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Apple will soon support encrypted RCS messaging with Android users

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Re: Apple will soon support encrypted RCS messaging with Android users

#111

Post by happymellon »

lxgr wrote: post #95
devilbunny wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never seen a reaction that helped. "OK" is short, it's in plain text, and it works easily. I don't need your thumbs up. Or your like. You want to emoji, go ahead, but I'm getting older and I can't zoom in on them without blowing up general text to the same size. With more complex emoji I have to screenshot the text and then pull up the image to zoom on it to even tell what it is. I'd silence the conversation,…

While acknowledging that you might not have any agency about this in your specific situation, this sounds more like a social/boundaries problem than a technical one. If I were in a group chat with people both joking around and sending messages requiring urgent responses, I'd let them know to either cut the banter and keep the channel clear, or contact me otherwise if they need my urgent reaction. Letting people hold…

It definitely sounds like a technical one if you can't make two groups, one for banter and one for serious talk so you can mute banter when it's not appropriate.

How are other people supposed to know that it's not okay for you right now because you are at dinner?

Re: Apple will soon support encrypted RCS messaging with Android users

#112

Post by devilbunny »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #104
devilbunny wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never seen a reaction that helped. "OK" is short, it's in plain text, and it works easily. I don't need your thumbs up. Or your like. You want to emoji, go ahead, but I'm getting older and I can't zoom in on them without blowing up general text to the same size. With more complex emoji I have to screenshot the text and then pull up the image to zoom on it to even tell what it is. I'd silence the conversation,…

The thumbed up reaction is useful because you can react to something specific in a fast-paced conversation. iMessage also allows replying to a specific message, which is also useful for the same reasons. > With more complex emoji I have to screenshot the text and then pull up the image to zoom on it to even tell what it is. ...you can make the font bigger. Or get glasses. > I'd silence the conversation, except that i…

> The thumbed up reaction is useful because you can react to something specific in a fast-paced conversation. iMessage also allows replying to a specific message, which is also useful for the same reasons.

A makes joke. B and C react "laugh". D replies with sub-joke. E, F, and G react "groan". Produce this little cascade every time a serious topic is brought up and someone makes an offhand joke as a lead-in to a serious topic.

> you can make the font bigger. Or get glasses

I have and use reading glasses. Making the font bigger is an option but I can read text just fine at that size. I can't make out the details of a complex emoji.

> Create group 1 with coworkers A,B. Create group 2 with coworkers B,C. Add C to group 1, A to group 2. Two different chat groups.

A completely non-obvious behavior (you can only create a group after you have sent the first text, see https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/group-conversations-i... for info), and as it's late at night, I can't test it. Trying to search for how to do this turns up mostly threads about how the same group of contacts keeps showing up in different conversation threads.

> "I won't bother to look up how to do things on my phone" != "my phone sucks."

Feel free to tell me what search will show me how to make a "MyCompany - Business" and "MyCompany - Social" group without ever sending a message, and guaranteeing that Business messages always go to Business and Social always go to Social.

Re: Apple will soon support encrypted RCS messaging with Android users

#113

Post by TheDong »

satvikpendem wrote: post #105
devilbunny wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never seen a reaction that helped. "OK" is short, it's in plain text, and it works easily. I don't need your thumbs up. Or your like. You want to emoji, go ahead, but I'm getting older and I can't zoom in on them without blowing up general text to the same size. With more complex emoji I have to screenshot the text and then pull up the image to zoom on it to even tell what it is. I'd silence the conversation,…

> I'd silence the conversation, except that iMessage won't let you have two identical groups with exactly the same members. So both humorous and serious stuff goes into the same group chat, and it's often very time-sensitive if serious Really? That's insane, so that means that 3rd party messaging apps literally have better UX than first party ones, as I have lots of groups with the same members for different things.

You'd expect an app, like Whatsapp or Discord or Signal, which focuses primarily on messaging, to be able to devote more attention to it than apple, which is really just a hardware company that reluctantly makes just enough software to charge 30% of all the good app's profits, and sell their hardware.

iMessage just not supporting android/windows/linux devices already makes it drastically worse than any other popular chat app.

Re: Apple will soon support encrypted RCS messaging with Android users

#114

Post by devilbunny »

happymellon wrote: post #111
lxgr wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While acknowledging that you might not have any agency about this in your specific situation, this sounds more like a social/boundaries problem than a technical one. If I were in a group chat with people both joking around and sending messages requiring urgent responses, I'd let them know to either cut the banter and keep the channel clear, or contact me otherwise if they need my urgent reaction. Letting people hold…

It definitely sounds like a technical one if you can't make two groups, one for banter and one for serious talk so you can mute banter when it's not appropriate. How are other people supposed to know that it's not okay for you right now because you are at dinner?

We all live in the same metro area. You might eat as early as five, you might finish as late as nine. But if you're going to use the business group, it should be about business. Banter is fine during working hours.

People get lazy and just use the "whole group" message rather than send it to those who are working today. And it's much like my problems with Android vs iOS: there are twelve people in this group, eleven of them have iPhones. They are not all going to install and use a separate messaging app for business than for personal communication, especially as iMessage is nominally E2EE. I could adapt or just be completely marginalized. So now twelve have iPhones.

Re: Apple will soon support encrypted RCS messaging with Android users

#115

Post by jandrewrogers »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #106
jeroenhd wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The encryption is based on MLS: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9420.html I don't think Google wanted to gatekeep their E2EE implementation. They have some generic documentation about how it works: https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf The thing about RCS is that no messengers seem to care at all about implementing RCS themselves. Part of that is probably because depending on the carrier, RCS ma…

> the green bubble problem Is this a problem? Outside NA? Because the rest of the world seems to neither care nor even notice the bubble (of either colour) i.e iMessage is irrelevant almost entirely outside North America (and that too I guess mostly USA; only among just the iPhone users of course)

I believe Canada has an even higher iOS market share than the US. Mexico mostly uses WhatsApp but I don’t text people there much. I have and use both WhatsApp and Signal routinely in addition to iMessage; no one I know uses WhatsApp within North America and only a handful use Signal.

When I worked in Europe just about everyone I texted with had an iPhone. We always use WhatsApp or Signal there by default. Nonetheless, iMessage was usually the fallback when those chat apps glitched because it is so reliable, especially compared to Signal. YMMV, etc.

What iMessage has going for it is that it is genuinely a very good implementation of a social chat app with unique features enabled by the iCloud ecosystem. I’m pretty agnostic about it, I’ve used a lot of chat apps by virtue of being more global than most, but iMessage is objectively pretty great when you stay within the Apple ecosystem. I’ve reduced things down to WhatsApp, Signal, and iMessage, which is kind of the minimum set that gets you global coverage, but if everyone is on iOS then iMessage is noticeably superior to Signal or WhatsApp. iMessage is more than just a chat app but it limits itself to that when interacting with other ecosystems.

Re: Apple will soon support encrypted RCS messaging with Android users

#116

Post by morpheuskafka »

devilbunny wrote: post #93
snypher wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just please stop sending the text that reads as follows, it totally destroys group chats and the amount of information conveyed in a react doesn't require quoting back the entire message, eg Liked "I would be surprised if this eliminates green bubbles. iMessage supports many features unavailable over RCS on Android devices. These would still be disabled and Apple needs a way to indicate a degraded feature set to iMes…

I have never seen a reaction that helped. "OK" is short, it's in plain text, and it works easily. I don't need your thumbs up. Or your like. You want to emoji, go ahead, but I'm getting older and I can't zoom in on them without blowing up general text to the same size. With more complex emoji I have to screenshot the text and then pull up the image to zoom on it to even tell what it is. I'd silence the conversation,…

What happens if you have a group with N+1 members and then remove the extra one? That would be a weird error message to write... "you can't remove X because everyone else is already in a group?"

Re: Apple will soon support encrypted RCS messaging with Android users

#118

Post by jandrewrogers »

TheDong wrote: post #113
satvikpendem wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd silence the conversation, except that iMessage won't let you have two identical groups with exactly the same members. So both humorous and serious stuff goes into the same group chat, and it's often very time-sensitive if serious Really? That's insane, so that means that 3rd party messaging apps literally have better UX than first party ones, as I have lots of groups with the same members for different things.

You'd expect an app, like Whatsapp or Discord or Signal, which focuses primarily on messaging, to be able to devote more attention to it than apple, which is really just a hardware company that reluctantly makes just enough software to charge 30% of all the good app's profits, and sell their hardware. iMessage just not supporting android/windows/linux devices already makes it drastically worse than any other popular…

You’ve pretty much indirectly nailed the issue: on iOS, iMessage is much more than just a “chat app”. It has an unrivaled feature set on iOS that isn’t replicable on other chat apps. The discourse that reduces it to a “chat app” is critically missing this point.

This wouldn’t mean much if iOS was a small percentage of phones. In regions where it is a majority of phones people use those additional features. In places like the US where most people are using iOS, most people don’t even realize those features don’t exist or are semi-broken on other chat apps because they don’t use them. For average people that have been using iMessage for a long time with other iMessage users, using those other chat apps feels like a downgrade.

Re: Apple will soon support encrypted RCS messaging with Android users

#119

Post by TheDong »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #118
TheDong wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd expect an app, like Whatsapp or Discord or Signal, which focuses primarily on messaging, to be able to devote more attention to it than apple, which is really just a hardware company that reluctantly makes just enough software to charge 30% of all the good app's profits, and sell their hardware. iMessage just not supporting android/windows/linux devices already makes it drastically worse than any other popular…

You’ve pretty much indirectly nailed the issue: on iOS, iMessage is much more than just a “chat app”. It has an unrivaled feature set on iOS that isn’t replicable on other chat apps. The discourse that reduces it to a “chat app” is critically missing this point. This wouldn’t mean much if iOS was a small percentage of phones. In regions where it is a majority of phones people use those additional features. In places…

What features?

The only two features I can think of that iMessage has which discord/whatsapp/etc don't are:

1. Automatically can flip to "do not disturb" mode when my phone is in sleep mode, and display that notice to my companion. Other chat apps require manually configuring that I think. I also suspect apple doesn't provide an API to make this easily possible for other apps.

2. iMessage makes it easy to identify the poors, the android users, and ignore them. If I exchange numbers on a dating app and get a green bubble, I can know to immediately ghost them.

Are those the features you were thinking about, or something else?

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