Samsung joins Google in RCS shaming Apple

AFAIK there is no open source messaging app that support RCS yet. It's not even included in android AOSP (or is it? I can't find any reference). It would help with adoption if google actually open-sourced the RCS client app.

Okay, Samsung is the party with some credibility here. It's a lot harder to hear Google whine about messaging standards when their churn in messaging has been hilarious and embarrassing.

Unless the EU makes them, they're not adopting rcs. I could see them putting out an imessage app for Android though. Probably ad supported to make the experience extra shitty for us. They'd quickly own the messaging market, at least in the US.

Friendly reminder that none of these asswipes are your friend :)

Gotta love how Google has spent the last, what, 10 years?, fighting iMessage and losing due to their own short-sightedness/lack of focus and incompetence. The company that dethroned MSN Messenger couldn't win a fight against an opponent that, on a global scale, represents ~25% of the mobile market. Meanwhile, Whatsapp dominates the instant messaging world.

While Apple should adopt RCS, I cannot help but feel that Google is being extremely hypocritical. They complain about iMessage being proprietary, but their implementation of RCS isn’t open source, and I believe they even mentioned they have no plans to open it up for 3rd party devs to implement it into their own sms apps. This just feels like an iMessage equivalent for Android. It has rich features that are exclusive to Android as a platform (more specifically exclusive to Google Messages or whatever the app is called now)… just like iMessage within iOS/MacOS/iPadOS..

MKBHD closed this topic for me forever. Apple is never going to open up. It provides them tremendous value. They don’t give a shit if Samsung taunts them lol. They want your teenage kids taunting their friends over their green bubbles. And it’s working.

Why should anyone care about RCS? The trend has been to get everything into data instead of carrier owned services for two decades now, we don't need another SMS (it will likely always be a fallback). What we should move onto is a carrier and device type angnostic universal standard protocol over TCP / QUIC like XMPP or Matrix, with SMS as the backup.

When you get a phone you can get an phone system account and a telephone number already. Modern apps in the Google ecosystem should already recognize you are already signed in with Google and sync your contacts. Since almost everyone is already in the Google ecosystem, if Google supported it they could have extended their XMPP implementation in Hangouts to allow messaging directly via XMPP to those contacts and SMS for anyone not yet in the system (similar to how Signal did, Apple does, and Google does now with RCS). Unlike Apple, since its just XMPP, users can still add friends and be added by friends on other XMPP servers (ex. their ISPs, their own, or a third party). They could have supported or jumpstarted a new very simple open source alternative app for that portion for AOSP if the EU complained. Eventually Carriers could have supported passthroughs for those still on feature phones and other users of SMS to use the number@carrier accounts to hit XMPP users with generated SMS numbers for non-SMS users (pushed either by business necessity or part of a government / teleco org like GSMA staged removal of SMS and telephone numbers). It's all data at the end of the day.

Instead, they developed a whole new protocol to fluff the telecos and keep the now badly managed telephone number system even more necessary allowing spammers and allow the problems of legacy SMS to continue.

Apple, Google, and Samsung should all be shamed for not supporting fully open protocols and necessitating dependency on user harming stacks.

Imagine a world where we can adopt a scalable, secure, open communication protocol where users can use whatever app they want. Imagine humanity moving past the diaspora of special-snowflake chat apps and on to better things.

Breaking news: Apple and majority of its users still don’t care.

I’d love to have RCS, but it’s not a make or break feature for me, and I’m tech savvy enough to know what it is and what it does. Good luck trying to convince the average consumer to give a fuck about invisible tech that doesn’t meaningfully change their experience.

Apple is not going to change this unless legally forced to because it is quite possibly the biggest driver of iPhone sales.

A whopping 87% of American teens use an iPhone, and the green text from Android SMS is the biggest reason. At that age people will do almost anything to fit in and get a date, and the green text was chosen specifically to elicit an "eww" response. Most of those teens will likely will continue to use iPhones as adults because it's what they know.

I'd be ok with everybody adopting Signal protocol but I can safetly say no government anywhere would "allow" that

1. EU passes the chat interop legislation.
2. Apple is forced to do RCS.
3. ???
4. Corpos that shout now declare victory.

First privacy, then USB, now RCS.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Samsung has released a new video in support of Google’s #GetTheMessage campaign which calls for Apple to adopt RCS or “Rich Communication Services,” the cross-platform protocol pitched as a successor to SMS that adopts many of the features found in modern messaging apps... like Apple’s own iMessage.

The video, titled “Green bubbles and blue bubbles want to be together,” shows a Romeo and Juliet-style conversation between two users who want to be together, but who are kept apart by one of their “parents.”

The “bubbles,” of course, are a reference to Apple’s iMessage interface which shows feature-rich blue bubbles for messages sent between Apple users, and discordant green SMS bubbles with reduced functionality when Android users participate in the chat.

This two-class system is especially frustrating in countries like the US where about half the population is using an iPhone and the other half is running Android on a Samsung device.

Apple, of course, has every incentive keep the status quo as a form of ecosystem lock-in, but it might be forced to open up its messaging service as a result of the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA).

Regulators are currently investigating whether iMessage meets the bar to be considered a “core platform service” under the rules, which would compel Apple to offer interoperability with other messaging services.

The original article contains 232 words, the summary contains 218 words. Saved 6%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Apple will never listen, but maybe the EU could decide it's important enough issue for them to force it. It's starting to feel like we should just go to them, first. I'd like to imagine we have another candidate problem for regulation enforced fixing, with Mac laptops' long-standing displayport multistream problem. Macs will only mirror and never extend to an nth monitor over displayport splitting ... but the availability of thunderbolt adapters as a workaround takes some of the "oomph" out of that argument. That one's been around like ten or more years.

The other issue alluded to by another commenter, though, is that rcs is not low-level in Android os quite like SMS is. Like the API to get the information into other competing apps is not there, so it seems a little bit hypocritical.

Signal is the way to go. No need to expose metadata to your mobile carrier via RCS. Also, currently you need Google's proprietary garbage message app to make use of RCS. There's litterally no reason to do this.

Satan and the Devil call Lucifier.

This public shaming bullshit reminds me of Epic's Fortnite debacle and it's not a good look, especially from Samsung who usually mocks Apple on Monday and is copying them by Friday (see "no CD drives in laptops" or "no headphone jack" or "no removable batteries in the phone"). I know they're completely different issues but whining is whining.

I haven't sent an SMS since like 2013 or something like that. Couldn't care less about this blue green controversy, my use of SMS is receiving 2fa codes and spam.

Just download Signal. Cross platform, verifably E2E, and verifiably no data collected by Open Whisper (as per their submission in a lawsuit). Also, one of the authors/architects of Signal occasionally trolls the companies that provide mobile spyware.

I think this issue is mostly a USA one, considering that most communications there have caps (data, phone time, SMS etc.) Paradoxically, the market there doesn't work very well and prices are relatively high. Big corporations take advantage of it to lock people to their ecosystems. There is a high probability that this issue, will be regulated by the EU, since US policy makers are unable to solve much more important problems. For them this is not an issue. The market has solved it.

RCS needs to happen, I'm so sick of Whatsapp.

RCS dates to 2008 and Appul didn't support it. Now we know that Appul is stuck in 2007 or earlier.

Everyone (in America) wants them to be together

Rest of the world already moved on to better services.

"What did the EU ever do for us?" in the monthy python mood. After usb c, apple is getting its proprietary model challenged again. When will Apple understand that in the long run it hinders innovation? And that openness and standardisation is a catalyst for it. RCS might not be the interoperable solution the EU pushes though. Anyway that's the future of not using standards : https://lemmy.nz/post/2316522

My understanding with RCS is that similar to SMS it uses the infrastructure of your phone carrier. First question: Do all carriers support this? Second question: Is there anything that prevents carriers from eventually monetizing this? At least with some sort of roaming trap when you are abroad...

My big question is: Why does Apple need to adopt it in the first place?

Answer is: closed nature of system they created and closed (yes) nature of RCS ecosystem.

We should adopt user-friendly democratic operating systems and chat protocols instead.

Why doesn't a third party just come up with a standard

I use SMS mostly. From time to time Google asks if I want to activate RCS and presents a policy along with it, which I decline. Does it pass through their servers? If it does, that's gonna be a big no.

Matrix with bridges and bots all the way.

Whole situation reminds me of another one. When Google created their services to be unavailabe to install without root access, while Huawei locked their devices so device owner have no root access that Huawei has remotely.

Then people started blaming regulators for inability to have Play Store on Huawei branded phone, not questioning why blessing from device vendor to install an app is required in the first place.

As an iPhone user, I agree with this message. Group chat's with Android users currently just ran in Telegram or Discord.

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Google and Samsung should bribe regulators to make it happen. Apple will never changed unless they are forced to and the only way that happens is shoving money in corrupt assholes pockets.

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My only issue with RCS is that it requires that either LTE or wifi be on. I personally keep those off unless I want to actively use the internet. Not a big deal, minor annoyance though.

Does it matter if Apple starts supporting RCS? If they start supporting it, they'll still treat it like SMS - green bubbles and all.

Stop trying to make fetch happen.

Apple users are absolute shitheels. And that's why I'll continue releasing bugs I find into the wild.

Yawn.

I think we should get rid of all SMS/phone services and just use data.

Sorry, this just reads to me as the little kid being angry he can’t join the bigger kids. I really believe that were the shoe and the other foot and were it Google with iMessage, they wouldn’t be so keen to let Apple use it.

itoddlers btfo

iMessage works.

Who has even heard of RCS outside of tech folk?