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I hope Apple never adopts RCS

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Re: I hope Apple never adopts RCS

#111

Post by amyjess »

delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #4

The SMS/RCS/iMessage/blue bubble-green bubble debate is almost entirely exclusive to the strange market of the US. Almost everywhere else in the world, users have simply adopted a variety of 3rd-party messaging apps that use the phone's Internet rather than GSM connection, like WhatsApp, Telegram, Messenger, Signal, WeChat, etc. EDIT: While I understand the need for a 'universal E2EE messaging standard', we don't hav…

I use Messenger and Discord to talk to all of my friends.

The only people I use SMS to talk to are my parents, who are too non-technical to install any apps that didn't come with their phones.

Re: I hope Apple never adopts RCS

#112

Post by mxuribe »

Although i'm very much a fanboy of the matrix protocol, i really wish Apple and other big players would at least consider something like matrix...That is, a protocol that is secure, extendible, but still universal enough to be federated; not proprietary. I imagine decades ago there might have been similar (though maybe lower intensity) debates when email was becoming popular. I'm so glad the elders were wise enough (and not money-grubbers like nowadays) and came to an agreement around mail protocols like smtp, imap, etc. Even if its not matrix that is chosen, i really wish we had better choice for a chat/text messaging protocol. I get that lay people may not care about open protocols, or federation as much, etc...but my goodness in this day and age, it astounds me that we have not gotten our collective act together to standardize on secure, federatable, and straight-forward basic messaging.

Re: I hope Apple never adopts RCS

#113

Post by joshstrange »

gertrunde wrote: post #44

I'm not sure why this is being framed as an XOR situation? Why would RCS support imply removal of iMessage? Surely RCS raises the lowest common denominator up a bit from SMS, and people are still free to use whatever 3rd party data-based messaging service they want to, be it iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, Facebook Messenger, or whatever else, even ICQ if that still exists. I don't think I've ever intentionally/deliberat…

> I'm not sure why this is being framed as an XOR situation? Why would RCS support imply removal of iMessage?

I'm not aware of anyone making that argument, it would replace and/or compliment SMS (since even if Apple adopts RCS, SMS is going to around for a long time).

> Surely RCS raises the lowest common denominator up a bit from SMS, and people are still free to use whatever 3rd party data-based messaging service they want to, be it iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, Facebook Messenger, or whatever else, even ICQ if that still exists.

Is it better than SMS? Yes but that's a low bar to clear and as a chat protocol it has many failings, not least of which are it's weak E2E when it supports it at all. Also RCS is practically owned by Google, operated by carriers, I literally cannot think of a worse combo of 2 companies/industries that I do not trust.

Bottom line is SMS is going to be around for the foreseeable future (so much is built on it, similar to email for better or worse) and we will have to support a SMS fallback even with RCS support in iOS. Because of that and the lack of compelling reasons to move to RCS, I feel like it's best just to leave SMS as-is and work on pushing people to your preferred third-party chat app.

Re: I hope Apple never adopts RCS

#114

Post by advisedwang »

fbanon wrote: post #45

RCS is inferior to iMessage simply because it doesn't work on tablets and desktop computers. Since RCS is tied to mobile carriers, who don't want to give up control over those juicy messages, the problem will persist forever.

EDIT: wrong

iMessage is device centered - your messages are just relayed to desktop by the mobile messaging app. Android messages can do this too [1], So can Samsung [2]

[1] https://support.google.com/messages/answer/7611075

[2] https://www.samsung.com/us/support/answer/ANS00087322/

Re: I hope Apple never adopts RCS

#115

Post by vineyardmike »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #52
londons_explore wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> forcing these apps to be able to federate I predict it'll 'work' so that the companies aren't fined by the EU, but the service will be atrocious. You'll probably have to jump through a lot of hoops to make it work, and even then you'll probably have to wait 5 minutes for messages to be delivered, have to deal with bugs galore, and have most of the features not work. "Warning: Sending an animated emoji will eject al…

> You'll probably have to jump through a lot of hoops to make it work, and even then you'll probably have to wait 5 minutes for messages to be delivered, have to deal with bugs galore, and have most of the features not work. Traditionally the EU is not amused by companies trying to cleverly work around its competition laws. I fully expect long trials with significant fines following the introduction of this law and h…

Traditionally, the EU is eroding their market and terrible at writing laws. You can’t legislate product decisions. That’s not what people actually want.

As Facebook and their suits illustrate, you can’t always run an international and feature-full service with their laws. The requirements for federation will probably devolve to an email or SMS fallback or just a lack of service offered. Big companies that don’t want to retreat at the risk of market share will totally provide lip service to the rules and implement the exact letter of the law and nothing more.

I expect that the EU taking this and other action will be a lot like the GDPR: solving a problem and providing a few solutions but basically none of the vision. The GDPR mandates data-exporting out of a service with the idea of portability. Except no one offers imports so there’s no real portability gained, just auditability (which is nice).

I do agree that I expect long trials and significant fines. The EU will look good politically for taking a stand to those big American companies. Those big American companies will maybe write a big check but certainly appeal for a decade.

Re: I hope Apple never adopts RCS

#116

Post by joshstrange »

Jleagle wrote: post #101
threeseed wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason is that SMS is dying and being replaced by better encrypted clients. There is no point moving to RCS which just prolongs this death and makes the current situation worse since Google has their own proprietary version of RCS.

Except SMS isn't being replaced, the new protocols work along side SMS. That's like saying WhatsApp is replacing iMessage. RCS Only has advantages over regular SMS.

> RCS Only has advantages over regular SMS.

Only if you don't count building/support/maintenance of RCS. SMS works well enough for it's main jobs: fallback for people that won't install a 3rd party app, an insecure channel for TOTP (something RCS doesn't improve on), and the one near-guaranteed messaging channel for a whole range of services that can't or won't write an app with push notifications.

Adding RCS is not free/easy and it continues to make us dependent on the carriers and Google, two groups I trust about as far as I can throw them. RCS is a crap "standard", this isn't a case of good being the enemy of great, it's a case of Google trying to force their latest messaging platform on everyone.

Re: I hope Apple never adopts RCS

#117

Post by Apocryphon »

vineyardmike wrote: post #115
WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You'll probably have to jump through a lot of hoops to make it work, and even then you'll probably have to wait 5 minutes for messages to be delivered, have to deal with bugs galore, and have most of the features not work. Traditionally the EU is not amused by companies trying to cleverly work around its competition laws. I fully expect long trials with significant fines following the introduction of this law and h…

Traditionally, the EU is eroding their market and terrible at writing laws. You can’t legislate product decisions. That’s not what people actually want. As Facebook and their suits illustrate, you can’t always run an international and feature-full service with their laws. The requirements for federation will probably devolve to an email or SMS fallback or just a lack of service offered. Big companies that don’t want…

Maybe it won't come down to legislation, but rather the threat of legislation. Maybe this is the sort of threat that will force companies to talk to one another and preemptively seek some sort of federation. Maybe they will be incentivized to do the right thing before it goes to court. At the very least, this is disruption of the status quo.

Re: I hope Apple never adopts RCS

#118

Post by vineyardmike »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #50
meragrin_ wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is also an issue for Android users in general. In large group chat instantiated by an iPhone user, Android users may be unable to respond. My mother has encountered that on numerous occasions.

That might be a temporary technical issue, but I presume adults would just call each other and switch to Whatsapp so as to not make it a social issue like teens might by continuing to exclude someone.

Nah. I’m a “real adult” (in a wealthy American city) who makes plans like an adult and isn’t driven by childish cliques and in-group behavior but I have 100% excluded android users or asked someone to manually relay messages to them when they got dropped from an iPhone group chat.

SMS is botched and finding an overlapping app across 15 people is impossible. How are you supposed to coordinate that if you can’t even use SMS groups? How do you find a common app? You’d need one or two people doing person to person investigation to figure it out. At that point, it’s easier just to find the one person who’s phone doesn’t work and relay messages to them. Half the people don’t want to download a new app. Another half don’t trust Facebook apps. Another half think email is too slow (and too easy to exclude someone).

The general social sentiment is that the android users did this to themselves by choosing a cheap phone or choosing to care more about “not letting apple be in control”.

Re: I hope Apple never adopts RCS

#119

Post by vineyardmike »

drawfloat wrote: post #11

Still find it incredible the green/blue bubble thing in the US isn’t a joke.

It’s real. Part of it is teens being judgy because teenagers do that. her bubbles are green because she’s poor and her parents can’t afford an iphone etc.

But also there is a real experience difference between iMessages and SMS and especially mixed group chats. Social people -even adults- who have lots of group chats via default messaging inadvertently punish android users for using SMS and that worse experience is represented in green. It’s just a symbol for that worse experience.

In fact, it’s getting worse not better. I have every messaging app imaginable on my iPhone (because it’s just an app why not). If I group chat mixed iPhone and android - I get the expected bad experience. But a lot of android users have now set up Signal to be their SMS app. So my iPhone will mix SMS iMessage going out, only for an android user to mix SMS signal messages coming back. So now the conversation is smeared across three apps and ruined.

Hence why I just install every app. So i can increase the odds of finding an alternative common ground.

PS. Everyone blames the android guy not the iPhone guy. “Stop being poor” or whatever. People are cruel.

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