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Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year

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

#161

Post by swozey »

earthboundkid wrote: post #138
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…

Yes, I think I got my first iPhone around 2010, and at the time I was still on limited text message plan. I don't think I got unlimited texts until 2014 or something.

Damn 2014?? My years are all skewed nowadays.

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

#162

Post by lxgr »

ceejayoz wrote: post #150
lxgr wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True, but at least in the case of iMessage, that would also mean not being able to text all while not within Wi-Fi coverage (since Apple absolutely refuses to let people actually send an SMS to a number it considers to be participating in iMessage).

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

#163

Post by kstrauser »

ok_dad wrote: post #139
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.

Back in my day, you used to pay per minute for calls. Then they moved to a few hundred minutes free and the new SMS system cost a few cents per text. Then it was like 1500min/100sms free. Eventually it became unlimited minutes and texts but data cost some cents per kb or mb, then eventually that ratcheted up to “unlimited” everything with some “reasonable limits”. As a kid I used to make a collect call to my mom and…

Ah, good ol’ Bob Wehadababyitsaboy.

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

#164

Post by discard124 »

smoldesu wrote: post #73
rattlesnakedave wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple only has dominant marketshare in the US. Everywhere else in the world people use Whatsapp. Why didn't they all hop on the RCS train? Because it sucks to implement and is a black box to use. Google was stuck with SMS because of their inability to implement a cohesive messaging app, despite owning and distributing an operating system. So what did they do? Pitched sob stories and got the europeans to threaten to r…

> They should have just built something good. This, but with Apple. Whether or not Google whined about it, iMessage was never going to last. It was never a matter of if iMessage would be forced to reconcile itself with the interoperable protocol it replaced, but when . So... Apple should have been ready. They should have been drafting absurd standards centered around their own servers, and taunting Google into adopti…

> They should have been drafting absurd standards centered around their own servers, and taunting Google into adopting it.

It's hard to imaging you sincerely think this would have been better. It seems like you want them to engage in dishonesty.

> But instead they played high and mighty, and now they have to contend with the law.

iMessage isn't going anywhere. They're just going to add RCS support in the same way that SMS is supported, because now there is momementum for carrier support. This is really a storm in a teacup.

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

#165

Post by Andrex »

throw0101a wrote: post #46

Is there E2EE in the actual RCS specification? Can there be, given that telcos are usually subject to lawful intercept laws? AIUI, what Google/Android does is have their own extension, with the Content-Type of the message being "application/vnd.google.rcs.encrypted": * https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf This is kind of like, with (E)SMTP/IMAP, having your own capability of "X-GOOG-ENCRYPT" if t…

The MLS protocol proposed by Google provides a cross platform path to E2EE.

https://thehackernews.com/2023/07/google-messages-getting-cr...

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

#166

Post by Terretta »

Tagbert wrote: post #94
Obscurity4340 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what you can do is different Can you talk a bit more about how iMessage is fundamentally diferent than SMS on the functionality level? Is it like "Signal" different or is it like "different" different? Edit: bonus points if you can offer why iMessage is able to be the skeleton key into your iPhone, as often it and WebKit seem to be behind most of the serious 0-days...

Both iMessage and Webkit have to accept requests from unknown sources that can contain a wide variety of content type. some other content types, like EPS are themselves programming languages that could contain infiltration scripts. That is why Apple has dropped EPS support. Similar situation can happen for other kinds of image and video content. I don't know much about how iMessage communication is implemented but it…

> Both iMessage and Webkit have to accept requests from unknown sources that can contain a wide variety of content type.

Lockdown mode rejects unknown sources, and doesn't autoplay content types.

So they don't have to any more, it's up to the user.

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

#167

Post by lxgr »

rickdeckard wrote: post #145
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 mess…

> 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.

Thank you for highlighting this. This important piece of information often gets lost in the "green bubble" discussion.

Google has significant incentives for pushing RCS for more than one reason.

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

#168

Post by hbn »

lxgr wrote: post #129
hbn wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I don't buy Google's bad faith shaming of Apple for not adopting RCS. The current version of it that people are using on Android isn't even a "standard" by any normal usage of the term, it's just another Google messaging service. No one can make their own app, and there's barely any carrier adoption, so Google is basically running the whole network. Does this mean that now if you send a message to someone…

> This is why I don't buy Google's bad faith shaming of Apple for not adopting RCS. Google is literally operating an RCS SaaS company for marketers and telcos, so I'd take any of their statements in support for RCS with a grain of salt: https://jibe.google.com/

Yup. The shaming campaigns are just a way to play the moral high ground in their effort to replace an actual messaging standard with their own proprietary service.

SMS is certainly long overdue to be replaced, but I don't want it replaced with a Google service. Hopefully the iPhone adoption will be some incentive for carriers to implement RCS properly.

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

#169

Post by a2dam »

throw0101a wrote: post #46

Is there E2EE in the actual RCS specification? Can there be, given that telcos are usually subject to lawful intercept laws? AIUI, what Google/Android does is have their own extension, with the Content-Type of the message being "application/vnd.google.rcs.encrypted": * https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf This is kind of like, with (E)SMTP/IMAP, having your own capability of "X-GOOG-ENCRYPT" if t…

There isn't E2EE in the RCS spec, but there's in-transit TLS encryption

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

#170

Post by mcphage »

smoldesu wrote: post #73
rattlesnakedave wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple only has dominant marketshare in the US. Everywhere else in the world people use Whatsapp. Why didn't they all hop on the RCS train? Because it sucks to implement and is a black box to use. Google was stuck with SMS because of their inability to implement a cohesive messaging app, despite owning and distributing an operating system. So what did they do? Pitched sob stories and got the europeans to threaten to r…

> They should have just built something good. This, but with Apple. Whether or not Google whined about it, iMessage was never going to last. It was never a matter of if iMessage would be forced to reconcile itself with the interoperable protocol it replaced, but when . So... Apple should have been ready. They should have been drafting absurd standards centered around their own servers, and taunting Google into adopti…

> They should have been drafting absurd standards centered around their own servers, and taunting Google into adopting it. They could have even charged a license fee for the software. But instead they played high and mighty, and now they have to contend with the law.

Isn't the situation in the EU that they're looking to force Apple to allow others to use the iMessage protocol? So why would Apple work on getting Google to support iMessage, when Google is putting in work to get access to it?

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