Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year

#141

Post by lxgr » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 7:30 PM UTC

swozey wrote: post #127

lxgr wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was that really a concern in the US? WhatsApp and iMessage require data plans, and as far as I can remember these have largely included unlimited SMS as well. It was definitely a factor in the EU, though: SMS still aren't free on many prepaid plans there. WhatsApp was the first popular application supporting unlimited messaging on mobile phones for many.

I'm 39 and SMS not being unlimited was a huge thing. I never thought it would be unlimited, when that happened (Suncom? I forget who started it) it was huge. This was a LONG time ago though, long before WhatsApp. Probably 15-18 for me. I remember a lot of conversations in high school going "My plans maxed out can you text $friend?" IIRC you had to specifically turn off receiving texts or they'd charge you for each on…

I don't doubt that SMS were not always unlimited in the US.

But the question here is: Were there any (reasonably popular) plans that provided data for smartphones, but not unlimited texting? If not, that couldn't have been a factor in the adoption of iMessage in the US.

Re: Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year

#142

Post by threeseed » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 7:30 PM UTC

faet wrote: post #49

signal11 wrote: post #44

What’s the story around e2e encryption on RCS these days? In the past there were a few countries that didn’t allow it, no idea if that has changed. Also, will iMessage support for RCS include e2ee?

Apple will be pushing for RCS/Carriers to adopt e2e, but it'll probably just flag green/notify users that messages are not encrypted.

As someone who has worked for two carriers Apple, Google etc have little clout.

Governments and their intelligence organisations are what matters.

And countries like UK will be pushing as hard as possible to make E2EE optional.

Re: Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year

#143

Post by JCharante » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 7:31 PM UTC

myself248 wrote: post #77

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market has spoken. People don't care about that feature. Or at least, they don't care enough about it to vote with their wallet.

Supposing I did want to vote with my wallet, where would I have spent my money to make that vote heard? They seemed to disappear from everywhere at once, at least during the time I kept my last phone.

The latest 7nm phone from Huawei lets you choose between using the second sim card tray for a sim card or removable storage up to 256GB (albeit their proprietary storage medium). From my experience, plenty of Chinese phones offer what geeks in the US want (expandable storage and removable batteries).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei_Mate_60

Removable storage NM card 256GB

SIM

Card slot 1: NANO-SIM

Card slot 2: Choose one of the two NANO-SIM or NM memory card"

Re: Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year

#144

Post by ceejayoz » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 7:31 PM UTC

JCharante wrote: post #130

ceejayoz wrote: post #20

Hopefully this'll mean better Google Fi support for the iPhone. It's a little janky, but $20/line is hard to pass up.

I use Google Fi for my iPhone. What am I missing out on? (asides from using more than 1 carrier's network simultanously)

I can't add cellular service for my Apple Watch, at all.

Enabling MMS requires a somewhat convoluted set of changes to the phone's cellular settings, and despite having done them correctly I periodically get a "we couldn't send you all your texts, fix your settings" warning SMS from Google.

Re: Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year

#145

Post by rickdeckard » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 7:31 PM UTC

edent wrote: post #14

I was working on RCS systems back in 2012. It was the future back them - incredible low latency for messaging and gaming, rich messaging, and a decent SDK. How did carriers fuck it up so badly that, a decade later, it's barely a blip on the messaging landscape? The were so desperate to stop OTT (over the top) services that they... locked everything down in the hope that customers wouldn't churn. It backfired spectacu…

The answer is that the carriers worked out a specification and both infra-vendors and device-vendors were left to develop the server/client based on that spec.

So each major device-vendor developed his client-app, and ended up with interoperability issues not only with the RCS-servers used by a given carrier, but also with devices of OTHER vendors. And that doesn't even begin to cover the issues on inter-carrier messaging...

The situation was only resolved after Google acquired Jibe Mobile (the biggest player in developing RCS server/client applications for carriers) and basically created a single RCS-client/server implementation using their Android Messages app and a Google-owned server.

But when you were working on RCS back in 2012, you may remember that at that time, RCS didn't even support store&forward (!!).

So if the receiving device was not available when a message was delivered (because it had no network or client wasn't running on a device, which happened alot especially on iOS because the client was in a constant fight with the OS), the message wasn't queued anywhere.

Apart from the obvious issue of missing messages, it caused the even worse UX-impact that the entire conversation looked different on sender/receiver.

--

Ah yes, and: RCS was originally designed with per-message billing in mind (of course). At the time it was launched it was finally clear to the carriers that those times are over, but the whole architecture had quite a chunk of billing architecture in it as well...

Re: Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year

#146

Post by bloppe » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 7:31 PM UTC

rattlesnakedave wrote: post #118

bloppe wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU is interested in fair competition. Apple has managed to provide a terrible cross-platform messaging experience to their own customers for years while successfully convincing everyone that the problem is due to every other phone besides theirs. I agree it's almost comical, but it certainly affects competition in a negative way.

I don't buy this. Customers needed no convincing from Apple. Even where iOS isn't dominant they saw their dropped and expensive SMS/RCS messages and picked up whatsapp.

I'm mostly just talking about the noxious white-on-green color they chose for cross-platform chat bubbles. It's a great example of hostile architecture. RCS fixes the cost / reliability problems of SMS, so that annoying color choice will be the only thing they have left to make imessage users feel superior.

Re: Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year

#147

Post by daft_pink » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 7:31 PM UTC

rgbrenner wrote: post #97

edent wrote: post #14

I was working on RCS systems back in 2012. It was the future back them - incredible low latency for messaging and gaming, rich messaging, and a decent SDK. How did carriers fuck it up so badly that, a decade later, it's barely a blip on the messaging landscape? The were so desperate to stop OTT (over the top) services that they... locked everything down in the hope that customers wouldn't churn. It backfired spectacu…

Reminder to everyone who wonders why WhatsApp and iMessage won: US phone carriers used to charge $0.10 to $0.25 per message. Yes, it was as ridiculous as it sounds. There used to be news articles about kids racking up hundreds of dollars on their phone bill. Here's one from the same year the iphone was released: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/0...

I don't think that's true. I think the fees are why Whatsapp won outside of the US.

US users quickly had access to unlimited SMS and calling on most phone plans, which is why Whatsapp never took root.

Re: Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year

#148

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 7:31 PM UTC

X-Istence wrote: post #117

andrewmunsell wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think that blue represents E2EE and not simply iMessage? If data isn't available and the iPhone sends an SMS, like you mentioned, the bubble is green, but this doesn't necessarily have anything to do with encryption. For example, the satellite SOS messages are represented as gray. It seems more like the color represents the transport.

Because blue means iMessage and iMessage means E2EE. Grey and Green means not encrypted. Simple.

[deleted]

Re: Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year

#149

Post by no_wizard » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 7:31 PM UTC

rgbrenner wrote: post #97

edent wrote: post #14

I was working on RCS systems back in 2012. It was the future back them - incredible low latency for messaging and gaming, rich messaging, and a decent SDK. How did carriers fuck it up so badly that, a decade later, it's barely a blip on the messaging landscape? The were so desperate to stop OTT (over the top) services that they... locked everything down in the hope that customers wouldn't churn. It backfired spectacu…

Reminder to everyone who wonders why WhatsApp and iMessage won: US phone carriers used to charge $0.10 to $0.25 per message. Yes, it was as ridiculous as it sounds. There used to be news articles about kids racking up hundreds of dollars on their phone bill. Here's one from the same year the iphone was released: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/0...

While its true that SMS used to cost per message (and outrageously at that) unlimited SMS/MMS (AKA, unlimited text) plans were cheaper (and on some carriers, predate) than unlimited data, often being only $10 a month or so as an add-on. Unlimited talk & text plans were relatively common as well.

In the EU for instance, the reverse was true. Particularly, unlimited data was cheap and affordable, where as SMS was quite costly (even more than in the US in some cases) so data heavy apps were easier to adopt. Hence, WhatsApp, Telegram etc. gaining so much popularity. iMessage was introduced much later to the rich messaging market than these apps in those countries (because mobile messaging apps were cheap to adopt in markets where mobile data is cheap).

There is much more competition in those countries with cheap mobile data in the rich messaging services space. In the US, unlimited data has had a more sordid history, and SMS / MMS had a much bigger adoption rate early on

Re: Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year

#150

Post by ceejayoz » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 7:32 PM UTC

lxgr wrote: post #141

swozey wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 39 and SMS not being unlimited was a huge thing. I never thought it would be unlimited, when that happened (Suncom? I forget who started it) it was huge. This was a LONG time ago though, long before WhatsApp. Probably 15-18 for me. I remember a lot of conversations in high school going "My plans maxed out can you text $friend?" IIRC you had to specifically turn off receiving texts or they'd charge you for each on…

I don't doubt that SMS were not always unlimited in the US. But the question here is: Were there any (reasonably popular) plans that provided data for smartphones, but not unlimited texting? If not, that couldn't have been a factor in the adoption of iMessage in the US.

If you had wifi at home/work/school, you could send and receive without incurring any data usage at all.