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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

#391

Post by MBCook »

system16 wrote: post #38

> This will work alongside iMessage, which will continue to be the best and most secure messaging experience for Apple users," said an Apple spokesperson. I could be wrong but I don’t see anything here to suggest non-iMessages will no longer have the “green bubble” like the author assumes.

I suspect “work alongside“ is in that sentence to make it clear they are not replacing iMessage.

I agree with you that they’re likely to have green bubbles. Green equals not iMessage, blue equals iMessage. It seems unlikely they would introduce a third color and it would never be blue because it doesn’t support all the same features.

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

#392

Post by Zak »

ender7 wrote: post #349
commoner wrote: post #80

Excellent. The next step is for Google to release a free and open source way for Android developers to build apps that send RCS messages. Currently, the only messaging app on Android that fully supports RCS is Messages by Google, which is closed source and requires Google Play Services to activate RCS features. Also, end-to-end encryption is not part of the RCS specification, but is a proprietary extension to RCS tha…

I have no insider knowledge here, but Google tried to go the high route of working with carriers for years before giving up on their intransigence. I suspect that Google's RCS is proprietary as a blunt instrument to prevent carriers from trying to either (a) undermine e2ee in some weasely way or (b) have the ability to pick and choose the pieces of the implementation they want to support. You either get the whole thi…

Google had the opportunity to own this space a decade ago when they made Hangouts the default SMS client on Android. It's exactly what Apple did with iMessage, but Hangouts was cross-platform.

It's absolutely bizarre to me they didn't iterate on that. I'm kind of glad they didn't.

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

#393

Post by qingcharles »

tredre3 wrote: post #328
qingcharles wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you turn off RCS, Google Messages shows you a full screen prompt once a week to turn it back on. Indefinitely. And of course the prompt has a large blue button to enable, and a very small text underneath to dismiss, making it easy to accidentally enable it. It happened to me a few times already. It also tells you nothing about the downsides (that you need a data connection, mainly) that would make RCS unusable to…

The problem with developers is that we are often isolated from whole sections of the world. The people on the Android team, probably working in SF, have perhaps never been into the hood. Out here there are guys on every street corner stood next to the drug dealers (often it's the same guy) trying to get you to take a free smartphone or a tablet. They get paid some sort of kickback if they can get you to take it -- it comes from this free federal plan:

https://www.fcc.gov/general/lifeline-program-low-income-cons...

The problem is that the phones generally only come with 15GB of data a month, and an average web page can easily run to 200MB now, so usually by the third day of the month they are all out of data.

There is a better federal plan for poor people called ACP which allows you to get your own phone and plan, but it isn't as well-known.

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

#394

Post by MBCook »

greedo wrote: post #158
wolpoli wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of opening up to other platforms due to Digital Markets Act: maybe we'll finally get FaceTime as an open industry standard at some point?

I thought Apple intended to do that but found out the a lot of the tech was patent-encumbered.

The story is Steve Jobs just announced that without consulting any engineers first. It was a total surprise to them.

They actually seemed to be working on it, but Apple was quickly hit with a patent suit from some company over FaceTime. I believe they had to re-architect how it worked to get around the patent.

They haven’t done anything about it since then. I wonder if they simply can’t because of patents. Either way by now I think they’ve decided it’s a strategic advantage and they wouldn’t do it by choice.

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

#395

Post by eitally »

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/

To be fair to Google, though, they did not intend to operate this as a SaaS. They fully expected carriers to run their own RCS servers but almost none did, so stepping in to fill the void was a follow-on decision from Google (which was honestly a very smart move - Messages w/RCS is hugely improved over vanilla SMS) only after realizing carriers didn't have the appetite to abandon SMS.

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

#396

Post by vineyardmike »

albert180 wrote: post #287
vineyardmike wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s probably a few things at play. First, not every iPhone user can be iMessage-only and SMS is a shitty experience. In most non-US countries, they’re not winning the iMessage shame battle, they’re driving people to WhatsApp. They’d probably rather people use the built in messaging app, which will incentivize you to use iMessage. Secondly, getting more involved gives them opportunities to embrace/extinguish rcs (…

RCS is already End to End decrypted by default on Pixel Phones

From the article:

> Finally, Apple says it will work with the GSMA members on ways to further improve the RCS protocol. This particularly includes improving the security and encryption of RCS messages. Apple also told 9to5Mac that it will not use any sort of proprietary end-to-end encryption on top of RCS. Its focus is on improving the RCS standard itself.

> For comparison’s sake, Google’s implementation of end-to-end encryption is part of the Messages app on Android rather than the RCS spec itself.

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

#397

Post by MBCook »

8note wrote: post #381
lbwtaylor wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>It was never about the resolution of pictures and even technical limitations Sure, to some degree, but I'm not convinced all or most of the shame is only the iphone cachet -- the quality is incredibly bad, like shockingly bad. It's unusable, particularly for videos. As those things change, I can't help but feel like the shame moderates. But I don't have a teenager, so I don't have that perspective first hand.

I could see apple still downscaling and compressing videos and pictures that don't come from apple devices

They’re not doing it to be evil. They’re following the MMS standard that was designed for phones released in like 2004.

That’s just the quality of pictures/video MMS carries.

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

#398

Post by mappu »

kbf wrote: post #337
X-Istence wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Green means cellular, blue means internet. This same color distinction is used in other places in the UI, such as control center and settings.

MMS is email-style MIME messages retrieved over HTTP on a data connection. Push notifications for MMS are delivered as a special SMS, but otherwise it's far far closer to internet than cellular, and it's green.

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

#399

Post by hfjjbf »

spiralpolitik wrote: post #352
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…

That's the trap door in this. Apple is going to implement RCS exactly as the specification says it should be implemented, no more or no less. Any incompatibilities with Android will be laid at Google's door to resolve. Having beaten Apple with the RCS stick for the last year, Google might find themselves now getting beaten back.

[dead]

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

#400

Post by Angostura »

turquoisevar wrote: post #218
rickdeckard wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RCS is still standardized and maintained by the GSMA, of which Google is a member. Google acquired Jibe in 2015 in order to get their RCS server and client architecture (Jibe was a leader in shaping the RCS-Standard). Everyone can make his own app, it's just that he would need to develop a whole RCS-client for it to interact with (Google's or carriers') RCS-Servers as well. So what is missing is Google offering their…

The problem is that Google has a de facto monopoly on RCS. The carriers (full members of GSMA) came up with RCS as a replacement for SMS/MMS at a network level and then didn't have the appetite to implement it. Instead, they either A) adopted Google’s Messages as is, B) adopted Google’s Messages in white label form, slapping their logo on it, or C) made “their own thing” running on Google’s Jibe servers. With very fe…

I wonder if Apple might run its own RCS servers
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