11–20 of 69 posts
Anybody have a good source on what the heck RCS is? I've never heard of it until now. I will google also, but I bet someone knows of an introduction they'd recommend.
Of note: Project FI has been plagued with short SMS issues for the past year. Some are reporting that this has been fixed, but does concern me if Google is going to get into this space. I'm saying this as someone who is a Android advocate and developer.
As a long-time SMS user, getting widespread RCS support is the biggest future mobile phone innovation I am looking forward to. SMS is wonderful because you can send a message to any mobile phone user regardless of their nationality, operating system, hardware, carrier, etc. However it has a few major flaws: cost, speed, lack of group messaging, limited multimedia support. The shortcomings of SMS have fueled the rise…
You have these problems with carriers as well. They're technically interoperable but they hit you with prohibitively expensive rates if you try to do anything international. Carriers are also effectively government-controlled monopolies or biopolies in a lot of places so users end up locked-in anyway.
> lack of interoperability
Again, you have these problems. Yes, phones are interoperable with phones, but they're not interoperable with anything else. IP-based messaging apps have the potential for phones to interoperate with computers, tablets, VR googles, smartwatches, and whatever else you want (although not all do at the moment -- Wechat and Whatsapp suck in particular -- but at least they have the potential, and some actually do interoperate with non-phone devices -- such as Facebook and Hangouts).
Phones may not necessarily be the center of everything 10 years down the road. I'd rather the freedom to innovate be with the software companies, not the operators of one particular infrastructure.
As a long-time SMS user, getting widespread RCS support is the biggest future mobile phone innovation I am looking forward to. SMS is wonderful because you can send a message to any mobile phone user regardless of their nationality, operating system, hardware, carrier, etc. However it has a few major flaws: cost, speed, lack of group messaging, limited multimedia support. The shortcomings of SMS have fueled the rise…
> total lock-in You have these problems with carriers as well. They're technically interoperable but they hit you with prohibitively expensive rates if you try to do anything international. Carriers are also effectively government-controlled monopolies or biopolies in a lot of places so users end up locked-in anyway. > lack of interoperability Again, you have these problems. Yes, phones are interoperable with phones,…
And very poor transparency on those short codes... I once got some extra charges, because of a shortcode (it was actually Yahoo!) I happened use was international. (No way to tell that by the number alone.) It was surprising to hear from the carrier I didn't have any way to block international text, too.
Ick. I wish we could kill SMS/Whatsapp/Wechat/LINE already and just do everything over e-mail or some other cross-platform, multi-login protocol. I hate being tied up to one device to message people. I change devices on the order of minutes, move over the course of a day between a few locations that all have devices I own, and don't regularly carry or look at my cell phone if I am already staring at something bigger…
And one huge question: will iOS support RCS?
However - google and messaging is just a messy, and they're pushing this now? How about sort out your Messenger and Hangouts mess and get all of that consolidated
Of note: Project FI has been plagued with short SMS issues for the past year. Some are reporting that this has been fixed, but does concern me if Google is going to get into this space. I'm saying this as someone who is a Android advocate and developer.
It's fixed for me but I definitely had the issue when I was onboarded. It's because I came from T-Mobile, so they had to "reset" the account and then everything was good to go.
Ick. I wish we could kill SMS/Whatsapp/Wechat/LINE already and just do everything over e-mail or some other cross-platform, multi-login protocol. I hate being tied up to one device to message people. I change devices on the order of minutes, move over the course of a day between a few locations that all have devices I own, and don't regularly carry or look at my cell phone if I am already staring at something bigger…
Have you tried Telegram?
It would be killer if Telegram could interoperate with at least 1 or 2 of the other services, which would allow it to ramp up adoption. Unfortunately Wechat is very insistent about not allowing 3rd-party applications to use their messaging protocol, and Facebook seems to have closed their XMPP interface as well. I would guess Whatsapp probably has the same attitude.
In this respect I really, really miss the days of Pidgin and those other similar applications which used to be able to put MSN/ICQ/AIM/QQ/Yahoo/Zephyr all on one interface. That seems impossible with the state of mobile apps now.