Never thought this would happen. Very glad to see this
this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
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Cool to see happen. My mom and my brother in law use Android and I haven’t been able to convince either to just use Signal to message me. This will prove to be a better bridge.
It’s odd watching this from Europe, where cross platform third party messaging platforms are ubiquitous. Nobody seems to care about blue or green bubbles because they are all using WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger or one of the many others.
Reminds of the days of old instant messaging, where different regions, or social groups even, would favour MSN Messenger, Yahoo, ICQ, AOL Messenger etc.
Is it not really annoying to have four or five different messaging apps to contact different people? How do you keep track of who is on what?
At least with SMS/RCS, I know everybody that I want to contact can receive it.
I can only speak for myself: In my circle, 99% of people are on WhatsApp with a handful on Signal. I have never come across the issue where I didn’t know how to contact someone. There’s badges and notifications, using multiple apps has been a solved problem on smartphones for 10 years.
It would be slightly nicer to have everything in one app, but it’s a non-issue for me at least.
WhatsApp and telegram are currently the best options for most people. I prefer signal but people just won’t use it because they haven’t heard of it
Signal will definitely be the app I’ll migrate to if WhatsApp annoys enough people to make them want to switch.
Im using 4 different messenger apps and i dont really need to track it. If people sent you a message, i just open and respond. I have an iphone and i dont use iMessage at all. I think Europe is different to USA.
WhatsApp, telegram really covers 99% of my contacts, private or work. My parents use sms (60)
Signal is not very wide spread, mostly used for texts you want to protect for whatever reason.
I would consider it very odd if somebody writes on iMessage , iMessage was shit for groups when WhatsApp did it better.
Europe has had the benefit of not having Apple building walls through the smartphone market as much as they have here. Americans flocked to them and elected them the trend setters, and Apple's design philosophy is as aggressively closed as it can possibly be. So we have an entire generation now raised with Apple devices in hand that balk at the idea of using anything else, meanwhile Apple keeps competitors locked out of the ecosystem.
Apple has trained far too many Americans to never, ever think beyond the defaults; downloading another app to talk to people is verboten.
Europe has had a properly competitive smartphone market where all the major players are using the same open system, so none of them are setting trends that the others can't follow.
That’s a ridiculous take. Before I entered the Apple walled garden, ok, long before, my favorite texting app was Pidgin. Open source, cross platform, yadda yadda … tried to integrate with all then common texting protocols. Can you really not understand the convenience of that integration?
If Apple supports RCS in a separate app, I won’t use it even if it is installed by default.
If Apple integrates it into iMessage like they did with SMS, ill use t all the time _as a better user experience _
Apple is doing the same thing in Europe as it is the US. The difference is that people in Europe switched to WhatsApp, where people in the US stayed on SMS and got used to iMessage. It’s a group dynamic problem, not a problem that Apple is forcing upon anyone or not allowing (although it could do something against it, but why should they).
Also: not every major smartphone company in Europe is using the "same open system", Apple is very much here as well.
Thank God... Or the EU regulations... Whichever.
[everyone liked this]
I think the phrasing is important here.
Later next year, we will be adding support for RCS Universal Profile, the standard as currently published by the GSM Association.
If Google’s & Samsungs implementations aren't compliant with the GSM associations’ standard then I don’t think this is going to work how people are expecting it to. The stuff Google has added to RCS messaging has all been their own implementation of it and not part of the standard, and as far as I’m aware android RCS gets routed through Google’s servers.
I wonder if RCS support is Apple trying to appease the EU with the DMA stuff forcing messaging apps to be interoperable with each other.
This is what I was hoping for. Something that an Android using friend of mine doesn’t grasp is that Apple adopting RCS with E2EE encryption as it’s implemented at the moment makes them beholden to Google. Google’s putting on a song and dance pretending to be the good guy in this situation but if that were true they would have developed E2EE in a way that was a part of the RCS standard instead of proprietary. In a weird turn of events; Apple committing to improving encryption for the RCS standard has turned this into a really good thing for everyone.
I never would have put this situation on my bingo card after years of Apple’s “Blue bubble vs green bubble” crap.
That's the same universal profile every android uses
No it’s not. At least not in the US.
All major carriers use Google Jibe as their RCS backend which is the universal profile with a ton of proprietary Google bullshit, and routing all message traffic through Google servers.
No thanks.
I don’t think google is doing anything particularly nonstandard, they basically wrote the standard. RCS requires a server for the device to talk through, and google has been the main server most devices use. Some mobile carriers hosted their own but found it wasn’t worth the effort since google would do it for them, and the encryption is such that carriers didn’t have much to monetize.
Even if google was doing something nonstandard, the amount of begging they’ve put in to get Apple to support RCS means I’m sure they will do everything on their part to ensure interoperability on their end.
RCS does not support end-to-end encryption, only Google's proprietary extension does. Google has been simultaneously promoting RCS as a "standard" while prominently advertising a non-standard feature.
So will Apple be rolling their own backend RCS infrastructure for this? It seems unlikely they would want to depend on Google for that.
They have lots of money and engineers I’m sure it will be fine
Nobody knows at this point outside of Apple. Articles do say that it would require carrier support, so maybe Apple is telling the carriers to do it, or maybe Apple will host their own backend like Google does.
This is the double edged sword of Apple supporting standards sometimes. They stick to the spec in many cases, and then people bitch about nonstandard or poorly implemented things not being compatible.
And non iPhones will still be green.
Honestly as long as I can share full resolution photos with my friends I don’t care what color their bubbles are.
and reactions. Apples implementation of basic reactions is embarrassing.
Yes, this!
Does this mean the Nothing Phone's feature is basically irrelevant now? If so that's an option I hadn't considered yet after watching the MKBHD video earlier this week.
Nothing already pulled their app because it’s a security nightmare, storing and transmitting every message in plain text.
MKBHD pointed that out too. You’d have to be a complete imbecile to use that shit.
Not necessarily, it depends what features from imessage you want, replies, editing texts etc aren't AFAIK currently available on RCS, hell e2e encryption isn't currently available with the Open Standard
What do you need encryption for? Are you a criminal paedophile?
Nice try Mr FBI
What is a criminal? Someone that trades crypto, someone gay, someone who wants an abortion, someone who is a difference race or ethnicity? Any of these can become criminal if a government chooses.
Only paedophiles use encryption