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Android is losing a generation, not a good sign for competition. I like my iPhone like many others I’m sure, but without competition it’s likely to stagnate and worse potentially have even higher price points.
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The phone is absolutely better. Better battery, nicer looking screen, more solid feel, faster processor, better game performance, better software integration (if you don’t care about customization). The only real downside to someone that isn’t a power user is price, and even power users can tweak iOS enough for nearly any use case. An example is that you can currently sideload a virtual machine app from altstore that…
> The phone is absolutely better. Better battery, nicer looking screen, more solid feel, faster processor, better game performance, better software integration Better than what, budget phones? Android phones worth half its price have comparable features nowadays. Apple has failed miserably in gaining customers from markets where its hegemony wasn't already established, including the world's largest smartphone markets…
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> The phone is absolutely better. Better battery, nicer looking screen, more solid feel, faster processor, better game performance, better software integration Better than what, budget phones? Android phones worth half its price have comparable features nowadays. Apple has failed miserably in gaining customers from markets where its hegemony wasn't already established, including the world's largest smartphone markets…
Except for the fact that the reason many markets buy android phones is because they are very budget oriented devices. Go to Mexico, India, China, Eastern Europe, anywhere where the purchasing power isn’t nearly on par with the US and you’ll find the reason everyone has android phones is because their carrier gives them a free one that happens to be years old and just about as terrible as they come. It’s essentially t…
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The article you link mentions Google asking Apple to use RCS, which is the industry standard for messaging interop these days, not SMS. Apple has so far declined, so nobody can function in their Messages app.
>RCS, which is the industry standard The article I linked to points out that RCS, as used by Google today, is a proprietary closed source fork of RCS that Google has refused to create a public API for. >Google's version of RCS—the one promoted on the website with Google-exclusive features like optional encryption—is definitely proprietary, by the way. If this is supposed to be a standard, there's no way for a third-p…
That’s news to me, interesting.
So is this fork fully incompatible with the spec, or it just adds some features beyond that spec? I.e. if Apple implements the open spec can they communicate with Google systems using the base spec features?
If Google built and run their own non-interoperable fork as a competing messaging system then I strongly agree that they don’t have a leg to stand on.
I’m a bit less convinced with the whole “Google wants your data” angle. The whole reason they used RCS in the first place is because carriers want to run their own messaging infra, and I believe the carriers still do even if they are using Google’s spec (eg see https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/30/22556686/att-android-phon..., though I am not certain on this point). In the past Google tried to get carriers to buy in to their own proprietary service and failed.
It looks to me more that AT&T, Verizon (a bit) and T-Mobile are all running Google’s version of the RCS spec on their own networks and servers, so even if it isn’t open (it should be), it is still a de facto industry standard. So I think they still have a case here that Apple should fall back to this spec instead of SMS.