Defaults matter. I too have WhatsApp, Signal, Google Chat and a few others on my phone, but the fragmentation is annoying to deal with, and getting social groups (or even individuals) to move to a single consolidating messaging platform turns out to be much more difficult than I expected.
If the default chat app is featureful and universally supported, people tend not to stray toward non-default alternatives unless they offer meaningful benefits. Sure, this ship has in many ways already sailed, since those alternative apps have a lot of mindshare and network effects.
But if Apple added RCS to its default messaging app (or if Google were permitted to add iMessage support to its default messaging app), I would ditch everything else and just message everyone (including groups) using the default Android Messages app, relying on it to select the best non-SMS/non-MMS contact method for everyone, regardless of platform.
Sure, it would take a little more work to move messaging groups over, but the cool thing is that I could just do it myself, and not wait for my friends to download yet another messaging app. This is the problem I ran into when I wanted to get friends off of WhatsApp; I had to convince people to install something else, and not everyone felt like doing it. But everyone already has the default messaging app installed, so that problem just goes away.
> While it’s all sweetness and light that Google got into bed with the phone carriers to develop this new “standard” tied to a phone number subscription that brings along all the retrograde privacy nightmares of Big Telecom since the bell system broke up.
Just wanted to call this out as FUD. RCS existed as a standard long before Google was involved (nearly a decade?). I too don't love that it's tied to a phone number, but options for doing this well are limited, and building a second, parallel identity system has its own issues. RCS at least can be federated, and it'd be possible to allow phone users to choose their own provider. And in practice, phone number portability means you aren't stuck with the crappy choice of ditching your "identity", or sticking with a phone provider you hate.
Not sure how iMessage or WhatsApp or Google Chat or Signal is any better, though, as they're all controlled by a single company that requires you to use their identity system.
Perhaps you're missing the point though? Maybe your friends simply don't care enough to switch.
Bottom line is iMessage works really well and people like it. Same with FB messenger and Whatsapp. You want to move friends to something else? There needs to be a selling point much larger than just security.
> Perhaps you're missing the point though? Maybe your friends simply don't care enough to switch.
Right, I mean, that's exactly the point. I can't force someone else to install a messaging app I'd prefer to use. But if we had an actually-good, cross-platform messaging standard that was implemented in the default, stock messaging app of both Android and iOS, I would not have to depend on my friends caring or not. I could just use it, and know that they will receive the messages.
The problem with moving groups over to iMessage is that you'll always leave some Android users out. Here in Spain Apple has a minority marketshare so that makes iMessage a total non-starter. But even in the US not everyone has an iPhone.
And really iMessage is not so much better than the cross-platform alternatives that it's worth leaving some friends out.
iMessage is kinda both its own messenger and SMS client. So when you text a number, I don't think you have a choice of how to send it. If the user is "Apple" it sends as an imessage, if not message, it turns the bubble green (so you know its SMS). Though in the epic trial Apple sees messaging as a "lock in feature"
"
In another exchange, Apple executives discussed in 2013 whether releasing a version of iMessage for Android would make it easier to switch phone brands. iMessage is still exclusive to Apple products.
“I am concerned that the iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove and obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones,” Craig Federighi, Apple software senior vice president, wrote in 2013."
> 1. No threading is supported. If you reply, it duplicates the message being replied to.
Threading (using "Reply") is not supported in mixed iMessage/SMS/MMS text chains. (I'm using iOS 16, so this may have been (unwisely) supported in earlier Message versions.)
> 2. “Tapbacks” (reactions) duplicate the message being reacted to with “so-and-so likes message … message”
The other things you list are limitations and side-effects of the standards used. They're valid, but I consider the experience "fine" without them. If the groups I text with cared about these we would probably use WhatsApp since everyone has that. Signal would be my preference, but it's hard to change people's habits.
Didn’t know about Tapback support on Android. Wish iOS had that support for non-iMessage chats!
I think the point I want to stress is that when everyone uses iMessage, it’s as easy as texting, but just about as good as WhatsApp/etc. from a feature/user experience point of view.
Agree that we can be friends. Hopefully my comment wasn’t seen as adversarial. I just get annoyed when I see the green text bubbles, because people try to use iMessage features and it’s just bad. Non-techies don’t realize it’s different because it’s the same app, but then wonder why photos aren’t high resolution, or things don’t work as expected.
But that uses MMS which many networks here (Europe) don't support anymore, or they charge a hefty fee (even though big SMS bundles are still a thing here). Especially for international use.
I didn't realise it was still used in the US though.
MMS definitely doesn't work on my phone, though I'm not sure if this is a provisioning/settings thing or that the provider has abandoned it. I never really looked into it as I've never needed it. I just tested it once to see if it worked.
I send international MMSes from my phone(android) to my mum's iphone, from UK to Poland, and it seems to work fine. Hasn't bankrupted me yet either(I just checked and it's apparently 30 pence per text).
> But everyone already has the default messaging app installed, so that problem just goes away.
Okay, so let's say Apple implements RCS support. Should they support the version of RCS that the carriers want? The version Google implemented? Are they now going to be required to implement support for proprietary Google extensions? Will they have to run their own RCS servers because carriers don't support this version of RCS?
RCS is a fragmented mess. It's dead in the water. This noise is just Google flailing about after having binned yet another one of their messaging platforms. Personally I don't care what Apple does here. I still want SMS support for when I'm in an area with little/no data coverage and I'm still going to treat RCS with the same disdain I'd treat any unencrypted messaging platform.
They should implement the version (and extensions) that gives them interoperability with the most users. Which, yes, would probably be whatever Google implemented, including the E2EE extensions. This... isn't really hard?
> They should implement the version (and extensions) that gives them interoperability with the most users
They already have that, with SMS. Perhaps you only exchange messages with people in rich countries so don’t notice what is most commonly implemented by carriers?
Why should Apple (or anyone) be on the hook for implementing proprietary extensions? Once you peel back the marketing schtick this is just demanding that Google be able to determine which proprietary services are included on an Apple product. That's ridiculous on its face.
If the issue is interoperability with Android users, fine. Google had successful messaging apps on iOS (I used a few) and they destroyed them through their own mismanagement. RCS doesn't solve that in the slightest.
> This... isn't really hard?
If you want E2EE the demand is now that Apple spin up its own Google-RCS servers and/or rely on Google's infrastructure. If you want Apple to rely on the carriers you don't get E2EE. Rather than work with the carriers Google fragmented RCS making implementation that much more difficult.
At the end of the day, what we need is interop, so Apple should be forced to either open the protocol, or adopt something that is already open. But either option is strictly better than the existing mess.
But either option is strictly better than the existing mess.
Disagree. We have interoperability, just not with advanced features within the default messaging apps. To me that's not a big deal at all as there are other, popular, options. We should get out of the habit of relying on carriers to provide much more than dumb pipes. To that end SMS (not MMS) works just fine and RCS is just going to continue to get bogged down.
It's easy to say that if Apple bent to the will of the carriers the iPhone would never have been as good as it is. But look at RCS, Google had to stand up their own infrastructure because the carriers weren't cutting it.
It's not that RCS is not the right product it's that RCS is the wrong approach entirely. Even in the United States Android is wildly popular. They've had every opportunity to create a wildly popular messaging platform and have failed. Google killed their own products as a result of their internal culture. This isn't Netscape vs IE again, it's more like Mosaic vs Gopher (or AOL vs Netscape if you like).
I was going to write "as much as I'd like to see non-Apple devices brought into the iMessage fold" but then I realized that's not true. I don't care because I'd just use Signal. In fact I still use Signal with some friends that have iPhones. RCS wouldn't change that, it'd either be one more shitty carrier product to avoid or one more shitty Google product that's going to get killed in a few months.
Turn that on its head. What does RCS bring to the table? RCS brings two types of features: those that carriers will try to monetize (file transfer, VoIP, visual voice mail) and those that seek to drive "customer engagement" (chatbots, carousels, branding, quick-reply suggestions, "rich" cards).
From the Wikipedia page:
RCS Business Messaging (RBM) is the B2C (A2P in telecoms terminology) version of RCS.
*This is supposed to be an answer to third-party messaging apps (or OTTs) absorbing
mobile operators' messaging traffic and associated revenues*. While RCS is designed to
win back Person-to-Person (P2P) traffic, RBM is intended to retain and grow this A2P
traffic. … RBM is expected to attract marketing and customer service spend from
enterprises, thanks to improved customer engagement and interactive features that
facilitate new use cases. *This was the primary reason for the development of RCS by
the GSMA*.
No. Thanks. As I said, I don't really care if Apple implements RCS support in their Message app. If they do it's just one more thing I'll disable.
My take is that carriers should be dumb pipes. Voice, SMS, and data routing and that's it. Part of the reason RCS is already fragmented is because the carriers are trying to monetize it, you can bet your ass they're going to continue to drag their feet with E2EE – which is why Google's stood up their own separate RCS infrastructure.
Didn't Google Talk, Google Chat, Google Hangouts, and Google Meet all support group chats? Didn't Google Talk even allow for federation?
The problem with RCS as a solution is that you're either going to rely on the carriers or Google and Apple to host infrastructure. Requiring Apple to implement support for Google (hosted) products is ridiculous as Apple already lists Google chat apps in their app store. Requiring Apple to host their own servers to interoperate with Google's services is also ridiculous because again Apple already provides software to interoperate with Google's chat services.
Requiring Apple to support RCS so their users can leverage carrier hosted RCS is also ridiculous because that's a fancy way of saying Apple should be required to monetize their users for the carriers' benefit. Per the Wired article linked to MMS was created solely to extract money from their users (or as Wired put it to "collect a fee every time anyone snaps a photo"). I'm sure most folks who are old enough remember when SMS (which literally consumes no additional bandwidth) was a paid feature, does everyone remember when MMS cost even more than a plain SMS?
RCS may not be a cash grab by Google, but they certainly haven't had any luck in getting the carriers to implement customer friendly features. Another lowest common denominator "standard" like RCS isn't an improvement at all, especially not in the face of the freely available, cross platform messaging apps.
What does RCS theoretically bring to the group chat table?
File transfers? Google's gonna mine them or carriers will charge exorbitant storage/transfer/viewing fees.
The default chat app and the technical merit dosn't matter. What matters is what people we want to chat with. Most of my friends and groups are on WhatsApp. Some prefer to use Telegram, me too. A very few living outside the country use FB Messenger. Nobody use SMS unless for emergencies, if they think the recipient has no data connection. RCS is totally unknown. If I say RCS somebody will ask me "the newspaper company?"
Making people switch is possible (use Telegram to chat with me), making a group switch is impossible as there is always at least one person that doesn't want to install a new app or can't (phones with tiny storage.) Anything else is irrilevant in my country. There are probably some friends of mine using iMessage when chatting with somebody they know to have an iPhone. They still to have to use WhatsApp to chat with everybody else.
Is Matrix built into the default, stock messaging apps of Android and iOS? No, it's not, so it does not solve the problem I've posed in any useful way.
(Beyond that, I've found the usability of Matrix on both desktop and mobile to be atrocious.)
> It however turned out that although the content of the message is encrypted, there is still a lot of user identifiable data that is not encrypted and can be seen by potential attackers.[0]
The amount of required metadata to maintain federation is very small. Some matrix instances operate in this minimalist or near minimalist domain, but in my experience, getting folks to share their custom forks of matrix requires some social schmoozing.
For better or worse, much of the fediverse is made up of small enclaves of hyper-paranoid tech weirdos who have often reinvented the wheel over and over, each in their own little group, which is a big problem for the casual person who wants to toss a server on a home server for friends and family.
And I say this as one of these hyper-paranoid tech weirdos. The network's growth is immensely stifled by the fact that people aren't keen on sharing, or building user friendly tools for the normies.
Message content can be fully end-to-end encrypted. Federation needs some unencrypted metadata. Some of it can be reduced, but some will be needed for federation to work. Signal probably needs less unencrypted metadata, but you lose federation.
If the default chat app is featureful and universally supported, people tend not to stray toward non-default alternatives unless they offer meaningful benefits. Sure, this ship has in many ways already sailed, since those alternative apps have a lot of mindshare and network effects.
But if Apple added RCS to its default messaging app (or if Google were permitted to add iMessage support to its default messaging app), I would ditch everything else and just message everyone (including groups) using the default Android Messages app, relying on it to select the best non-SMS/non-MMS contact method for everyone, regardless of platform.
Sure, it would take a little more work to move messaging groups over, but the cool thing is that I could just do it myself, and not wait for my friends to download yet another messaging app. This is the problem I ran into when I wanted to get friends off of WhatsApp; I had to convince people to install something else, and not everyone felt like doing it. But everyone already has the default messaging app installed, so that problem just goes away.
> While it’s all sweetness and light that Google got into bed with the phone carriers to develop this new “standard” tied to a phone number subscription that brings along all the retrograde privacy nightmares of Big Telecom since the bell system broke up.
Just wanted to call this out as FUD. RCS existed as a standard long before Google was involved (nearly a decade?). I too don't love that it's tied to a phone number, but options for doing this well are limited, and building a second, parallel identity system has its own issues. RCS at least can be federated, and it'd be possible to allow phone users to choose their own provider. And in practice, phone number portability means you aren't stuck with the crappy choice of ditching your "identity", or sticking with a phone provider you hate.
Not sure how iMessage or WhatsApp or Google Chat or Signal is any better, though, as they're all controlled by a single company that requires you to use their identity system.