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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

#571

Post by Lio »

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

This is just me but I’m less bothered by Big Brother than I am by little brother.

I don’t worry (very much) that law enforcement will read my messages but I do worry that advertisers, insurance cartels, spam marketeers, bookmakers or price gougers will.

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

#572

Post by bigfudge »

paholg wrote: post #558
donny2018 wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless they conspire in $20B/year search agreements.

That's not competition.

And there’s no true Scotsman. This sort of thing is - in practice - what capitalism looks like in the 21st century.

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

#573

Post by mikelward »

kelnos wrote: post #511
JohnFen wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's the dumb thing. When you disable RCS on your phone, why doesn't the phone just send that same API call that gets called when you visit that web page and deregister? (Ditto for Apple, if that's still an issue over there with iMessage as well.)

The web page says it does?

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

#574

Post by giantrobot »

rickdeckard wrote: post #345
filmgirlcw wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> They have many, many incentives and pretending otherwise is naive and obtuse. Okay. The main incentive is to create a competitive method for messaging which allows rich communication with everyone, regardless of platform or ecosystem just via their phone number. Name five more.

Running a messaging gateway means Google gets all that sweet metadata at the very least and message content in the many cases where E2EE isn't enabled. That's a lot of data to build advertising derivatives all linked to a specific identity.

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

#575

Post by commoner »

hankchinaski wrote: post #449
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 personally trust more Google and apple than a spider web of random developers and potential malwares that might cause just security issues in the long run and reduce the overall security of the platform and ecosystem

Nothing is stopping you from using Messages by Google or Apple's Messages app if you prefer. Fear, uncertainty, and doubt over unnamed "security issues" is not a good reason to prevent other developers from creating clients for RCS, which is intended to be an open protocol to replace SMS and MMS, and not a closed "ecosystem" consisting of 2 apps from 2 of the largest tech companies.

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

#576

Post by sneak »

averageRoyalty wrote: post #191
sonicanatidae wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Both Signal and iMessage are E2EE, SMS is not. Why do you feel Signal is better security wise?

iMessage, in practice, is not e2ee as devices escrow their “Messages in iCloud” cross-device sync keys to Apple in the non-e2ee iCloud Backup.

Even if you turn on e2ee for iCloud (“Advanced Data Protection”), your endpoint keys will stop being escrowed in a way readable to Apple in your backup, but the endpoint keys for everyone you message with will still be escrowed because they have not enabled Advanced Data Protection (because it’s off by default), so Apple will still be able to read all of your iMessage traffic.

99.9%+ of iMessages pass through Apple servers encrypted with keys that Apple has copies of (thanks to the insecure non-e2ee default nature of iCloud Backup). If the middle transit service has the private keys, it’s not e2ee.

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

#577

Post by rickdeckard »

chimeracoder wrote: post #553
acdha wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I think that point would be stronger if anyone else was open. Google used to run an open messaging service but shut it down as part of their failed attempt to compete with Facebook, and their current professed love…

> Google used to run an open messaging service but shut it down as part of their failed attempt to compete with Facebook, and their current professed love of open RCS hasn’t extended to allowing anyone else to use their implementation. It's funny to read this criticism, when comments in another thread are criticizing Google for running an RCS implementation as a service for carriers. RCS is an open standard, and Goog…

Fully agree.

Android also has APIs to register another RCS client to the OS.

What's missing are open APIs for apps to control Google's RCS-client. Indeed this would be convenient, but considering the potential for misuse there, Google would probably need a separate certification process for each app, which is quite a scale for something that didn't scale yet...

A own RCS-client still requires accreditation to ensure interoperability with the RCS-service. API-access to Google's client would either require accreditation of the app using the client, or would need to be limited so dramatically that it's probably of no use...

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

#578

Post by zik »

cubefox wrote: post #469
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…

Even when they adopt RCS I bet they still punish non Apple users with green bubbles.

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

#579

Post by bigfudge »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #559
kaba0 wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but the presence of a single Android user in an iMessage group chat can break the experience for everyone It is still such a laughable issue from the POV of any other country.. SMS is there for text-only, it’s a legacy tech that didn’t ever get popular in different places due to it having shit support for non-ascii letters (writing a single ü would almost halve the remaining chars I can write), and not having unlim…

> It’s a made-up issue. My biggest pet peeve is when people have an issue that doesn't affect them so they need to declare it as "fake". Just because you don't feel the problem doesn't mean "it's a made up issue". The following are simply facts: 1. In the US, among iPhone users, iMessage is by far the dominant messaging service. 2. Among certain socioeconomic groups in the US, iPhone is by far the dominant mobile pho…

The sad thing for me is that even though almost all my contacts have iPhones, the lowest common denominator effect means everyone ends up using WhatsApp to allow everyone to join. That’s definitely a worse outcome

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

#580

Post by zik »

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…

> If they'd simply added a "WhatsApp/iMessage mode" to Google Chat...

They'd have been sued by WhapsApp and Apple if they did that since they're proprietary protocols.

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