Samsung has released a new video in support of Google’s #GetTheMessage campaign which calls for Apple to adopt RCS or “Rich Communication Services,” the cross-platform protocol pitched as a successor to SMS that adopts many of the features found in modern messaging apps… like Apple’s own iMessage.
Friendly reminder that none of these asswipes are your friend :)
Just like actors, musicians, athletes, & authors. None of them are your friend.
I don’t know, George Orwell was a solid dude.
If he’s not there to help you when it’s time to move then he’s not your friend. So you can read Eric Arthur Blair but he’s not your friend.
That’s not what the word friendly means
While Apple should adopt RCS, I cannot help but feel that Google is being extremely hypocritical. They complain about iMessage being proprietary, but their implementation of RCS isn’t open source, and I believe they even mentioned they have no plans to open it up for 3rd party devs to implement it into their own sms apps. This just feels like an iMessage equivalent for Android. It has rich features that are exclusive to Android as a platform (more specifically exclusive to Google Messages or whatever the app is called now)… just like iMessage within iOS/MacOS/iPadOS…
Yeah, the only issue is that RCS is actually better and the counter argument is that Apple is breaking the messaging platform by not implementing it in some way.
The other point to make here is that iMessage wouldn’t have to just disappear. They could continue to support iMessage while just allowing text messages to be better for those who just don’t want an iPhone. The whole thing is hypocritical on both sides. Apple has convinced it’s users, very successfully might I add, that it is an Android problem and instead of having choice over your phone, you should just buy an iPhone.
As someone who works in IT this is really not the answer users should get. To me, this is equivalent to, “your computer quit working? Just buy a new one.” But imagine you only had one choice and it’s because that company refuses to just improve standard text messaging for all users across the board but iPhone users don’t understand that Google has a method to fix this problem Apple just refuses to make it a better experience for everyone.
Additionally, I think RCS is an open platform. Google’s fork of it carries encryption and group messaging integration. Point being Google genuinely has a viable iMessage solution to non iMessage texts. Apple wouldn’t even have to stop using iMesaage.
While I agree, Apple is being obnoxiously stubborn and it truly only does benefit Apple users as well, it just feels disingenuous from Google. It more feels like they want to get their product onto Apple devices. If Apple could implement RCS the way they wanted to and interoperate with Google, then I think it would be a more valid argument (and I suppose they can, but Apple would be caught dead investing money into something like that). But Google clearly wants Apple to use their own version and is putting up this annoying ad campaign to mask it. (As far as I know, the standard RCS implementation doesn’t even include E2EE, rather it’s something unique to googles implementation, correct me if I’m wrong). Google uses encryption as a talking point in their ad campaigns and is honestly for me the biggest reason for it to be used in iOS. Otherwise the experience is only marginally better than sms, and I wouldn’t expect Apple to even bother with it. At least with encryption one can challenge Apple‘s stance on being a privacy focused company…
Im also a software engineer and it’s annoying as hell that Apple is stubborn, but from a business perspective, it’s a gold mine for Apple - ecosystem lock-in is just too valuable to them as a company.
Has apple tried to work with Google on the RCS version? If not, I see everything you’ve written here as an invalid false equivalency
Google Voice still doesn’t support it!
MKBHD closed this topic for me forever. Apple is never going to open up. It provides them tremendous value. They don’t give a shit if Samsung taunts them lol. They want your teenage kids taunting their friends over their green bubbles. And it’s working.
Imagine a world where we can adopt a scalable, secure, open communication protocol where users can use whatever app they want. Imagine humanity moving past the diaspora of special-snowflake chat apps and on to better things.
Capitalism: “No.”
But I wouldn’t earn money, as we are currently forcing people to use our services/products.
Future generations will never know our pain
Gotta love how Google has spent the last, what, 10 years?, fighting iMessage and losing due to their own short-sightedness/lack of focus and incompetence. The company that dethroned MSN Messenger couldn’t win a fight against an opponent that, on a global scale, represents ~25% of the mobile market. Meanwhile, Whatsapp dominates the instant messaging world.
iMessage will have to open up bridges to other messaging services soon regardless thanks to being a Gatekeeper under the EU Digital Markets App.
bad news, imassage was not classified a gatekeeper because in europe they have to few users
I really thought Facebook overspent when they bought Whatsapp for $1B but I was wrong. It took Google too long to finally get behind a single messaging strategy. That’s just poor leadership.
Facebook bought Instagram for a billion. WhatsApp was 16 billion (and additional 3 billion in restricted stock units).
Ahh yes my memory isn’t great anyways. Thanks
Wasn’t it a crazier number—like $15 billion or something?
Edit: Siri says $19 billion [pinkie to corner of lips]
My memory was waaaaay off
Thatz ok, little buddy :) U just leave all the thinking to me [mind tap]
In order to grow a chat app you need a consistent and stable interface over a long period of time. It can’t have too much bullshit in it either.
In order to grow your career at Google you need to build ridiculous shit and then leave once you get your promo. Entire departments get reorged so someone can hit their people manager quota.
Product groups, business units, “orgs”, VPs, SVPs, it’s all just a game and “everyone’s playing except you.” This is why Google kills shit. Because Google rewards behavior that results in killing shit.
Why should anyone care about RCS? The trend has been to get everything into data instead of carrier owned services for two decades now, we don’t need another SMS (it will likely always be a fallback). What we should move onto is a carrier and device type angnostic universal standard protocol over TCP / QUIC like XMPP or Matrix, with SMS as the backup.
When you get a phone you can get an phone system account and a telephone number already. Modern apps in the Google ecosystem should already recognize you are already signed in with Google and sync your contacts. Since almost everyone is already in the Google ecosystem, if Google supported it they could have extended their XMPP implementation in Hangouts to allow messaging directly via XMPP to those contacts and SMS for anyone not yet in the system (similar to how Signal did, Apple does, and Google does now with RCS). Unlike Apple, since its just XMPP, users can still add friends and be added by friends on other XMPP servers (ex. their ISPs, their own, or a third party). They could have supported or jumpstarted a new very simple open source alternative app for that portion for AOSP if the EU complained. Eventually Carriers could have supported passthroughs for those still on feature phones and other users of SMS to use the number@carrier accounts to hit XMPP users with generated SMS numbers for non-SMS users (pushed either by business necessity or part of a government / teleco org like GSMA staged removal of SMS and telephone numbers). It’s all data at the end of the day.
Instead, they developed a whole new protocol to fluff the telecos and keep the now badly managed telephone number system even more necessary allowing spammers and allow the problems of legacy SMS to continue.
Apple, Google, and Samsung should all be shamed for not supporting fully open protocols and necessitating dependency on user harming stacks.
This sounds nice at a superficial level, but there’s a lot of reliability and backwards compatibility issues being ignored. During natural disasters and emergency situations, internet and cellular data are the first to fail. It’s not casual. For the phone and SMS (GSMA) protocols are sturdy enough that they can operate with very simple, low energy consuming and highly reliable machines. Internet data services on the other hand consume way more electricity (more expensive to have them operate with backup generators, for example) and are more delicate and prone to failure. They also need to be replaced more often. 100% of national emergencies systems run on phone and SMS tech, that could reliably operate for several decades with little maintenance that would cost billions to replace them with internet based system that were as reliable and durable. And then on top of it all, wired phones can even operate without electricity and connect with cellular terminals to contact other phones and cellphones. Only the tower needs to have power. There’s just a lot banked of that reliability that most modern conveniences don’t have.
I totally agree we can’t simply drop SMS immediately, but what am I missing in supporting backwards compatibility (for example via my pseudo number solution, like how VOIP works) preventing us from moving forward during a stagged shutdown in the span of decades? MMS and RCS both would also fail under cellular data loss, and SMS itself hasn’t always been available during major disasters. I’m not sure I buy the argument you can’t have similarly low energy towers (even with net neutrality states, you can still cap all bandwidth per user), and a simpler tower that only does data should be far more reliable than a tower that provides multiple carrier services given the simplicity (and it’s very rare to have towers that only do voice + SMS anymore).
I don’t know for certain. But one point to consider is that you have to qualify your “simply” statements with the fact that we are talking about millions of towers and hundreds of millions of repeaters over millions of square miles. While RCS works on top of the backbone that’s already there and fallsback to SMS by design. So it might actually be simpler. The big up is that the server is on the carrier, not centralized, which makes it entirely different than what you are talking about and giving it more resilience.
Apple is not going to change this unless legally forced to because it is quite possibly the biggest driver of iPhone sales.
A whopping 87% of American teens use an iPhone, and the green text from Android SMS is the biggest reason. At that age people will do almost anything to fit in and get a date, and the green text was chosen specifically to elicit an “eww” response. Most of those teens will likely will continue to use iPhones as adults because it’s what they know.
As someone from the EU, I’m so confused about why this would matter to people. At that age, people will just find any excuse to bully regardless of what it is, it’s why uniforms don’t work either for those purposes. Hell, if someone were to try and shame me for the fucking color of my messages I’d be thankful, they’ve shown me another cunt to avoid associating with. In that sense it might actually be useful. (also, who even uses sms anymore?)
Very true and very ridiculous. A great deal of people will commonly do almost anything to be apart of a desirable group.
Breaking news: Apple and majority of its users still don’t care.
I’d love to have RCS, but it’s not a make or break feature for me, and I’m tech savvy enough to know what it is and what it does. Good luck trying to convince the average consumer to give a fuck about invisible tech that doesn’t meaningfully change their experience.
Considering how much time Apple users spend bitching about green text bubbles and “shitty android photos” it would meaningfully impact their experience when talking to anyone that’s not on iPhone.
They blame Android for that for some reason. Makes no sense.
Apple deliberately makes it appear that way so the competition looks bad.
They don’t really advertise the fact that they’re quietly intercepting all of their customers messages to other customers and routing them through a proprietary network.
And if you dare leave, messages from your old iPhone friends mysteriously won’t arrive unless you proactively deregister your number from iMessage or it eventually expires out.
…or when you are given a new number from the provider and dont find out it doesn’t recieve messages from iPhones.
Happened to my fiance a few months back. She got a new number, and her dad received no messages from her. (He had an iPhone) It was fathers day weekend. All plans fell through.
Cause they don’t realize it’s a protocol issue, they just imagine that only iPhone has progressed past 2007 photo technology I guess.
First part is true, second part isn’t. Most people aren’t that dumb.
Apple users are.
That is a terrible generalization and even my less tech savvy Apple friends and family don’t think this.
This isn’t about making iPhone users care per se, I really think it’s just a public perception thing.
Yes, until now we’ve accepted to be governed by what Big Tech can convince “average users” to use and here we are.
Internet is controlled by a handful of company who decide what you read, what you watch, how you communicate with friends and family.
It sucks because there are so many great alternatives to most big tech solutions but it doesn’t matter until you can convince people of the benefits of using those alternatives.
I’d be ok with everybody adopting Signal protocol but I can safetly say no government anywhere would “allow” that
I am beyond bummed that Signal abandoned SMS support. It worked, it isn’t a constantly evolving standard. Just leave it alone, Signal!!
I used it too. I miss it, but i get why they removed it: it just kinda breaks the Signal user experience and trust model. This app lives and dies by the users trust their conversations will be private. By having an option to message someone in a completely unencrypted, easy to intercept mode like SMS it risks this trust for little gain (some power users like us liked it). By removing it, the app concentrates on what is expected from it and removes a big possibility for user error while fleshing out its marketing image even more. It makes perfect sense but its a tad annoying.
I understand what you’re saying, but I feel it was pretty transparent the way they handled SMS vs. Signal Messages. I suppose it’s a bit like the D.W. meme, though.
I always thought having SMS support in Signal created a significant risk of confusion about what kind of message the user was sending. Of course sophisticated users always knew the difference, but it’s for software that emphasizes security it’s better not to have to tell people who don’t understand the technical details “it’s secure unless…”.
It’s a valid point that it could potentially create some confusion when a user assumes that everything in Signal is secure. Unencrypted SMS threads could contain an open padlock icon and even an ominous red window border, but someone inevitably will not understand the difference.
However, my frustration has been how both convenience and security is reduced by removing SMS from Signal.
Many people will continue to use SMS for a variety of reasons, necessitating the use of an additional app. So now we have people continuing to communicate over this insecure protocol, but with the additional target vector of potential vulnerabilities in the supplemental app.
You’ll notice Signal backtracked on supporting SMS as soon as they got an ex-Googler as their new leadership.
RCS needs to happen, I’m so sick of Whatsapp.
Why not switch to something not owned by Facebook like Signal (or something on an open protocol like Element)?
No one I know uses Signal or is skilled enough to switch away from Whatsapp. 100% have WhatsApp.
Trying to switch, would be like talking people into using Linux. Not going to happen unless the current option got much worse.
Yeah that’s a big problem that I’m trying to research solutions for myself too. It was way better when I could tell people to just install Signal and it’d replace their SMS app but be secure when others use it, but unfortunately Signal dropped SMS. Currently I just have all the apps, but since Signal does contact discovery (like Whatsapp) I follow a Signal, Whatsapp, FB Messenger, RCS (via Google Messenger), then SMS pattern and stopping when I can contact someone. Obviously, this has the issue that all these apps are getting far more data than they need and I’d like to look into a multiplatform app that does e2e. From what I’ve researched so far, Matrix bridges (servers that connect your Matrix account to a third party messaging service) might be the answer.
I haven’t tried it yet but there is a Matrix bridge that you can host if you are selfhosting a Matrix server (or use a commercial Matrix provider that already hosts it) that will allow you to connect to your Whatsapp friends without needing the Whatsapp app yourself that could be interesting for at least that use case https://docs.mau.fi/bridges/go/setup.html?bridge=whatsapp .
I think this issue is mostly a USA one, considering that most communications there have caps (data, phone time, SMS etc.) Paradoxically, the market there doesn’t work very well and prices are relatively high. Big corporations take advantage of it to lock people to their ecosystems. There is a high probability that this issue, will be regulated by the EU, since US policy makers are unable to solve much more important problems. For them this is not an issue. The market has solved it.
I’d argue the SMS/MMS reliance in the US is entirely because there have been no caps on it for years now. Nearly all plans you can get here have unlimited SMS/MMS included, even cheap prepaid ones.
Having a fixed allotment of texts or minutes hasn’t been a thing for over a decade at this point, and the only thing that’s expensive now is data.
That was my understanding. I was told one of the reason for growth in apps like Whatsapp outside the US was that data was cheaper than texting (probably just per message cost).
This public shaming bullshit reminds me of Epic’s Fortnite debacle and it’s not a good look, especially from Samsung who usually mocks Apple on Monday and is copying them by Friday (see “no CD drives in laptops” or “no headphone jack” or “no removable batteries in the phone”). I know they’re completely different issues but whining is whining.
There’s truth in this, but in the meantime, these small moments are huge and the alternative is that they are gone entirely in our monopolistic, fixed slice of capitalism. Enjoy the small bit of competition we still actually see. Agree that Google/ Samsung are ultimately disappointing but on balance, better than the walled garden, hyper inflated pricing and big-buttoned toddler interfaces of iOS
I don’t have to guess your position based on your language but I do want you to understand that some of us like the walled garden. There’s a lot of shit out there that I don’t have to deal with and don’t want to have to.
Everyone (in America) wants them to be together
Rest of the world already moved on to better services.
I haven’t sent an SMS since like 2013 or something like that. Couldn’t care less about this blue green controversy, my use of SMS is receiving 2fa codes and spam.
Yeah, this is very much a weird USA issue.
I often only have internet access - no sms (receive only), no calls. Don’t want to pay for it, don’t need it.
iMessage is probably a USA issue, however everyone using WhatsApp is not a solution either.
It’s a proprietary application controlled by Meta, we need an open standard so no Big Tech controls everyone’s messages.
I didn’t say “WhatsApp” once, so… Sure. That’s what xmpp is for, or whatever is currently in vogue.
In any case, it doesn’t involve smses.
It’s hard to get phone service without unlimited SMS in the USA. Using it is still worse than most alternatives so I do find it weird that people aren’t adopting chat apps more eagerly.
Right, nearly all US carrier and MVNO plans have offered unlimited SMS and MMS for years now. It’s free, it’s built-in, and it’s easy. For most, it doesn’t matter if chat apps are better, so it’s been very difficult to convince people you chat with to switch to a different app.
RCS dates to 2008 and Appul didn’t support it. Now we know that Appul is stuck in 2007 or earlier.
Edit: it seems RCS is another centralized hellscape
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Samsung and Google are just now getting around to supporting it
Hey now, I’ve been rocking RCS for three years. The only reason it took so long to begin with is because Google was trying to get service providers to implement it themselves. Google finally said fuck it and started doing it themselves iMessage style and then providers started playing along.
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RCS wasn’t originally supposed to run on data, it only does now because carriers didn’t want to support it natively.
Centralized or not, it’s a massive improvement over basic SMS/MMS.
Edit: at least the concept is. Implementation aside, it’s crazy that there isn’t a cross-platform texting option that has more modern capabilities than what we’ve been using for the past couple decades.
