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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

#91

Post by criddell »

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...

It will be interesting to see what color they choose for RCS. Right now, blue indicates an end-to-end encrypted message and green indicates not encrypted. Even when messaging between two Apple devices you can get a green bubble if, for some reason, the message is routed over SMS.

If it were up to me, encrypted RCS would be blue and not-encrypted RCS would be green.

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

#92

Post by drawfloat »

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...

[flagged]

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

#93

Post by lxgr »

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.

Probably never. At the very least, RCS itself needs SMS for account provisioning on a new device.

I also don't see every business relying on SMS for B2C messaging (and in particular for SMS-OTP) switching to RCS anytime soon.

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

#94

Post by Tagbert »

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...

Both iMessage and Webkit have to accept requests from unknown sources that can contain a wide variety of content type. some other content types, like EPS are themselves programming languages that could contain infiltration scripts. That is why Apple has dropped EPS support. Similar situation can happen for other kinds of image and video content.

I don't know much about how iMessage communication is implemented but it does offer end to end encryption and supports richer interaction and content than plain SMS does. that was one of the reasons that Apple marked SMS clients with the green bubbles to indicate not to expect the same interaction with them. It was some little shits that turned that into an anti-status symbol.

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

#95

Post by microtonal »

enragedcacti wrote: post #68
signal11 wrote: post #44

What’s the story around e2e encryption on RCS these days? In the past there were a few countries that didn’t allow it, no idea if that has changed. Also, will iMessage support for RCS include e2ee?

The current status iirc is that Google built its own e2e solutions in Android Messages, first for one-on-one conversations and as of August 2023 for group chats as well. They released technical papers but I don't think the implementations are part of the official spec. I think this section is basically Apple saying that they are going to push for that standardization: > Finally, Apple says it will work with the GSMA…

The good news is that Google's E2E solution is the Signal protocol:

https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf?sj...

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

#96

Post by mattl »

mdasen wrote: post #36
jwells89 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not green, but it should probably remain different so there’s an unmistakable visual indicator of which conversations are encrypted (assuming Apple implements carrier-flavor RCS, which to my knowledge is not encrypted unlike Google-flavor).

I think it'll remain green. Apple might feel pressure to implement RCS to ward off regulators, but keeping the chats green will likely still serve Apple's purpose. Even if RCS is 100% as good as iMessage, a decade of green bubbles has cemented the perception in people's minds. Even if people don't know why a green bubble is worse (and even if they aren't worse), it will still be their perception. Apple has no reason…

I don't know many people with Android who don't use WhatsApp or Signal.

Keeping SMS green would be good for purely transactional type SMS messages, and using another color for RCS would be good.

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

#97

Post by rgbrenner »

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…

Reminder to everyone who wonders why WhatsApp and iMessage won: US phone carriers used to charge $0.10 to $0.25 per message.

Yes, it was as ridiculous as it sounds. There used to be news articles about kids racking up hundreds of dollars on their phone bill.

Here's one from the same year the iphone was released:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/0...

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

#98

Post by andrewmunsell »

criddell wrote: post #91
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...

It will be interesting to see what color they choose for RCS. Right now, blue indicates an end-to-end encrypted message and green indicates not encrypted. Even when messaging between two Apple devices you can get a green bubble if, for some reason, the message is routed over SMS. If it were up to me, encrypted RCS would be blue and not-encrypted RCS would be green.

Why do you think that blue represents E2EE and not simply iMessage? If data isn't available and the iPhone sends an SMS, like you mentioned, the bubble is green, but this doesn't necessarily have anything to do with encryption. For example, the satellite SOS messages are represented as gray. It seems more like the color represents the transport.

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

#99

Post by geodel »

AequitasOmnibus wrote: post #67
filmgirlcw wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bingo. The cartel was so focused on trying to save their existing money printing machine they took their eye off the ball and refused to disrupt themselves. The cable television industry did the exact same thing. If they’d been willing to go OTT a decade ago and not force agreements based on geolocation, a lot of the streaming services that exist wouldn’t even need to exist today.

> The cable industry did the exact same thing. Kinda but not really. The cable providers were and continue to be hamstrung by the networks who force the cable providers to buy channel packages. Cable never had the leverage to, say, tell Disney that they only want to offer ESPN but not the 10 other Disney branded networks being offered. It was often all or nothing.

Exactly right. A lot of people have tendency to simplistically choose heroes and villains. SO Disney is hero, cable TV bringing disney to home via their Coax cable is villain. Top artists are heroes, but ticket booking service which ultimately are reason for enormous payout to these artists are villains gouging fans.

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

#100

Post by no_wizard »

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…

I think iMessage doesn't have the most dominant marketshare outside the US (and possibly Canada)

iOS /iPadOS (and by extension, iPhone and iPad) however, has slim-to-major majorities in most lucrative markets[0] and even in markets where iOS is not a majority, its well known in the mobile industry that iOS / iPadOS customers are far more lucrative

[0]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ios-vs-android-market-share-1...

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