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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

#461

Post by mig39 »

jhatemyjob wrote: post #413
code_duck wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve had a couple girlfriends in their 40s mildly judge me negatively for having an Android phone, but someone who would take that seriously enough for it to affect their relationship decisions is someone I’d rather not be involved with. Maybe it would be better to text people with a “beater” Android phone as a test for how shallow they may be, like the semi-cliche of a financially well-off person driving an old truc…

It has nothing to do with finances. You can buy a perfectly good used iPhone for less than $100. It has to do with taste. Not wanting to date a guy with an Android phone is like not wanting to date a guy because he's a Weaboo.

Honestly, if I were a girl, and a guy was mansplaining to me why Android was better than iOS, I wouldn't want to date them either.

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

#462

Post by dev_daftly »

lxgr wrote: post #82
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…

Google absolutely had a cohesive messaging app (Google Chat, later called Hangouts), they just threw it away and tried to rebuild it several times and under various other names and paradigms rather than iterating on it. If they'd simply added a "WhatsApp/iMessage mode" to Google Chat in 2015 (i.e. allow Google account based users to seamlessly communicate with phone number based users), I think we might be seeing a v…

We wouldn't because the issue always was iphone users never willing to use an app outside of imessage. What good is a messaging platform if more than 1/2 your network won't use it?

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

#463

Post by lotsofpulp »

devilbunny wrote: post #249
spike021 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in America and literally nobody I know cares about this. Unfortunately I think it's just the typical remnant of the old Mac vs Windows haters who come out of the woodwork online to make it sound like a problem.

I care, actually a fair bit, but only because I work in a building that has two areas that are complete dead zones for cellular reception, and our IT department blocks WiFi calling (but not iMessage data). Blue bubbles can message me in those areas; green cannot. It's not at all unusual for my phone to explode in dinging when I leave one of those areas. I wish they didn't block WiFi calling, because my cellular recep…

> Blue bubbles can message me in those areas; green cannot.

They can, but one or both parties is refusing to use any of the numerous alternative messaging options like WhatsApp.

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

#464

Post by gigatexal »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #442
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. But the point to me is that I don't care whether it's "bad faith" or not, just that (again, to me) it's actually the correct point of view. Messaging integration between iOS and Android, in the US at least, is not just fundamentally broken, but the presence of a single Android user in an iMessage group chat can break the experience fo…

> There is no reason for there to be such messaging incompatibility between iOS and Android. My feeling is that Apple knows the regulatory winds are shifting very much against anticompetitive behavior, and their iMessage incompatibility was just looking like the blatant protectionism that it is.

iMessage is and always was for iPhone users to communicate with other iPhone users. It will send messages over SMS as a fallback but it was only ever for use in communicating with other iOS devices in the same way iOS is only for Apple devices.

I see all arguments to force Apple to open up iMessage as punishing them for building a platform that people want that the majority of the US has bought into.

And android is bigger everywhere outside the US.

Also Europe has already solved this. If you want to talk to iPhone and android users in Europe you just use WhatsApp or another third-party service.

Why must Apple dilute the experience to communicate with folks not on its platform?

In electric car charging Tesla built out the super charger network investing billions in service of making their cars more useful. (iMessage is this to iPhone users.) there’s another standard out there or handfuls of other methods of charging cars but the market leader is the super charger network. And wouldn’t you know? Folks are adopting it because Tesla is licensing it but it was their choice.

To force Apple to open up iMessage as a protocol to other devices by fiat seems wholly totalitarian and invasive.

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

#465

Post by lotsofpulp »

dev_daftly wrote: post #462
lxgr wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google absolutely had a cohesive messaging app (Google Chat, later called Hangouts), they just threw it away and tried to rebuild it several times and under various other names and paradigms rather than iterating on it. If they'd simply added a "WhatsApp/iMessage mode" to Google Chat in 2015 (i.e. allow Google account based users to seamlessly communicate with phone number based users), I think we might be seeing a v…

We wouldn't because the issue always was iphone users never willing to use an app outside of imessage. What good is a messaging platform if more than 1/2 your network won't use it?

WhatsApp succeeded. Google misfiring 10 times giving people zero reason to invest was the problem.

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

#466

Post by paxys »

Despite the usual "I want Apple to be a walled garden" sentiment that is prevalent on HN, I'm glad that the EU, DoJ and all the various corporate lawsuits are finally forcing Apple to open up their ecosystem, even if it is still far from where it should be. The smartphone is now the primary personal computer for most of the planet, and deserves to be treated as such.

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

#467

Post by OJFord »

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…

> 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.

And which prompts you every bloody time you open it to enable RCS, ignoring the last thousand times you clicked the tiny 'skip for now' font.

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

#468

Post by inferiorhuman »

scarface_74 wrote: post #409
hedora wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A corollary to that lesson is to not support RCS. I'd have much rather iMessage only open up interoperability with E2EE platforms like signal or even Whatsapp (because Facebook is somehow the lesser evil in this corner of the privacy world).

In theory, E2EE is good until someone you are messaging turns on iCloud backup of messages you sent and now law enforcement can force Apple to give them your iCloud backup - with iMessage

So e2ee is good until there's a situation where it won't work and then it's no worse than the status quo? What's the problem?

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

#469

Post by cubefox »

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…

Carriers supported it. Just Apple didn't, for a long time. The reason is obvious: To increase their market dominance in the US, where iMessage is common. Especially among US teens this was apparently successful. Teens didn't want to be the lame green bubble kids with reduced messaging features. They flocked to iPhones.

RCS is (was) the prime example of Apple's anticompetitive behavior, after the App Store exclusivity, preventing side loading, and disallowing alternative browsers.

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

#470

Post by cubefox »

paxys wrote: post #466

Despite the usual "I want Apple to be a walled garden" sentiment that is prevalent on HN, I'm glad that the EU, DoJ and all the various corporate lawsuits are finally forcing Apple to open up their ecosystem, even if it is still far from where it should be. The smartphone is now the primary personal computer for most of the planet, and deserves to be treated as such.

iOS though is still very much a walled garden when it comes to installing apps.
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