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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

#211

Post by lxgr »

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.

Absolutely. Apple Messages is way too minimal, for both iMessage and SMS.

As another example, it makes it almost impossible to manage multiple numbers for a given contact (e.g. to explicitly text somebody’s work phone), and the sender side is very confusing as well with dual-SIM. Apple’s implementation freely merges threads that I’m trying hard to keep separate and then still falls over with tons of delivery errors in complex situations (usually after swapping SIMs).

It all works reasonably well if you have a single long-lived mobile number and all your contacts have the same, and are using iMessage (or now RCS), since that’s presumably the reality for most Apple engineers.

Anything slightly more unusual and the thing falls apart completely and makes me wish for a Nokia 3310 (or convince my contact to switch to something more reasonable for messaging).

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

#212

Post by theshackleford »

devilbunny wrote: post #159
theshackleford wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have trouble seeing how they help anyone. That sounds like a problem unique to yourself and I imagine this is not the only such case in which you struggle.

Imagine away.

At least I can. The seemingly impossible task for you.

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

#213

Post by madeofpalk »

nottorp wrote: post #185
jeroenhd wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not necessarily true. For full compatibility you'd need a pre-installed app on Android, but vendors like Samsung and Sony and OnePlus can build their own RCS messengers for those devices should they choose to. Same with custom ROM developers for an open source implementation. For non-ROM developers, it depends on what RCS activation technique your carrier uses. RCS isn't a Google spec, or an Apple spec, or eve…

> For non-ROM developers, it depends on what RCS activation technique your carrier uses. There's your problem right there. You may not remember being charged per message, but trust me, it was a thing. The carriers would love to go back to 2 cents per sms, 5 per rcs "rich message" and 10 per encrypted "rich message".

I don't believe this FUD. I think overal the market has moved from from charging for messages. I fully believe carriers would love to rip off everyone as much as they can, but I think carriers know customers would just use facebook messenger if they tried charging per-message.

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

#214

Post by WhyNotHugo »

alwayslikethis wrote: post #36

Unfortunately, RCS on Android requires google apps, so this isn't really a solution to anyone who doesn't want to be tracked by Google everywhere they go. I'm still a little confused as to what problem RCS is supposed to solve. It is just as centralized as any other chat app, and is a bit more invasive (often requiring device attestation). Is it really worth all this hassle just to not have to install, let's say, Sig…

RCS seems to be mainly designed as a successor for SMS.

For interpersonal communication, SMS is dead in the majority of the world, so a successor is entirely irrelevant.

For for the 1 or 2 countries where people still send SMS, RCS seems like a major improvement with a bunch of feature that have been available on other platforms for many years now.

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

#215

Post by bolognafairy »

klabb3 wrote: post #178
cubefox wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's false. The color green is irrelevant. If the Apple bubbles had been green, and the Android bubbles had been blue, still the Android bubbles would have been shamed. It was never about the color. It was because of the SMS/iMessage feature incompatibilities.

Let me spell it out: the arbitrary color lets you identify the ones who use Android. Some people think the reason for using Android is being poor. Others don’t want to be seen as poor, because social posturing is important to them.

Social posturing is important to everyone. You probably just socially posture differently.

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

#216

Post by gruez »

jeroenhd wrote: post #183
alwayslikethis wrote: post #36

Unfortunately, RCS on Android requires google apps, so this isn't really a solution to anyone who doesn't want to be tracked by Google everywhere they go. I'm still a little confused as to what problem RCS is supposed to solve. It is just as centralized as any other chat app, and is a bit more invasive (often requiring device attestation). Is it really worth all this hassle just to not have to install, let's say, Sig…

That's not necessarily true. For full compatibility you'd need a pre-installed app on Android, but vendors like Samsung and Sony and OnePlus can build their own RCS messengers for those devices should they choose to. Same with custom ROM developers for an open source implementation. For non-ROM developers, it depends on what RCS activation technique your carrier uses. RCS isn't a Google spec, or an Apple spec, or eve…

>but vendors like Samsung and Sony and OnePlus can build their own RCS messengers for those devices should they choose to.

Yes, but AFAIK they all caved and switched to google messages instead

>Same with custom ROM developers for an open source implementation.

Does one exists?

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

#217

Post by lxgr »

TheDong wrote: post #119
jandrewrogers wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

There’s an API for “focus mode” now, I believe.

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

#218

Post by lxgr »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #138
TheDong wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Most (all?) of the Apple iOS apps and data can be collaboratively shared, edited, etc over iMessage and it is extremely seamless with fine-grained access controls. I get people sending me calendars, notes, slide decks, documents, etc to either read or work on together via iMessage/iCloud. You can selectively share most things in your iOS environment with any other person in the iOS ecosystem. Google Apps is a pale im…

So… attachments? WhatsApp and Signal can send those too, directly from the share sheet.

I find the iMessage implementation very clunky compared to WhatsApp. It’s trying so hard to be “minimal” about delivery status and recipient capabilities that I never quite know whether something worked or not, especially with contacts that have older devices on their iMessage account.

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

#219

Post by WhyNotHugo »

nottorp wrote: post #185
jeroenhd wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not necessarily true. For full compatibility you'd need a pre-installed app on Android, but vendors like Samsung and Sony and OnePlus can build their own RCS messengers for those devices should they choose to. Same with custom ROM developers for an open source implementation. For non-ROM developers, it depends on what RCS activation technique your carrier uses. RCS isn't a Google spec, or an Apple spec, or eve…

> For non-ROM developers, it depends on what RCS activation technique your carrier uses. There's your problem right there. You may not remember being charged per message, but trust me, it was a thing. The carriers would love to go back to 2 cents per sms, 5 per rcs "rich message" and 10 per encrypted "rich message".

Being charged per message, per minute is pretty common all over the world.

And a lot of carriers still don’t support international romain or will charge a shit ton.

Usually, the cheapest approach is to just buy a cheap sim when you visit another country, but that doesn’t play well if you rely on SMS.

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

#220

Post by WhyNotHugo »

madeofpalk wrote: post #213
nottorp wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For non-ROM developers, it depends on what RCS activation technique your carrier uses. There's your problem right there. You may not remember being charged per message, but trust me, it was a thing. The carriers would love to go back to 2 cents per sms, 5 per rcs "rich message" and 10 per encrypted "rich message".

I don't believe this FUD. I think overal the market has moved from from charging for messages. I fully believe carriers would love to rip off everyone as much as they can, but I think carriers know customers would just use facebook messenger if they tried charging per-message.

Carriers charging too much is exactly why WhatsApp became so popular in so many countries. It was optimised for very little data usage, so was dramatically cheaper than SMS.
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