-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
The Verge: "Google tries shaming Apple into adopting RCS with #getthemessage campaign"
- Thread starter Mafro
- Start date
Good, shame them to hell and back.
People who are in here saying "just use a third party texting app" are ignoring how that isn't exactly a choice for many [most?] of us.
If your friends / family / etc do that, then great - if they don't, you're hooped.
Nobody I encounter in life [outside when I travel for work in France] uses a third party messaging app for anything other than buying / selling drugs [Signal / Wickr].
[I'm in Canada, FWIW]
I just want to be able to text people, with the default texting app on my phone, and not have the experience hamstrung because of different people's different devices.
It's ridiculous that this gulf in texting still exists between both platforms, and it needs to be fixed yesterday.
People who are in here saying "just use a third party texting app" are ignoring how that isn't exactly a choice for many [most?] of us.
If your friends / family / etc do that, then great - if they don't, you're hooped.
Nobody I encounter in life [outside when I travel for work in France] uses a third party messaging app for anything other than buying / selling drugs [Signal / Wickr].
[I'm in Canada, FWIW]
I just want to be able to text people, with the default texting app on my phone, and not have the experience hamstrung because of different people's different devices.
It's ridiculous that this gulf in texting still exists between both platforms, and it needs to be fixed yesterday.
(5/5)one.
(2/3)ha. This topic is always worth a giggle. 55/45 in US, 20/80 in the rest of the world. I stopped caring about iPhone users experience being awful when talking to the majority of the people on the planet a long time ago and don't much care if Apple ever gets it tog
(1/3)In my circle the shaming really comes from us Android users in the form of making fun of iPhone users not getting with the program or being unable to download another app like almost everyone else. Not a big deal for us but it does seem to bunch the iPhone users up. Ha
(4/5) Sent from my iPh
(3/3)ether. Lol.
(2/3)ha. This topic is always worth a giggle. 55/45 in US, 20/80 in the rest of the world. I stopped caring about iPhone users experience being awful when talking to the majority of the people on the planet a long time ago and don't much care if Apple ever gets it tog
(1/3)In my circle the shaming really comes from us Android users in the form of making fun of iPhone users not getting with the program or being unable to download another app like almost everyone else. Not a big deal for us but it does seem to bunch the iPhone users up. Ha
(4/5) Sent from my iPh
(3/3)ether. Lol.
All three words are wrong, sorry. It's neither global (even int the US not all carriers support it), nor adopted (were here talking about forcing people to adopt it I guess) and also not a standard (see the linked Ars Technica piece).
So why doesn't Google use carrier implemented RCS and their own RCS as fallback?
They do. Android supports RCS Universal, which is the standard RCS. Its a fallback to their specific fork of RCS. There is literally zero reason why Apple can't do the same.
RCS Google -> RCS Universal -> MMS -> SMS
RCS is recognized by the GSMA.
If there is a globally recognized successor to SMS/MMS, it's RCS.
US carriers went hard on making texting free and unlimited before other countries carriers did.
That's why we never migrated to messaging apps. Essentially texting has been free since cell phones were widely adopted so there was 1 less major forcing factor for families to all decide to download a 3rd party app.
Now it's just sort of too late for anything new to replace "texting".
That's why we never migrated to messaging apps. Essentially texting has been free since cell phones were widely adopted so there was 1 less major forcing factor for families to all decide to download a 3rd party app.
Now it's just sort of too late for anything new to replace "texting".
And people argue it wasn't a factor every thread, and the world keeps spinning.
This is basically all of the reasons needed for Apple to tell Google to kick rocks.
Here in the US, Google initially went with the carrier option.
It was a broken, incompatible mess as ever carrier tried to implement their own version.
The only reason RCS even somewhat works is because Google got the three main carriers to agree to using their implementation of it (and then AT&T promptly broke it again by being a bunch of controlling dickheads).
Same, Adults who are all parents themselves (all in their 30's) on my street have specifically left out two members because they don't have iPhones. Apple needs to just support RCS at this point. WhatsApp was brought up but no one wants to install it as no one uses it.
Does it not improve the user experience for iMessage users who have noniPhone contacts as well?
Yeah, it doesn't hold up to basic scrutiny.
People will always find a way to wage
Certainly it would.
LOL, Google is hilarious
The stupid bubble would still be green. It's not an iMessage, so it will be tagged accordingly anyway. And even if Apple uses RCS in the background as a fallback, that does not mean that it will ever be compatible with iMessage group chats and all the other stuff.
If anything people in the US have to wake up already and use universal messaging apps like everyone else in the world. Using an unencrypted protocol (and I don't see Apple implementing Googles proprietary solution) ... Thanks no
Apple is not going to support Google's flavor of RCS, which is what Google's promoting and wants though
And yet Apple can just implment the RCS-Universal standard as-is and tell Google to have fun convincing the carriers alone.
You are hilarious. Human race can't even get everyone to agree to mask up in a global pandemic now you want them all to agree to download a different messaging app, create a new account under that service and then tell every friend to convert.
does the universal standard without Google's hotfixes work as reliable as SMS?
Would this help at all? It's Google's implementation that adds the worthwhile features, right?
Last edited:
Google should take the energy they did for this stunt and apply it to sticking with one messaging service. They had a chance and bungled it up and are now blaming apple.
I know, but it really is impossible to understand what's the problem when you live outside the US I guess
I mean it's not hard to imagine. If WhatsApp is the dominant way of communication in your country, imagine having to tell everyone to switch off from that because Meta is shit.
This is not some non-profit standardization organization thats the good guy here:
GSMA - Wikipedia
Love me some carrier special interest group.
On the carriers that support it, yes. For those that dont nothing changes since messages will still fallback to MMS->SMS. But now Apple can say "I don't know what you're talking about. We support the standard. Its not our fault if it only has 60-80% support
All Googles implementation adds is E2E Encryption. The rest is just RCS as-written.
We did. When Whatsapp changed their EULA to let more data to Facebook literally half the population moved on to Signal, Threema, Telegram. The force was so big WhatsApp tried to "delay" the rollout of their EULA.
TBH I kind of want them to do so, only to give them green bubbles, because they sure as hell won't ditch iMessage - and see Google's reaction.
... They did?
"Google Messages" is their iMessage equivalent. Whenever I text someone else using Google RCS, the experience is virtually similar to iMessage. This is purely about the quality of messaging when users of both platforms communicate with each other.
Is that anecdotal or are there statistics showing that WhasApp has lost majority of users in EU? If it's not literally everyone you are just fragmenting the population.
The business dueling is normal.
Everyday people picking sides to defend their favorite smartphone manufacturer of the month is what's really cringe.
Everyday people picking sides to defend their favorite smartphone manufacturer of the month is what's really cringe.
Google could create a messaging service that gave everyone on Android $100 per character and it still wouldn't solve the problem.
- iOS users in the US are not going to download a third party chat app to replicate what they already have.
- Apple won't integrate it into their messaging app, so it does nothing to address the issue between iOS and Android.
As long as SMS is the only built-in way to communicate between an iPhone and Android phone, this issue isn't going to go away.
It's not something a third party app can fix.
This is not some non-profit standardization organization thats the good guy here:
GSMA - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Love me some carrier special interest group.
Don't be daft. They maintain the standard like many other industry, trade and non-profit groups do. Just because the standard is held by a trade group doesn't make it any less valid than a non-profit standard association. They maintain the global standard that is a regulated standard in many countries across the globe.
You can argue that maybe the standards setting body within the GSMA should be split out to a non-profit group. And that would be a compelling valid argument. But you can not refute that they are the global legal standard for telecom communications.
They did so after multiple attempts including Google Hangouts (which was great, only to be killed)
This is truly an USA problem.
The rest of the world just uses whatsApp lime and wechat and simply do not care.
Also Apple does not care
The rest of the world just uses whatsApp lime and wechat and simply do not care.
Also Apple does not care
That is the opposite of the point. It's another app that does something my phone ALREADY does, for free. The issue is the tech monops arguing with each other and leaving their users with the shit.
Majority of businesses and friends I have to contact in EU still seem to be on WhatsApp 🤷♂️
I don't care what ultimately ends up being used (RCS, Google's RCS, Matrix, some other protocol).
I just want the ability to send a video to my wife from my Android phone to her iPhone without it turning into a mess, and to not have my group chats fall apart.
I guess I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, better cross-platform messaging would be good, and it would just be an additional fallback. On the other, supporting RCS specifically is just prolonging the life of carrier-centric messaging when it would arguably be better for that to die with SMS.
(And of course, being locked into any of these proprietary messaging platforms kind of sucks and is its own problem, and some modern, federated, e2e-encrypted-by-default protocol gaining traction would be great. But I don't know what the pathway to that would be. Maybe some smart legislation that doesn't make the mistake of mandating RCS or similar.)
(And of course, being locked into any of these proprietary messaging platforms kind of sucks and is its own problem, and some modern, federated, e2e-encrypted-by-default protocol gaining traction would be great. But I don't know what the pathway to that would be. Maybe some smart legislation that doesn't make the mistake of mandating RCS or similar.)
Last edited:
IDK if RCS, or RCS in its current form is the answer, but we do need a universally adopted SMS/MMS successor.
Also this.