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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

#81

Post by sonicanatidae »

jmull wrote: post #56

> the green bubble shame set to end I'm betting the non-Apple bubbles will remain green... and remain a bit stigmatized. It was never about the resolution of pictures and even technical limitations around group chat was just part of it. It's a social thing and the technical protocol is incidental. Dr. Seuss probably explained it best in The Sneetches.

I love when people comment on the color of a text message. It makes it real easy to know who to block, because they worry about entirely the wrong things.

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

#82

Post by lxgr »

rattlesnakedave wrote: post #61
bastard_op wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't the carriers, it was Apple mostly winning the race in creating their walled garden, and everyone else being disinterested in an alternative in the phone race wars. It's now some badge of shame Apple users discriminate against the blue vs green windows if a friend or relative doesn't have an i-thing, and Apple loves it all the way to the bank.

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 very different messaging landscape today.

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

#83

Post by marcellus23 »

Obscurity4340 wrote: post #42
eropple wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple doesn't put a green bubble on SMS "to ostracize people's kids". Kids are ostracized just for having a default skin in Fortnite--because kids can be little shitheads. Apple differentiates because what you can do with SMS is different from what you can do with iMessage and that's a clear way to demonstrate it (and also to indicate if there's something weird going on when it changes from iMessage to SMS). RCS is a…

> what you can do is different Can you talk a bit more about how iMessage is fundamentally diferent than SMS on the functionality level? Is it like "Signal" different or is it like "different" different? Edit: bonus points if you can offer why iMessage is able to be the skeleton key into your iPhone, as often it and WebKit seem to be behind most of the serious 0-days...

> Can you talk a bit more about how iMessage is fundamentally diferent than SMS on the functionality level

It's different in the same way every messaging app is different from SMS:

* Group chats, with custom group names and icons

* High quality images/videos

* Reactions

* Stickers

* Rich link previews

* Threads

* etc. etc.

> why iMessage is able to be the skeleton key into your iPhone

I don't think a lot (any?) of the vulnerabilities are unique to iMessage. It's more about the fact that SMS/iMessage is a means for someone to send you data that's then parsed/decoded immediately by the system.

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

#84

Post by TerrifiedMouse »

Obscurity4340 wrote: post #42
eropple wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple doesn't put a green bubble on SMS "to ostracize people's kids". Kids are ostracized just for having a default skin in Fortnite--because kids can be little shitheads. Apple differentiates because what you can do with SMS is different from what you can do with iMessage and that's a clear way to demonstrate it (and also to indicate if there's something weird going on when it changes from iMessage to SMS). RCS is a…

> what you can do is different Can you talk a bit more about how iMessage is fundamentally diferent than SMS on the functionality level? Is it like "Signal" different or is it like "different" different? Edit: bonus points if you can offer why iMessage is able to be the skeleton key into your iPhone, as often it and WebKit seem to be behind most of the serious 0-days...

Some carriers charge per SMS - after X SMSs per month. iMessage is completely free.

Kind of important to be able to tell if you are burning up your SMS quota.

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

#85

Post by microtonal »

apienx wrote: post #35

Google ran a clever “Time for SMS to exit the chat” campaign some time ago. Might have helped precipitate this decision. https://youtu.be/N_B0riy__rw?si=C-gDkNbmb3MFyWao Telcos live in the Stone Age. A little disruption is well overdue.

Unlikely. This is most likely due to regulatory pressure of the EU. The Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act both hit Apple pretty hard.

Though the real losers here are potentially WhatsApp, Telegram and other third-party services (assuming that Apple will implement E2E encryption). Since iPhone is not as dominant in other countries as the US, WhatsApp and some other messaging services have become dominant outside the US. They are not really necessary anymore once there is a proper standard across platforms.

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

#86

Post by lxgr »

crazygringo wrote: post #60

What a surprise! I'm quite sure RCS bubbles will be green though, and that's still going to be enough of a difference when it comes to teen groups and even adult dating. The EU may mandate interoperability, but I don't see them mandating bubble color...

They don't need to. Almost nobody uses iMessage in the EU, since everybody is on WhatsApp.

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

#87

Post by voidwtf »

simse wrote: post #26

This is great to hear. Apple should be selling phones because their phones are better, or iMessage is, not because of social pressure, which is crazy.

What if the social pressure, is in part, a result of the better experience one gets with iMessage?

Photos, videos, group messaging are all a significantly better experience with iMessage in my experience. This is not to say that other apps don't offer a similar experience, you can achieve much of the same functionality on Telegram or WhatsApp. It's just that it's built into the phone.

Google might have achieved similar success with their own messaging platform had they'd not constantly thrown it under the bus and created a new one every month. Allo, Duo, Meet, Google+, Google Chat etc....

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

#88

Post by sonicanatidae »

TechRemarker wrote: post #37
throw0101a wrote: post #33

> Breaking: Apple will support RCS - the green bubble shame set to end Note that the green bubble could be kept for other reasons: RCS is a major improvement over SMS/MMS, but there could still be functionality that isn't on par with a completely in-house system like 'iMessage'. The green/blue distinction may still be useful for setting certain expectations on how things work.

Yeah definetly would not expect it to be blue as 9 to 5 noted how Apple mentioned it won't be as secure as iMessage and iMessage will be separate. So presumably people texting will still want to know if they see blue they get full privacy where is if they see green or a new color it means yes they get lots of new features like iMessage, but not as secure as iMessage. But the green bubble (or whatever new color) will…

"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.

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

#89

Post by bloppe »

rattlesnakedave wrote: post #63
crazygringo wrote: post #60

What a surprise! I'm quite sure RCS bubbles will be green though, and that's still going to be enough of a difference when it comes to teen groups and even adult dating. The EU may mandate interoperability, but I don't see them mandating bubble color...

> but I don't see them mandating bubble color I personally see no limit to what arbitrary nonsense regulation the EU is willing to push.

The EU is interested in fair competition. Apple has managed to provide a terrible cross-platform messaging experience to their own customers for years while successfully convincing everyone that the problem is due to every other phone besides theirs. I agree it's almost comical, but it certainly affects competition in a negative way.

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

#90

Post by freedomben »

whoopdedo wrote: post #62

Is there a sunset timeline for SMS? No service lasts forever and if Apple knows carriers will want to turn it off sometime they'd have to get on board with the RCS sooner rather than too late.

Apple is big enough that they could make the carriers keep SMS. If a carrier tried to remove it and break "compatibility" with the iPhone, Apple would block that carrier from having iPhones altogether, which would decimate that carriers business. So through a causative chain, Apple could force carriers to keep SMS.
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