41–50 of 69 posts
One big question: will carriers still charge exorbitant per-message fees? And one huge question: will iOS support RCS?
Are there still companies that still charge per message fees?
Wow, RCS seems pretty bad from a privacy standpoint. The spec is available on the GSMA website [0]. The relevant section is 2.13.1.3 of "Rich Communication Suite 6.0 Advanced Communications Services and Client Specification Version 7.0-final draft" available in the specification ZIP. TL;DR: Encryption seems to be included but for voice and video only. They have _deliberately_ compromised messaging security to be vuln…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you tried Telegram?
Hadn't heard about it. Just checked it out, and it looks interesting. Unfortunately, due to network effects and my social circle, 99% of the people I know pretty much only use either Wechat, Facebook, or e-mail, but I look forward to seeing something disrupt this space with something better, more functional, cross-platform, and multi-login. It would be killer if Telegram could interoperate with at least 1 or 2 of the…
One big question: will carriers still charge exorbitant per-message fees? And one huge question: will iOS support RCS?
Are there still companies that still charge per message fees?
Ick. I wish we could kill SMS/Whatsapp/Wechat/LINE already and just do everything over e-mail or some other cross-platform, multi-login protocol. I hate being tied up to one device to message people. I change devices on the order of minutes, move over the course of a day between a few locations that all have devices I own, and don't regularly carry or look at my cell phone if I am already staring at something bigger…
Have you tried Telegram?
I fear it could eventually become another closed garden.
So basically this will only install on android. No?
Of note: Project FI has been plagued with short SMS issues for the past year. Some are reporting that this has been fixed, but does concern me if Google is going to get into this space. I'm saying this as someone who is a Android advocate and developer.
Ick. I wish we could kill SMS/Whatsapp/Wechat/LINE already and just do everything over e-mail or some other cross-platform, multi-login protocol. I hate being tied up to one device to message people. I change devices on the order of minutes, move over the course of a day between a few locations that all have devices I own, and don't regularly carry or look at my cell phone if I am already staring at something bigger…
That's an workable idea. What's needed first is to improve the transmission speed of short emails. I was once considering writing a mail forwarder for servers that don't have mailboxes, one that would open an outbound SMTP connection to the destination host before closing the incoming SMTP connection. The message would be forwarded immediately and the status code passed back to the inbound SMTP connection before closing. No mail bounces, ever. This would be the normal case for single-address emails that aren't too big and aren't tagged as spam. It's not essential to do it this way, but a mail server should not delay a short message more than 1 second.
Next, IMAP servers need to implement NOTIFY per RFC 5645. [1] This provides a push notification back to any interested mail client that new mail is available.
Mail clients can then treat emails like message conversations. Maybe using the "colored bubble" display UI on mobile, as with texting. A useful informal standard could be that single-recipient subject-only emails or no-subject emails get that display treatment.
That gives us texting with attachments for images using existing infrastructure. It could kill off a few unnecessary messaging services.