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Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year

9to5mac.com

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

#311

Post by filmgirlcw »

AequitasOmnibus wrote: post #67
filmgirlcw wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bingo. The cartel was so focused on trying to save their existing money printing machine they took their eye off the ball and refused to disrupt themselves. The cable television industry did the exact same thing. If they’d been willing to go OTT a decade ago and not force agreements based on geolocation, a lot of the streaming services that exist wouldn’t even need to exist today.

> The cable industry did the exact same thing. Kinda but not really. The cable providers were and continue to be hamstrung by the networks who force the cable providers to buy channel packages. Cable never had the leverage to, say, tell Disney that they only want to offer ESPN but not the 10 other Disney branded networks being offered. It was often all or nothing.

And carriage fees are not at all related to the cable companies refusal to adopt or accept OTT solutions. They could have still offered the same shit they offered coax but you know, over a web browser, without requiring you be on a home network from an ISP also your cable producer (Comcast), or on whatever device you want (Comcast, Charter) all to save the stupid extra box fees that they lost anyway.

People didn’t quit cable because of price. They did it because of price to perceived value. As has been shown with the current state of streaming services, it isn’t actually cheaper to cut the cord. But what you do get is a lot more flexibility.

Imagine if Comcast had offered its own YouTube TV style service in 2012 (something Intel tried to do in late 2013 before it was summarily canceled — I almost took a job on that team and dodged a bullet), rather than hoping against hope that cord cutting wouldn’t take off? You’d probably have a bunch of Comcast subscribers to this day who were satisfied that they could watch all their TV live and on demand whenever they wanted.

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

#312

Post by JohnFen »

commoner wrote: post #306
JohnFen wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the only messaging app on Android that fully supports RCS is Messages by Google Plus, unless they fixed it, if you enable RCS and then regret it and disable it again, anybody who texted with you via RCS will no longer be able to text you at all. Things won't revert to SMS. This bit me pretty hard, but I finally fixed it by changing my phone number.

You can deregister your phone number from Messages by Google here: https://messages.google.com/disable-chat This is similar to Apple's iMessage deregistration page.[1] Google has been funneling RCS messages through its own servers to bypass wireless carriers, which were slow or unwilling to directly support RCS.[2] Unfortunately, this has centralized RCS communications through Google and allowed Google to make end-to…

That's interesting! I wonder why the phone didn't automatically deregister when I disabled RCS, or why there wasn't at least an informative popup telling me this was necessary.

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

#313

Post by qingcharles »

no_wizard wrote: post #28

This is something I never thought I'd see. I hope the GSM association moves fast to make robust E2EE a standard required for proper implementation for carriers. That would go a long way in making a huge improvement over SMS/MMS. This is a win for RCS, ultimately. Maybe this will kick carriers into high gear to up their messaging standard support game and have standard interop. I don't think this will lead to a declin…

Hopefully vendors start putting better fallback into their messaging clients when RCS isn't available.

It's been terrible for all the poor people I know who rarely have working data on their phones, but RCS enabled by default. They can't figure out why they're not sending or receiving any messages and I have to keep disabling it for them.

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

#314

Post by qingcharles »

dcgudeman wrote: post #301
ralferoo wrote: post #229

As an Android user, it'd be nice if replying "No" to "Do you want RCS?" meant "Never ask me again" and wasn't just interpreted as "ask me again in next week and every week thereafter".

why don't you want RCS?

A lot of people I know can't afford a data plan for their phones, so when RCS becomes enabled it just bounces all their incoming/outgoing messages and it is sometimes days or weeks before they realize.

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

#315

Post by filmgirlcw »

geodel wrote: post #99
AequitasOmnibus wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The cable industry did the exact same thing. Kinda but not really. The cable providers were and continue to be hamstrung by the networks who force the cable providers to buy channel packages. Cable never had the leverage to, say, tell Disney that they only want to offer ESPN but not the 10 other Disney branded networks being offered. It was often all or nothing.

Exactly right. A lot of people have tendency to simplistically choose heroes and villains. SO Disney is hero, cable TV bringing disney to home via their Coax cable is villain. Top artists are heroes, but ticket booking service which ultimately are reason for enormous payout to these artists are villains gouging fans.

The networks and the cable companies are both complicit with their demise. No one is arguing otherwise. I mentioned cable companies specially because they have the same legal monopoly that telephone companies had even post AT&T breakup in terms of location-based authority (it took widespread nationwide wireless for that to change in the U.S., which was like the early 2000s in terms of not having to get a regional wireless plan that could roam on a friendly network spectrum) and because like wireless carriers, cable companies have refused to acknowledge they are just a dumb pipe offering data and that they can’t continue to print money off of things that cost them nothing anymore. Oh, and because in the US, ISPs and cable companies are overwhelmingly the same companies.

The networks ruined their own businesses too — even if some were smarter than others (HBO being the smartest and also why it was the most valuable asset of the AT&T acquisition and the Discovery acquisition) — but I chose to focus on the cable companies b/c they are dumb pipes the same way wireless carriers are and they refused to disrupt themselves.

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

#316

Post by qingcharles »

lxgr wrote: post #123
rgbrenner wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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.

RCS requires a data plan, and certainly Google's Messages app doesn't handle it well when there is no data. I know a lot of people who are too poor to afford data on their phones and they are regularly losing all their messages because of RCS.

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

#317

Post by newaccount74 »

sonicanatidae wrote: post #88
TechRemarker wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah definetly would not expect it to be blue as 9 to 5 noted how Apple mentioned it won't be as secure as iMessage and iMessage will be separate. So presumably people texting will still want to know if they see blue they get full privacy where is if they see green or a new color it means yes they get lots of new features like iMessage, but not as secure as iMessage. But the green bubble (or whatever new color) will…

"Privacy" is not the reason a lot of people comment on green text bubbles. It's status. That's it. If they truly cared about sec, they would use something like Signal.

Unfortunately Signal makes it hard to backup photos people send you, and I know a few people who lost all their Signal chats and photos after switching phones (including myself).

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

#318

Post by ephimetheus »

Is RCS a thing in Europe? I don’t think I’ve ever seen this mentioned anywhere. Does the carrier sell you an RCS package? Does it apply to messages to other countries? If that’s the case, I don’t see how it could compete with any internet message service that exists today in any capacity.

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

#319

Post by filmgirlcw »

lxgr wrote: post #167
rickdeckard wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 incenti…

Agreed. I hate that we pretend Google is somehow altruistic with their support of RCS. They have many, many incentives and pretending otherwise is naive and obtuse.

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

#320

Post by sudosysgen »

Arcanum-XIII wrote: post #78
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…

Well... let's say also that the telco investment were not light. That Google was pushing for RCS, and SMS, and their messenger of the moment. Apple refused to implement RCS, because why do so, since there was no carrier at the time proposing it. So yeah, no.

As Google demonstrated, carrier support for RCS is not necessary.
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