I did just find and disable the RCS Config Service, too, and testing that everything still works.
https://www.fcc.gov/general/lifeline-program-low-income-cons...
The problem is that the phones generally only come with 15GB of data a month, and an average web page can easily run to 200MB now, so usually by the third day of the month they are all out of data.
There is a better federal plan for poor people called ACP which allows you to get your own phone and plan, but it isn't as well-known.
Wait, what? How did it come to that? I thought it was more like 50 MB if not even less. Thank God we have ad blockers.
> guys on every street corner trying to get you to take a free smartphone or a tablet with 15GB of data a month
Would it be possible to get it as a tourist?
People didn’t quit cable because of price. They did it because of price to perceived value. As has been shown with the current state of streaming services, it isn’t actually cheaper to cut the cord. But what you do get is a lot more flexibility.
Imagine if Comcast had offered its own YouTube TV style service in 2012 (something Intel tried to do in late 2013 before it was summarily canceled — I almost took a job on that team and dodged a bullet), rather than hoping against hope that cord cutting wouldn’t take off? You’d probably have a bunch of Comcast subscribers to this day who were satisfied that they could watch all their TV live and on demand whenever they wanted.
No idea what kind of poor purchasing decisions would lead to that. You can't get any form of cable package for less than $150 a month last time I checked. I don't pay anywhere near that for Internet + a couple of streaming services.
Oh, and the $30 a year or whatever for a VPN.
And the networks were already offering online access to their content via TV Everywhere. They didn’t want to do the geolocation thing, that was all requirements of the cable companies (the issues with the network broadcasters like ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox are much more complex).
In fact, you could (and I would) argue that it was the cable companies insistence on maintaining their defacto monopolies on who could get what service where (because there was never consumer choice in who your cable provider is, unless you count satellite, which I do not) that pushed the networks hands into creating their own competing OTT services based on the content they owned. Because as people cut the cord, the networks weren’t going to watch their businesses completely go up in flames. Now, should they have done that sooner and more aggressively (HBO did it best and earliest with HBO Now as a companion to HBO Go — a move that earned them the ire of the cable industry, the same industry who often refused to let HBO Go subscribers who paid the cable companies directly for HBO, do things like access the service on an Xbox b.c they didn’t like the idea of people not paying a $5 a month fee for an extra box), yes. 1000%
But let’s not pretend like the cable companies were without leverage. If they’d acted decisively and disrupted themselves early enough, they were the ones with the direct relationship with the customer, not the networks. They were the ones who could have created their own bundles of OTT content. But no, they refused until it was too late and got to see the whole industry bleed itself and for live content to essentially die.
I find this absolutely hilarious and almost beautiful: Google has been harassing Apple to implement RCS because it's an open standard and because its users feel green bubbles on iMessage are exclusionary. Now Google has implemented a proprietary protocol on top of RCS that only works with its messaging app, and only messages sent between users of that app appear in a darker blue color with a special lock icon.
So Apple will ship the RCS standard in iMessage, and communication between Android users and iMessage will be sent using RCS, but iMessage users will appear to Android users in the lesser light blue bubbles alongside the dark blue bubbles only given to Android users with Google's proprietary app! Huzzah!
Pretty sure everyone would still have to use Google Messages.
How does google messages (gMessage?) indicate which messages aren't secure?
Grey and Green means not encrypted. Simple.
> If you see a green message bubble instead of a blue one, then that message was sent using MMS/SMS instead of iMessage.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/105087
> iMessages are texts, photos, or videos that you send to another iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or Mac over Wi-Fi or cellular-data networks. These messages are always encrypted and appear in blue text bubbles.
You could say "blue means it supports link embedding; green means it doesn't" and it would be just as true.
Personally, I strongly suspect that Apple views it as "blue means Apple; green means NIH."
The word "Mac" encompasses all of those, just fyi.
The networks ruined their own businesses too — even if some were smarter than others (HBO being the smartest and also why it was the most valuable asset of the AT&T acquisition and the Discovery acquisition) — but I chose to focus on the cable companies b/c they are dumb pipes the same way wireless carriers are and they refused to disrupt themselves.
Ticketmaster isn't the true price-gouger. It's actually the artist + promotor + venue that collectively set the high prices. Ticketmaster is just the administrative computer system to implement the high prices that the artist/promoter/venue want to charge.
For example, top artists can negotiate to get 105% of ticket's face value from the concert promoter. Indeed, people have speculated that Taylor Swift had so much leverage in negotiating the terms of the Eras tour that she got 110% of the ticket's face price.[1]
If Taylor gets 110% of the ticket money, how does that leave anything left for the promoter and the venue?!? With those artists' financial demands, you now have a math problem: where to get the extra +5% or +10% and also pay the promoter+venue without taking a loss? By charging extra fees.
It's a very clever bit of financial sleight-of-hand. The artist/promoter/venue can all charge more money but hide the blame by embedding it in Ticketmaster's "convenience fees", "service fees", "order processing fees", etc, etc. In this way, Ticketmaster is perceived as the parasite.
Your question where Ticketmaster is already assumed to be the "bad guy" means Ticketmaster's deliberate manipulation of public perception is working exactly as designed.
Green bubbles matter in group chats. You can’t easily change participants and stuff like reactions generate junk messages.
I agree RCS will stay green. It will have text, good quality media, maybe read receipts.
And that’s it. No E2EE or other extensions. Apple is fixing one issue (bad media quality) and taking away a disingenuous Google talking point. Perhaps this is also an argument to legislators that they don’t need to open iMessage.
They’re never going to go out of their way to make it preferable in any way.
Unfortunately I think it's just the typical remnant of the old Mac vs Windows haters who come out of the woodwork online to make it sound like a problem.
2. Any Android users with iPhone friends trying to use iMessage for group chat cares about it. It's impossible to add Android users to an existing group chat... and any time you have a mixed iPhone + Android group chat it degrades a number of the iMessage group chat features normally accessible to iPhone users.
3. Any Android users receiving media over SMS/MMS from an iPhone user cares. They'll be receiving images & videos that look like they were shot with a potato.
The blue vs green color doesn't matter, but the effects mixed platform chatting has on both iPhone & Android users is significant.
It's not at all unusual for my phone to explode in dinging when I leave one of those areas.
I wish they didn't block WiFi calling, because my cellular reception at home isn't great, and I'd use it there. We have an internal WiFi network separate from the public one, with per-user authentication, so you don't have to worry about visitors overloading the infrastructure (it's a hospital, lots of families and patients in addition to the staff).
That's incorrect. Apple here refers to a group of people, not the fruit. Google here too refers to a group of people, not the software that provides search features.
> They do NOT HAVE FEELINGS you need to defend.
Their feelings need to be defended as much as any other person. Which, logically, is not at all, but as you are defending your own feelings here what is logical is already violated, so...
The grandparent comment is talking about excluding people for wasting their time going on rants about message bubble colors, not about excluding those with a “wrong” message bubble color.
And no, caring about not having to waste time on listening to someone who cares entirely too much about message bubble colors doesn’t mean that you care as much as they do about it.
I do not care what color the message is. If I could read it, mission accomplished. People who worry about the color of an SMS are not folks I care to deal with. They are overly concerned about the wrong shit.
I hate people who judge others based on $1000 dollar Veblen goods. Also I make more money than them, so I'm very aware that the person who cares about bubbles is being exploited by Apple's psychology and marketing department. So... maybe I don't hate them, maybe we should feel sorry for them.
Or maybe we need to hate them because its a deterrent against corporations exploiting insecurities.
I remember a lot of conversations in high school going "My plans maxed out can you text $friend?" IIRC you had to specifically turn off receiving texts or they'd charge you for each one and we were broke HS kids.
edit: Oh that article posted above is 2007. I guess it lasted way longer than I thought.
I can also remember killing my data plan browsing Instagram while skipping my French class ... So about 7 years ago?
But the question here is: Were there any (reasonably popular) plans that provided data for smartphones, but not unlimited texting? If not, that couldn't have been a factor in the adoption of iMessage in the US.
As a kid I used to make a collect call to my mom and when they asked who was calling I’d say, “pick me up” and hang up. Free short messages even in the 90’s!
RCS is a suboptimal standard, and while it's good that Apple will support it to try to de-jank mixed-platform group messaging, I'd expect it also to be a different color because RCS in turn introduces its own jank that iMessage doesn't have. So people who want to make up an Apple to get mad at will still have their chance, I guess.
Hello, fellow graybeard!
This is something I pull out every once in a while to let kids these days know how rough we had it: we had to pay 10-25 cents per minute for any in-state phone calls that weren't "local", where "local" was an arbitrary boundary on the map not even related to area code.
If we had to call out of state, charges started at $1 per minute. Every year at Christmas, we'd have an event where the local family would gather to make phone calls to out-of-state family. Because the cost was so high, we had to strictly ration time. Each kid (I was a kid then) got 3 minutes talk time.
This was late '70s/early '80s, and the figures are not adjusted for inflation.
The reason why WhatsApp was huge internationally (like, 10^8 users huge) was because many teclos in developing countries included data usage in their plans but SMS was extra (and talking minutes were finite), so people used WhatsApp for all comms.
WhatsApp's had a free tier, but their basic plan was (IIRC) $1/month, and they many (tens/hundreds) of millions of users that paid it.
Facebook bought WhatsApp for $20B:
* https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-whatsapp-idUSKCN...
> Evidently, Zuckerberg lied to the European and American trade commissions. It was in fact possible to interface Facebook and WhatsApp platforms to mine data. Facebook has been doing it since day one of its acquisition. As always, Zuckerberg admitted to the misdeed, apologized and paid the fine. He got away scot-free.
> Months later, co-founder Jan Koum discovered that Facebook’s management weakened WhatsApp encryption system to make it easier for them to mine data. Koum resigned too.
> Fast forward to today and Zuckerberg continues to mine our data through Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram (which he acquired in 2012). Facebook has become a surveillance behemoth – arguably the biggest surveillance organization in the world.
* https://www.philstar.com/opinion/2023/04/05/2256935/real-rea...
So are most people who prefer iMessage over MMS (aka “green bubbles”), which is kind of the point.
But your analogy doesn't fit here... the issue with blue and green bubbles is the social pressure to have the "better" bubble color, to show you're part of the "better" group. That is, the negative social pressure comes from the threat of social exclusion via lower social standing. But the previous poster is also threatening social exclusion, but a more complete exclusion, and based on nearly the same thing. So it would be more like showing your objection to racism by expressing racist ideas or taking racist actions. Doesn't make sense, of course. That's my point.
Maybe because I'm good looking and make a lot of money, I don't have to care about green bubbles?
Maybe this is important if you are a poor person.
Why would I want to burden myself with clowns like that?
I wear clothes because they are comfortable and look nice. I don't wear clothes because of the branding and those that are overly concerned about the branding, would be the same.
Edit: also, I'm now apparently the same ilk as racists, since I choose not to deal with idiots that worry about the color of text boxes. That's cool.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoreceptor_cell#/media/File...
That's RGB lit up contrasted with just G lit up. One of the only worse pairings would be white on yellow, which would be RGB vs RG lit up, with the only distinguishing signal coming through blue, which we have the lowest resolution of.
White on blue is RGB vs B, all the visual difference in RG which we have the highest resolution of.
This is why you generally want different color schemes for light vs dark terminals, if the color saturation is high (saturated blue text on black is bad, saturated blue text on white is fine and vice versa for green and yellow).
It’s important users can tell if they are using SMS so they don’t get a giant phone bill at the end of the month.
Can you talk a bit more about how iMessage is fundamentally diferent than SMS on the functionality level? Is it like "Signal" different or is it like "different" different?
Edit: bonus points if you can offer why iMessage is able to be the skeleton key into your iPhone, as often it and WebKit seem to be behind most of the serious 0-days...
It's different in the same way every messaging app is different from SMS:
* Group chats, with custom group names and icons
* High quality images/videos
* Reactions
* Stickers
* Rich link previews
* Threads
* etc. etc.
> why iMessage is able to be the skeleton key into your iPhone
I don't think a lot (any?) of the vulnerabilities are unique to iMessage. It's more about the fact that SMS/iMessage is a means for someone to send you data that's then parsed/decoded immediately by the system.
I don't know much about how iMessage communication is implemented but it does offer end to end encryption and supports richer interaction and content than plain SMS does. that was one of the reasons that Apple marked SMS clients with the green bubbles to indicate not to expect the same interaction with them. It was some little shits that turned that into an anti-status symbol.
It integrates with sharing my location and I can tell when someone is actually typing
Kind of important to be able to tell if you are burning up your SMS quota.
I currently have an iPhone 15 Pro Max and have also used Android devices in the past. I like to switch each time I get a new phone.
Apple definitely picks an ugly color to make you feel uncomfortable texting with a non iPhone user. They should at least let users choose the color (which will never happen).
Trying to claim that Apple picked an "ugly color to make you feel uncomfortable" is simply false.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/277597847631822848/11...
But what's Apple's motivation? Making me feel uncomfortable reading an Android user's messages does little to influence that Android user into buying an iPhone.
That said, I don't know why Apple thinks the transport protocol (iMessage vs SMS) is so important that users want to see a color indicator for every message.
You can turn on high contrast mode in Messages settings which gives you a forest green color that's imo pretty nice to look at.
The green bubble is there because in the past, when telcos charged money for individual SMS messages, green meant money. I.e., greenbacks, US dollars.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenback
* https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/263943/meaning-o...
Blue meant no charge for the message, since it went over the data plan and through Apple's servers.
The tribal/clan split of iPhone/no-iPhone came later.
Carriers like AT&T and Vodafone that were early to adopt RCS never even managed to interoperate with other RCS carriers - you could only send RCS to other AT&T subscribers, or other Vodafone subscribers. Then they all gave up and just adopted Google's servers. So now RCS just means "Google Jibe".
It's a failed standard. It never worked.
It doesn’t fix the end to end encryption problem unless google opens up their system.
There is little new information to gain for them, no matter how Android users communicate with Apple users right now.
There is however a lot to gain for them if a unified rich communication standard is established in the market, because apart from finally being able to replace SMS, it would drive platform-agnostic innovation in this area.
Google and Apple agreeing on a standard could disrupt the ecosystems of Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Vibr, Zoom, MS Teams etc.
The client and the OS don't really give them any metadata or message content. Operating the server infrastructure would.
SMS doesn't touch their servers (except possibly for people that use Google's Messages app and/or backup service); RCS does.
> There is however a lot to gain for them if a unified rich communication standard is established in the market, because apart from finally being able to replace SMS, it would drive platform-agnostic innovation in this area.
Absolutely, but that open standard will hopefully not be RCS. It's way too coupled to the 3GPP/ITU model of doing things.
I trust the organizations in charge of the web and Internet (who brought us email and XMPP/Jabber!) a bit more than those who still somewhat yearn for the days in which OTT players did not exist and telecommunication was charged by the mile and minute or message.
The client includes a spam protection service which allows them to send message data to a server for scanning. Every other messaging app uses the Notification service to send the message and its relevant metadata to the OS. So as far as conspiracy goes, Google has all the means to get the data already today.
There’s always a risk that someone you’re sending a message to has been compromised but most of us are never at risk from that, as opposed to things like dragnet data collection or server breaches. E2EE is solving the problems it’s designed to solve, so it’s not a problem that things out of scope are more complicated.
The issue you describe is just not an attack vector that is in anyway relevant, if you can’t trust the other side, every hope is already lost.
I don’t worry (very much) that law enforcement will read my messages but I do worry that advertisers, insurance cartels, spam marketeers, bookmakers or price gougers will.
Huh, pleasantly surprised Apple is taking up the mantle on something cross-platform. Nice.
Yes, but when other promoters (not Live Nation) book artists at non-LN venues and use Tickemaster as the ticketing agent, all the extra convenience fees are still there.
E.g. Taylor Swift's promoter for Eras Tour was AEG, not Live Nation. And in Dallas, she performed at AT&T Stadium which is a venue owned by City of Arlington, not Live Nation. Ticketmaster was only the agent selling tickets for that Dallas show and it still had all the extra TM service fees padding out the price. In that case, Taylor Swift + AEG + AT&T Stadium got their slices of the pie by using Ticketmaster fees as the "bad guy".
Live Nation acquiring Ticketmaster in 2010 doesn't fundamentally change what Ticketmaster is designed to do: take the public relations blame for artists, etc charging the higher prices.
(Discontinuing their old magazine features, with nary a month to back up my purchased collection, as a one by one download was the latest thing).
Where it belongs. Google's fork of the open RCS standard is closed source and proprietary.
> Google's version of RCS—the one promoted on the website with Google-exclusive features like optional encryption—is definitely proprietary, by the way. If this is supposed to be a standard, there's no way for a third-party to use Google's RCS APIs right now. Some messaging apps, like Beeper, have asked Google about integrating RCS and were told there's no public RCS API and no plans to build one.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/new-google-site-begs...
will RCS still break most imessage group chat capabilities?
I dont really think “at least my videos will send at full resolution to android users” is really that much of a difference
multiple generations of people use phone chats for all the capabilities they offer, which is way more than higher resolution picture and video attachments alongside text
Apple adopting RCS won't solve #1, and is unlikely to solve #2, but solving #3 is a great start, and if the Apple faithful continue to give feedback to Apple that they care about fixing #2, we might see it one day.
Another solution Google could perhaps pursue would be to license one or multiple of those to include in the default Android install, but I don't see that happening without regulatory interference.
FB Messenger will have a "green bubble" for messages to people using whatever other app they're forced to integrate. Same with Whatsapp, Telegram, etc...
(IIRC, my plan with Cingular didn't have any texts built-in, so they were 10¢ a pop, in each direction. I could send many thousands within the data plan's couple of gigabytes.)
Are you sure? I remember iMessage falling back to SMS if for some reason it can’t get through on iMessage.
The newly created SMS group doesn’t replace the thread associated with the original group, though, so it’s easy for the group to fork when this happens.
Unlikely this will change with RCS.
> Besides ease of use, there's another side benefit to this seamless integration. If you send messages regularly to iOS 5 users, you may be able to switch to a cheaper texting plan from your carrier. Assuming you send messages exclusively to iOS 5 users, you may one day be able to ditch a texting plan altogether.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/06/more-upcoming-ios-5-...
No, its not.
Its more like a grouping of a subset of the actions of a group of people in some contexts, and a shared subset of the interests of a different (narrower, but overlapping) group of people in others.
But its not generally simply a way of referencing a group of people.
But if you want to see someone that appeals to the whole populace, then you will have to compete with the whole populace.
TicketMaster is a textbook example of a consumer-harming monopoly, and yet they have gone unprosecuted for decades. No excuse.
To be fair the blue they choose is also not ideal, but it is a lot better than the green.
https://medium.com/@krvoller/how-iphone-violates-apples-acce...
iOS 5 (introduction of iMessage) : https://i.imgur.com/v2Wths4.png
iOS 7: https://i.imgur.com/7k8QL3z.png
Yes, it was green before, but it didn't look so vile. Since the redesign of iOS in 7 the difference of green vs blue is a difference in legibility.
This should change, certainly! Hopefully Apple will force Google to open up their implementation and protocol for E2EE so they can build a compatible implementation.
Things like Key Transparency in the IETF are tackling some of this, in the sense that they'll provide public evidence of tampering.
I don't suspect what Google has implemented for their own client/server setup gets us close to a multi-party solution within RCS Universal profile.
They can, but one or both parties is refusing to use any of the numerous alternative messaging options like WhatsApp.
On Android, it wasn't an issue to use Signal, because it will communicate securely if it can and by SMS if it can't. So you can still text anyone from the app. On iOS, not so much.
I'd stay away from Whatsapp just to keep away from Meta.
This seems prejudiced. If one company supports end-to-end encrypted chats with everyone, and the other only with people who buy their devices, I think it's clear who cares more about privacy.
Where is that claim made?
"So it would be more like showing your objection to racism by expressing racist ideas or taking racist actions"
This is stating that, for example, if you dislike racists and choose not to associate with them, you're acting like a racist. lol
That's not racism...at all. It's not even bigotry. The choice is based on actions, not class, religion, color, etc.
I think that point would be stronger if anyone else was open. Google used to run an open messaging service but shut it down as part of their failed attempt to compete with Facebook, and their current professed love of open RCS hasn’t extended to allowing anyone else to use their implementation. Android developers aren’t given access the way they were to SMS, and nobody except Samsung is allowed to use their proprietary E2EE servers.
I think this is basically Apple calling their bluff and telling them that they need to actually release their proprietary work as open standards. I’m sure that will be their argument to regulators.
It's funny to read this criticism, when comments in another thread are criticizing Google for running an RCS implementation as a service for carriers.
RCS is an open standard, and Google does let others use it. However, other carriers didn't adopt it themselves, so Google set up a service that carriers can use and is running it themselves to ensure compatibility. There is no API for Android apps to use, yes, and that is a problem they should fix, but it's not exactly a self-serving decision, especially because it hampers Google's own products as well. The reason for the lack of the app API is likely because RCS hasn't been widely adopted enough to warrant it.
Android also has APIs to register another RCS client to the OS.
What's missing are open APIs for apps to control Google's RCS-client. Indeed this would be convenient, but considering the potential for misuse there, Google would probably need a separate certification process for each app, which is quite a scale for something that didn't scale yet...
A own RCS-client still requires accreditation to ensure interoperability with the RCS-service. API-access to Google's client would either require accreditation of the app using the client, or would need to be limited so dramatically that it's probably of no use...
Google wanted the carriers to all host their own servers. They refused, so Google took it on. Agreed that there are going to be interop issues with Google's RCS implementation, but let's not place all the blame at Google's feet, here.
> I think this is basically Apple calling their bluff and telling them that they need to actually release their proprietary work as open standards. I’m sure that will be their argument to regulators.
Which would be a great outcome!
The idea was for every carrier to be the gatekeeper of his subscribers, so no one was giving up anything and everyone wins. The strongest carriers in the working group rolled out their own servers in the initial stage of development, a total of five only IIRC. No one else followed because there was no visibility on return of investment.
At that time, major device vendors maintained their own SMS-app to navigate all the custom requirements of the carriers in the world. Google aimed to standardise the client and include all these carrier-specific customizations, but RCS was about to fragment this space even further, as every vendor was expected to integrate his own client.
Google then stepped in in 2015 by acquiring Jibe, a main supplier of RCS servers and the developer of a vendor-agnostic RCS-client. At this point only ONE carrier still considered to buy a own server.
Google continues maintaining the existing servers and also offers to host RCS as a service for carriers. Overall goal was to defragment both the server and the client area, as this was the only way to scale.
It's time for others to step in and balance the playing field again, Apple is the best candidate for that.
I have no love for the carriers but to me open would sound like things Google could do unilaterally:
* Android developers can now use the RCS APIs, not just our own app
* Our extensions are released as an open standard waiving any IP litigation except in self-defense
* Our E2EE key server is open to users of other apps and/or supports this federation protocol
Nah gov doesn't give a shit they just see the incapable outcome and the rest of Apple's behavior.
It is still such a laughable issue from the POV of any other country.. SMS is there for text-only, it’s a legacy tech that didn’t ever get popular in different places due to it having shit support for non-ascii letters (writing a single ü would almost halve the remaining chars I can write), and not having unlimited SMS sends, so internet-based messaging spread like wide-fire. iMessage is the latter, the normal SMS is not. But there are also Telegram, Whatsapp, Facebook, a million other solutions.
It’s a made-up issue.
My biggest pet peeve is when people have an issue that doesn't affect them so they need to declare it as "fake". Just because you don't feel the problem doesn't mean "it's a made up issue".
The following are simply facts:
1. In the US, among iPhone users, iMessage is by far the dominant messaging service.
2. Among certain socioeconomic groups in the US, iPhone is by far the dominant mobile phone. I have been in several friend groups where there was at most 1 other Android user.
3. In group chats, not only does the limited functionality for Android users make it harder to converse, but the presence of a single Android user can break the experience for everyone (I've had messages randomly not show up, abysmal video quality, etc.)
So while I would absolutely love it if other people would switch to Telegram or WhatsApp or whatever, you try telling a group of 10 people "Hey, can you all switch the messaging app you are familiar with and use all the time so I don't feel left out?" If you think that's viable you just don't understand human nature.
The other option is for Apple to simply make an Android version of iMessage (like all the other messaging apps you mentioned), but they don't seem too keen on that.
I do experience the human aspect, and have 4-5 different chat programs installed, which is not ideal, but it is just simply can’t be expected that everyone uses the same stuff. I just remember to use Telegram with friends X, Y and Signal with W.
iMessage is and always was for iPhone users to communicate with other iPhone users. It will send messages over SMS as a fallback but it was only ever for use in communicating with other iOS devices in the same way iOS is only for Apple devices.
I see all arguments to force Apple to open up iMessage as punishing them for building a platform that people want that the majority of the US has bought into.
And android is bigger everywhere outside the US.
Also Europe has already solved this. If you want to talk to iPhone and android users in Europe you just use WhatsApp or another third-party service.
Why must Apple dilute the experience to communicate with folks not on its platform?
In electric car charging Tesla built out the super charger network investing billions in service of making their cars more useful. (iMessage is this to iPhone users.) there’s another standard out there or handfuls of other methods of charging cars but the market leader is the super charger network. And wouldn’t you know? Folks are adopting it because Tesla is licensing it but it was their choice.
To force Apple to open up iMessage as a protocol to other devices by fiat seems wholly totalitarian and invasive.
Also, how many people actually care all that much about their message history? I know I do (and I have 1GB of SMS/MMS/RCS message history dating back to 2010 that I back up to GDrive nightly), but it seems to me that most people don't care about their message history that much?
These all have significant usability impacts; I think Apple still has the correct defaults.
Finally, my understanding is that recovery keys are escrowed in a HSM separate from cloud hosting, and releasing an escrowed key is an audited event. My concern is mostly about actors accessing my data or surveilling me without transparency, as that gives no chance for accountability.
That said, I suspect that there's more people out there who're going to lose their text history with their dead parent and be distraught over that, than who're going to be actively upset that the state can subpoena their messages.
I see all arguments that Apple shouldn't be forced to open up iMessage (or implement RCS) as forcing me to have a worse phone experience because I didn't buy an iPhone from the company that said "if you want to sideload apps, buy an Android".
"Just use a third-party app" is not a solution for people who text with the normal messaging app, and I sure as hell would never beg them to migrate to Whatsapp of all things.
>To force Apple to open up iMessage as a protocol to other devices by fiat seems wholly totalitarian and invasive.
You have this backwards. The totalitarian and invasive part is when I have to beg Apple for permission to use software they wrote, to sell apps to people using devices they sold, etc. This bootlicker mentality of "it's Apple's devices and software" needs to die. Apple is the totalitarian, the EU is trying to stop tyranny.
Because YOU don't want to adapt you're asking nay advocating the forceful opening up of another platform to do it for you. That's just lazy.
Think about it like this:
You create a super successful bit of software -- let's call it an operating system -- that runs on a very popular and well designed piece of hardware referred to as an internet phone -- let's call it an iPhone. :-)
It takes off. Market share is just above 50% in the country of it's birth. w00t.
Now folks that haven't licensed your software by buying the hardware you built it for are out with pitch forks to force you to support other internet connected phones when you already do support them just not in the same way. Messages are still able to be sent to these devices but they don't share the same richness.
Why would anyone advocate that something a person with autonomy or a company for that matter be forced by fiat to open up a messaging system or any other bit of kit because the mob wants them to?
People are just frustrated and entitled. This isn't open source software. You can't just go and fork it. There are entire companies that have cropped up that are trying to bridge this blue bubble green bubble divide and that's the solution to take. Until, and unless Apple caves and opens up iMessage it seems wholly un-American to force them to do so when there are alternatives be it something like WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, normal SMS and the green bubbles that come with it or moving to an iPhone. I'll never buy the "waaa because I use the built-in app on my Android phone and I want to have blue bubbles when I talk to my friends on iPhones ... waaaaaa!"
There are solutions, I've already outlined them. Pick one.
> Apple is the totalitarian, the EU is trying to stop tyranny.
The EU tends to do this. A successful platform is created and to give shortcuts to other companies to build on that success they force that platform to open to competitors. This is exactly why the EU doesn't have companies that innovate like the US does.
In many places, most people wouldn't. But Europeans (and some others) seem eager to BCC all their texts to Mark Zuckerberg for some reason.
But there's no reason to move. Your messages still get to iPhone users via SMS with a different color. What's the beef with the blue v. green anyway? The messages get there. Don't like it? There's plenty of iPhones or other iOS devices that can be had for cheap. They'll last a long time, they'll get tons of updates, they're secure. What's not to love?
Or there are third-party services that you can pay for like Beeper that will act as a bridge.
And if they hadn't done so by choice, they should absolutely have been required to open up that network to all cars.
Can you imagine a world (for ICE cars) where you'd have to find a car-manufacturer-specific gas station to refuel? That's ridiculous.
Pathetic.
If they'd simply added a "WhatsApp/iMessage mode" to Google Chat in 2015 (i.e. allow Google account based users to seamlessly communicate with phone number based users), I think we might be seeing a very different messaging landscape today.
They'd have been sued by WhapsApp and Apple if they did that since they're proprietary protocols.
Japan: 65.88%
Denmark: 64.04%
Norway: 61.94%
Canada: 57.84%
Australia: 57.47%
United States: 56.74%
Switzerland: 55.92%
Sweden: 55.33%
United Kingdom: 51.63%
Taiwan: 51.32%
from: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/iphone-ma...
Also surprising as I always thought Android was more popular because there is more variety and cheaper options.
It's still a race war, apple (rich folk) vs. everyone else. Some middle ground probably, but not much - apple folks are obviously the richer targets.
I know who to target with spyware and otherwise get rich quick schemes, ransomware, kidnapping, almost any other major crimes. The best demographic with 1200 to spend on a phone.
It's not a "race war" if you need to clarify that apple <=> "rich folk". I might give you "class war", except there is no "war" part and no need to include it.
iOS /iPadOS (and by extension, iPhone and iPad) however, has slim-to-major majorities in most lucrative markets[0] and even in markets where iOS is not a majority, its well known in the mobile industry that iOS / iPadOS customers are far more lucrative
[0]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ios-vs-android-market-share-1...
Not really. It's dominant in some regions but definitely not a huge chunk of Asia.
This, but with Apple. Whether or not Google whined about it, iMessage was never going to last. It was never a matter of if iMessage would be forced to reconcile itself with the interoperable protocol it replaced, but when.
So... Apple should have been ready. They should have been drafting absurd standards centered around their own servers, and taunting Google into adopting it. They could have even charged a license fee for the software. But instead they played high and mighty, and now they have to contend with the law. Frankly, I'm glad Google summoned Shai Hulud.
It's hard to imaging you sincerely think this would have been better. It seems like you want them to engage in dishonesty.
> But instead they played high and mighty, and now they have to contend with the law.
iMessage isn't going anywhere. They're just going to add RCS support in the same way that SMS is supported, because now there is momementum for carrier support. This is really a storm in a teacup.
Isn't the situation in the EU that they're looking to force Apple to allow others to use the iMessage protocol? So why would Apple work on getting Google to support iMessage, when Google is putting in work to get access to it?
No, that's exactly what I said it was not.
A subset of the actions of a group of people, or a subset of the shared interests of a group of people, is not a group of people.
ok..
Signal does E2EE. They have not yet done anything to jeopardize the trust they have earned. Some do not like them, and that’s fine. I have a different view.
Its a boundary and we all need to get real better at understanding and being respectful thereto.
Only issue is if you want them more than they you, there's a bit of a dance to navigate . If the like Musk, send them to all his endorsementz. At the end of the day, it will have to be a negotiation at play and its more of a toughlove ultimatun purely for the area of which messenging platforms to engage with.
Lockdown mode rejects unknown sources, and doesn't autoplay content types.
So they don't have to any more, it's up to the user.
Actuvate LockDown, and its all gone. Indefinitely cuz it blocks the original sin. And there's basicaly 0-downsides.
There is zero evidence that Facebook is engaging in passive mass surveillance of WhatsApp messages.
Yes, it's called creating standards and fostering free market competition. This has happened REPETEDLY and time and time again.
Pretty much every standard, cable and tech you're using that works on multiple manufacturers was "something a company built by fiat".
If I'm facetious as you - I'm surprised just how deep corporate bootlicking goes here that outright hurts your ability to vote with the wallet and make modern market capitalism work for you as a user.
Free markets are I create something awesome and profit from it not am then forced to allow you and everyone else to build off of my hard work unless I choose to or am forced to.
If Apple was approached by governments or other institutions to use iMessage as the basis of some standard which iirc hasn't been done that'd be one thing. What we do know is that RCS is inferior to iMessage in many ways.
So Apple will adopt standards compliant RCS but it likely won't be the same and lazy Android users who want to stick to the stock app will get to enjoy the spoils of a half-baked solution.
My issue is with this mob mentality of forcing the hand by fiat, lawsuit, or otherwise to coerce a company to open up a tech/product/platform when they built it with no intentions of opening it -- it's proprietary by design.
The free-market works when someone else builds something -- in this case a better phone experience -- that would cause folks to move to that and abandon iMessage. But no -- let's keep our pitchforks and keep insisting some wierd collective ownership bias that means you or I or anyone else has some say over the property and tech of another person or company. Because, sure that makes sense.
The free market fails when the cost for anyone else to enter the market is completely out of reach to anyone else.
Industries where direct competition is allowable do not suffer from these problems.
No, they suffer much worse. Haven't you noticed how all goods and services go to shit over the years? This is not an accident, this is competition optimizing out any quality it can get away with removing.
No. I can't think of anything I buy that I would want to go back in time with. The quality in my experience has only improved, often dramatically. Those who try to skimp on quality get destroyed by the competition. What are you referring to?
The only thing I can think of that you might be referring to – based on what I hear other say, not based on my own buying habits – is things like appliances where manufacturers have really dug deep into computerization so that they can enjoy the same legal moats other tech companies do. But what you are experiencing there is the lack of competition we spoke of earlier.
A subset of the actions or interests, not a subset of the group of people (the latter would, indeed, be just a different group of people, but isn't what I said.)
> If people somehow magically disappeared, the corporate entity would disappear at the exact same time – it's the same thing.
No, its not the same thing.
If North America disappeared, all the piles of dog feces in North America would also disappear, but the piles of dog feces are not the same thing as North America.
"It's not what we all already use."
There's exactly one person I know who uses Signal on a consistent basis. I don't turn on notifications for anything, so I don't see their messages on a consistent basis, but Signal offers me no incentive to use limited social credibility to try to encourage others to use its awkward affordances and non-native interface over either a native interface with reasonable security (iMessage) or a much better non-native interface without (Discord, Slack).
"There's no excuse not to use the one I like" is Linux-on-the-desktopping and is not responsive to how normal human beings actually operate in life and society. You might put picky conditions on your interactions, but most people meet others where they are--because network effects are real and humans matter more than technology.
Has all the features of anything else without the bullshit and lack of credibillity/hazard to their own users.
If people respect themselves and their data enough, they will find a way. I've had zero problem with my closest friends cuz they trust I don't assign them random bullshit for shiggles. Maybe you need to reevaluate your relationships and the extent to which you place primacy on being able to communicate freely and without crap that works against you (or at least isnt built to work with you rather than rat you out about everything controversial you privately express)
Just don't get it man, maybe they're more the Telegram type. Nothing's more advanced or private than a Telegram for sure. Stop.
At some point, perhaps it will enter your consideration that talking about things like "people respect[ing] themselves and their data enough" is alienating to anybody who has a job and a mortgage and things they care about more than your minority choice of a messaging platform. Normal people don't care because normal people don't have governments, etc. in their threat models because normal people are boring. If you want to interest normal people, you have to be better than the BATNA--better than non-use. And saying "privacy" or "just get your friends to use it too" is a fail state.
Linux-on-the-desktop failed, too, when the only tool in the box was hectoring. (He said, from a Linux desktop.)
Direction is the word you are struggling to find, but it is the direction of the group of people. You have not added anything drawing attention to this so-called subset. It changes nothing about the discussion. It's just silly wordplay to divert our attention from your grievous error at the onset.
And this has real effects. For example, Im forced to use a piece of shit Macbook at work, where literally everything else in our cloud runs on linux, because the company issues Macs as a way of attracting talent since "tech" people also want tech jewelry.
Only a very specific demographic, though. Such companies are missing out on a lot of talented tech people.
Those people don't sound like people worth knowing. Ignorant and judgy to say the least.
If it's a boss or someone I love and they want to ignore my messages that's on them. If it's a work issue possibly HR could be involved as discrimination or outright ignoring messages based on device wouldn't really fly.
The people who were refused dates dodged bullets, then.
On Twitter you can easily curate Twitter lists of people to follow without being forced to use the generated feed. I'm rarely if ever outraged or otherwise emotionally charged when I'm using it. (Maybe except when I come across reply-bots)
And as I said elsewhere in the thread, I've never experienced that problem with any friend groups when it comes to iMessage.
Probably not a big issue if you already have a solid social circle of old tight friends who don't care about you breaking chats as they can also call you, but it can be huge issue when you move to a new city and trying to make new friend, as any extra friction you add to groups lessens your chances of being accepted and invited further.
Yeah, people can be quite lazy and petty even about such trivial things, when they don't know you and don't have any attachment to you yet, and you breaking group chats won't improve your first impressions and chances of being accepted. Hence the ever increasing loneliness crisis we're facing.
Thank fuck I live in Europe where nobody uses iMessage for group chats. Honestly fuck Apple for creating that unnecessary friction, it's not like they couldn't have accommodated blue bubbles to not break group chats but it's more profitable to emotionally extort people to buy your iJunk by making them feel outsiders.
Meh. I'm not interested in being part of a social circle that is as petty as that.
Sounds like not dating them is dodging a real bullet if they're that shallow.
The goal of a profit-seeking entity is to maximize profit. That is achieved by becoming a monopoly. Competition is just the consequence of multiple entities trying to become a monopoly - there can be only one. This is the motive part of market economy. The energy source.
Now, monopolies are obviously bad for society. Therefore, markets are regulated to prevent monopolies. This turns the market into an engine. You have constant inflow of upstarts dreaming of riches, fighting each other out to reach the throne of a monopolist, only to be denied it by regulation, and eventually become broken and/or pushed out by the younger followers.
Or, via another analogy: the market economy is designed like a donkey chasing a carrot on a stick attached to the animal, while standing on a treadmill. Being surprised that monopoly is the goal of companies is like being surprised the donkey would chase the carrot.
Indeed. It's so obvious and apparent that even Adam Smith himself made this exact point.
Markets are regulated to enable monopolies. Bell would have never become a monopoly if there wasn't the regulation involved in laying copper and Microsoft would have never become a monopoly if there wasn't intellectual property regulation.
She's not "cut off", but it requires a conscious effort to contact her. So while I may be keeping a group of people up to date or inviting folks for a bbq, open house, etc casually, I need to specifically invite her via some other channel.
Sometimes I forget. Feelings are hurt. I'm a single parent with a demanding job. Low friction rules the roost for me, and our group of friends all sort of support each other with these types of things and do alot of ad-hoc stuff.
My boss could be refusing dates from people that have green bubbles, but not ignoring my messages. Same with a family member for example. Your comment says they aren't worth knowing either way.
Seems like a completely different situation.... and really, again, a people problem.
For Microsoft: I think that's a weird argument. Plus I think there would have been lots of things pushing towards a single big player for desktop computing in the early-middle days (network effects).
Same goes for Microsoft. Everyone and their brother would have released their own 'Windows' if regulation weren't there to disallow it. Again, that regulation offered a moat which allowed them to establish their monopoly.
On the Ms point.. is your argument that we should have no intellectual property rights for software at all? It seems odd to single out only this example. I’m broadly not in favour of software patents but I’m not clear that they were relevant to MS success anyway. I think you need to make a clearer argument about what regulations we would have forgone for others to really evaluate your case.
Obviously not. That would require opinion, and sharing opinion is in bad faith. Discussion is merely for talking about how the world is. And as the way the world is, a monopoly needs some kind of moat to emerge. Intellectual property regulation exists to enable such moats.
> It seems odd to single out only this example.
Why? One example is all that is necessary to convey the idea.
But also, it is the only convicted monopolist in that respect that I could think off off the top of my head. Google was recently charged, but not yet convicted, so I could not include them. I am not about to suggest that other companies are monopolies based on my opinion. That, again, would be in bad faith. But, theoretically, the same could apply to other companies. It is not something that needs to be strictly limited to Microsoft.
