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Google and major mobile carriers want Europe to regulate Apple's iMessage platform (www.engadget.com)

submitted 1 year ago by Salamendacious to c/technology

202 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The long fight to make Apple's iMessage compatible with all devices has raged with little to show for it. But Google (de facto leader of the charge) and other mobile operators are now leveraging the European Union's Digital Market Act (DMA), according to the Financial Times. The law, which goes into effect in 2024, requires that "gatekeepers" not favor their own systems or limit third parties from interoperating within them. Gatekeepers are any company that meets specific financial and usage qualifications, including Google's parent company Alphabet, Apple, Samsung and others.

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[–] cm0002 29 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

It's RCS not RMS and Google didnt even want control of it in the first place, it's well documented Google has been trying to get US carriers to stop dragging their feet on RCS for a long time. They never did until Google literally went "Fine, I'll do it myself then"

AND RCS is an open protocol, nobody really has "control" over it, Google runs some RCS servers but if it disappeared tomorrow (Or you changed the defaults) RCS itself would run just fine on whatever including if Apple supports RCS

ETA: Also SMS is absolute trash, it's from the early 90's (it's older than me FFS) it doesn't really support what we want out of it media wise today, and what it does support it was forced to. It'll send "video" but it'll be completely unrecognizable. It needs to be put to pasture already.

[–] ozymandias117 8 points 1 year ago

It will be an easier sell if Google manages to get their proprietary extensions to RCS into RCS version 10, rather than only being supported in Google Messenger

[–] BURN 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

SMS takes less bandwidth and is perfect for large broadcast messages and works perfectly fine for text based messaging. The only major problems it has are security and media, which while are valid needs, are not a reason to get rid of one of the few universally accepted standards

[–] cm0002 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

SMS should have been a fallback years ago and nothing more, it's absolutely asinine that it's still in as much use as it is today

[–] BURN 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It doesn’t need to be a fallback. It’s still perfect for text messages, government alerts, mass notification of customers, etc.

It’s barely used today anyways. The only time it’s used on iPhone is if you’re messaging someone outside the iMessage ecosystem, which really isn’t a problem for 95% of Apple users.

[–] cm0002 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't know why you insist on holding onto a 30+ year old protocol. It's not perfect and at times it can be downright unreliable. Once it's left your phone you have no idea if it was successfully delivered or not, there's no acknowledgement no retrys no retransmits. It just shoots it off and hopes for the best.

Group chats are laughably broken even among all SMS recipients (It was never intended for it anyway) and frankly the bandwidth required for text regardless of if it's over SMS or RCS is inconsequential, who cares if RCS messages need a bit more bandwidth to send text. The difference is negligible.

[–] BURN 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That’s why it works so well. What you see as problems with SMS I see as good design decisions. It’s an incredibly simple implementation that does exactly what it’s supposed to. You just want it to do more than it needs to.

Something will eventually replace it, but it sure as hell won’t be RCS. RCS is a defacto google standard now. Many features are locked out if you don’t use google servers. It’s not an open standard and it’s disingenuous to portray it as one.

[–] cm0002 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Uh yea, because we do so much more on our phones, it might be well designed, but it was well designed for the 90s. That's why it makes a good fallback protocol, but by no means should it be the go-to.

RCS is the replacement, it's been the replacement for a long time in the EU. In fact, if the US carriers just implemented it when the EU did, this entire thread wouldn't even exist.

It's a standard until Google takes control of the GSM Association.

Here's a Wikipedia article on RCS : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services

Even has this blurb:

The Verge in 2019 criticized the inconsistent support of RCS in the United States, with carriers not supporting RCS in all markets, not certifying service on all phones, or not yet supporting the Universal Profile. Concerns were shown over Google's decision to run its own RCS service due to the possibility of antitrust scrutiny, but it was acknowledged that Google had to do so in order to bypass the carriers' inconsistent support of RCS, as it wanted to have a service more comparable to Apple's iMessage service available on Android.

[–] BURN 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It’s still not a standard as long as you’re relying on google for the majority of features.

[–] cm0002 2 points 1 year ago

Like I said in the other comment, those features are all present in the Universal Profile which only lacks e2ee and those weird sticker things.

All the things we would want, file transfers, video, high quality pictures, real group chats etc are all present