I personally think the current situation with iMessage is garbage. Even if Apple doesn't care about Android users, they are hurting their own users: every time an iPhone user has to send a text to an Android user, they degrade the security and privacy of their own users.
(It's telling to see where Apple draws the line: being anti-competitive around messaging is more important to them than their customers' privacy and security.)
Even if Google had their shit together when it comes to messaging, there's always the "default install" problem: iMessage is on every iPhone, from the factory. That creates a barrier for any competitor to gain market share with an alternative messenger. Sure, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc. have been pretty successful, but they're not the default install. (Remember when Microsoft got in trouble in the 90s for bundling IE, at the expense of Netscape?)
As an Android user, all I really want is a secure way to communicate with others by default, without having to figure out which secure messaging app I have in common with each of my peers. Apple has made that impossible, and should be required to allow Google to integrate iMessage support into the stock Android Messages app. Or they should be required to support RCS (with E2E encryption compatible with Google's extension) on iPhones. I'll accept either option, though I'd probably prefer RCS rather than an Apple-proprietary protocol.
> "Even if Google could magically roll out RCS everywhere, it's a poor standard to build a messaging platform on because it is dependent on a carrier phone bill. It's anti-Internet and can't natively work on webpages, PCs, smartwatches, and tablets, because those things don't have SIM cards. The carriers designed RCS, so RCS puts your carrier bill at the center of your online identity, even when free identification methods like email exist and work on more devices. Google is just promoting carrier lock-in as a solution to Apple lock-in."
But, there is no "carrier lock-in" (at least not in the USA). In the USA, carriers are legally required to allow users to port numbers to and from any carrier thus creating competition rather than lock-in.
There's no carrier required at all with iMessage. With RCS you HAVE to have a carrier.
On the flip side, most people using RCS would otherwise be using an @gmail.com address as their identity if that was how it worked. I'd say that's probably better than the carrier owning the identity, but it's still not ideal.
There is a publicly-facing Google site to enter an RCS enabled cellphone number, in order to disable Chat features… including end-to-end encryption.[0] This feature should only be configurable on-device, ideally, or at least be behind a login and 2fa. It’s just there on a public site. This is basically asking for sim-swapping attacks. And you’d never notice, only wonder why your RCS e2e keeps turning itself off. I wonder which individuals and agencies may benefit from that…
Even with the Chat features enabled, RCS doesn’t not support e2e on group texts[1], unlike iMessage, which does[2]. Google is just playing dirty pool and calling Apple users bullies by proxy, and I’m calling them on it.
Edit: Apple has a similar site to disable iMessage. This setting should only be available on-device, or if it has to have an online workaround, behind a login with 2fa. If you no longer have access to your phone, you should have to contact Apple support or go to an Apple store. The status quo benefits bad actors and intelligence agencies more than it improves the experience for end users IMO.
[0] https://messages.google.com/disable-chat
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202724
[2] https://support.google.com/messages/answer/10262381?hl=en
You copied this one 4 times—that's egregious! No more, please.
This is _really_ misleadingly worded. The website asks for a confirmation code, which you presumably need access to the device in order to obtain, right?
Requiring users to visit an Apple store to leave Apple's messaging ecosystem doesn't seem like an ideal solution, to put it lightly.
I think the status quo is actually not terrible, and with a simple modification (making any externally-triggered deactivation very visible on the logged-out device) it could be secure as well as being usable.
Regardless, I don't see this as a big deal. The site will send a verification code to the phone before allowing anyone to disable it. If someone has cloned/swapped/stolen my SIM card and can intercept and use that verification code, then I have many many many more things to worry about before I worry about someone disabling RCS for my number.
But, as you point out in your edit, iMessage has the same issue. Potato, potahto.
I would guess that your devices will notify you if someone maliciously disables iMessage for you phone#, and maybe google does the same?
It's interesting that both sites are very similar. Maybe Google copied Apple's site.
So for me it seems like a far worse solution than the status quo.
Any other features that are missing or sub-par in the RCS vs. iMessage equation is IMO trivial compared to the harm we have now of the lack of interoperability.
That is by every definition worse than what we have today.
Look, I'm not asking for the perfect messaging system here. Because we're never going to get that. I just want something secure and private, and that works by default. Agreed that other client implementors don't have to support E2EE, but Google does, and Apple certainly would, and that covers enough cases right now to make me happy.
I'd grudgingly accept an iMessage app for Android, or (better) iMessage integration with the stock Android app. But I'd much prefer a standard that isn't controlled by a single company's goodwill... goodwill that they have already shown is in short supply.
And you want instead to move the world towards a single, insecure standard, dictated by carriers who have decades long history of (a) supplying data to governments, (b) selling data to random third parties, (c) intercepting messages for their own nefarious purposes e.g. advertising and (d) doing very little to secure and protect their platforms from abuse.
No thanks.
There already is a standard, one which Apple falls-back to when messaging Android: SMS.
The would-be-dystopia you describe well in your second paragraph is not a hypothetical: that is the world as it is today with SMS; Apple could change that by switching to RCS + encryption extension and protect their users' privacy, but they won't because they view it as a competitive wedge (we know this due to the Epic lawsuit, as mentioned in TFA)
This is a pretty literal description of how iMessage interfaces with non-iPhones today though, so not worse.
iMessage is tied to your Apple ID, not your phone number or IMEI.
Group RCS isn’t e2e, unlike iMessage. That’s the main point.
But security is besides the point: Google doesn't want RCS support for security, it wants people not to know they're communicating with a non-apple device because they're afraid of the peer pressure.
Given that android has a huge marketshare lead, and google definitely knows how to make chat apps, they just never made one and stuck with it. Instead they kept continuously shipping new, incompatible, disconnected, chat apps and services. Because of that no one really trusts Google when it says "use this chat app, this time we'll keep it around". Meanwhile a person with a first gen iPhone or iPad (or a Mac from that era) can still use iMessage to talk to someone using the latest generation software. I would guess there's a loss of feature set, but it should theoretically still work.
Google could have avoided this by not continuously releasing and killing chat services. If they’d stuck to one they would have a much bigger number of users - people complain about iOS, but lets be real: android is a much bigger market. Google allowing both the hardware and software to fragment in basic functionality is a questionable decision.
And now we are back to Google Chat again!
What you want is for everyone to support whatever messaging protocol Google is pushing today. There have been a lot over the years and it seems like RCS won’t be the last (it has its flaws — serious, fatal ones, IMO).
Nearly a decade and a dozen failed messaging products later, now they are shaming others for not being interoperable with their preferred spec?
I don't think that's the way the world is.
I'd prefer the opposite: an OS with _no_ messaging app, and let users pick their own (both for Android and iOS). Expecting OS vendors to ship one out of the box is asking for a new IE-like scenario where whatever big tech companies pick becomes the standard, no matter how good or bad it may be.
I'm not suggesting another competing platform. I'm suggesting an already-widely-deployed platform (RCS) that is standardized, has been around since 2008 or so (older than iMessage!), and is the actual real elevation of SMS, not an Apple-proprietary protocol.
> If iMessage was cross platform
It's not, and that's the problem! Making it cross-platform would at least partially solve the problem, though it does mean Yet Another Messaging App I have to install.
> If you want secure cross platform messaging, use any of the other platforms built around that feature.
That's a huge pain in the ass. Not all of my friends have Signal, and I'm tired of evangelizing. Not all of my friends have WhatsApp, and I'm not interested in evangelizing a Facebook property. I don't use Telegram, and very few of my friends do, and I'm also wary of evangelizing a messenger that is not secure by default, and that has what is IMO a sketchy, secretive history around its cryptography.
Looking through my Messages history, there are 27 people I communicated with over unencrypted SMS/MMS over the past month. Only one of those people has Signal (not sure why they SMS'd me, but that just further illustrates the problem of how it's difficult to remember to contact people using the "correct" means), and maybe 6 or 8 of them have WhatsApp (for whatever reason, they/I don't really use WhatsApp often).
Why is this so hard? Apple! If Apple supported RCS (with the E2EE extension), literally every single one of those 27 conversations would have been encrypted, without me (or, critically, the other party, whom I have no control over) having to do anything special. As much as I love blaming Google for many things, they cannot solve this, because iMessage is a closed protocol that they are not permitted to implement, and the messenger app that is in the default install (the iMessage-supporting Messages app on iOS, and the RCS-supporting Messages app on Android) has a huge easy-adoption advantage that third-party messengers will never be able to match.
You can argue a bunch of "shoulds" here, but I'm talking about what the reality actually is.
The RCS Universal Profile is the first standardized version by the GSMA and came out in late 2016.
Google's RCS usage has primarily been via Google's own hosted implementations because of poor carrier adoption. Verizon AFAIK is planning to have RCS deployed this year.
Also AFAICT the e2e extension is not a standard but is Google-specific and currently exclusive to their Messages app. It also has several inferior technological, privacy, and UX impacts to other systems (such as only working for 1-to-1 chat, or requiring out-of-band verification code comparisons to guarantee the encryption isn't compromised).
It also is not a protocol evolution of SMS - its similarity is mostly that it like SMS was standardized through the GSMA. I also do not believe that the GSMA mandates its usage "instead of" SMS - it is meant to sit alongside SMS.
> That's a huge pain in the ass. Not all of my friends have Signal, and I'm tired of evangelizing. Not all of my friends have WhatsApp, and I'm not interested in evangelizing a Facebook property.
There's zero chance that RCS will replace Signal or WhatsApp or Telegram. It also won't replace SMS, at least this decade. It's just going to be Yet Another Option.
They are likely using an Apple device, so they can't use Signal as the default SMS/messenger app and have to remember to use it for the right contracts.
Android allows you to choose the default messenger app, and setting up Signal this way gives you an experience very similar to the iMessage one on Apple devices - messages to non-Signal-using contacts go over SMS/MMS, messages to contacts with Signal go over the Signal protocol.
Signal supports SMS on Android because Android has API for apps to actually interact with the underlying phone SMS capability (because Android is a platform customized by OEMs).
Apple does not have public API to interact with the hardware to send/receive SMS, although there's no limitation on using SMS in other apps.
There are two messaging limitations in the platform:
1. The sms: url scheme can only go to the built-in app. Since this does not let you pre-compose messages, I've actually never seen it used in production.
2. The MFMessageComposeViewController is used to overlay iMessage with your application to send a chat message. Generally I've only seen this used in lousy applications (admittedly including Twitter and various Google applications in that list) - the modern approach is to use the Share and Action sheet functionality, which presents first and third party apps via equal heuristics.
There's no point in arguing about the technical aspect of this anyways. It's purely a social manipulation campaign by their marketing department, they as much as admit to it in their advertising.
Because it's the right thing to do. They are intentionally degrading the privacy and security of their own users every time an iPhone user opens the Messages app and sends a message to an Android user. They do this because they want a competitive edge, and value that over the privacy and security of their users. They're contributing to the problem of proliferation of various messaging apps, which makes it harder to contact people, and harder to evaluate what method of contact gives the most security and privacy.
I'm not claiming Google is any kind of saint here. They are the definition of message app proliferation (and message app graveyarding). But at least Google, with RCS, is finally trying to do messaging in a way that's open to interoperability.
I'm also not claiming that Apple "must" open things up. As you say, it's their prerogative not to. But I am also free to judge that decision as a net negative for society, and demonize them for it.
Your argument isn’t really very compelling to me, and as another poster mentioned, iMessage may be patent encumbered and not able to be interoperable or offered on other devices. What if Google is choosing not to license the relevant patents to score some points against Apple and take the heat off themselves, as they have potential antitrust cases pending due to their ad sales model.
To me, Google is the monopolist trying to force the issue in their favor. It seems like your argument is that users of Google products deserve the benefit of Apple services without being customers of Apple. Just like Google benefits from ad auctions on their ad sales channels even if they don’t ultimately serve the ads, as they have collaborated with Facebook to not outbid each other. The track record of Apple and Google suggests that while Apple has always been somewhat proprietary, and hasn’t ever suggested otherwise, Google presents itself as open while pulling shenanigans behind the scenes to their own benefit, and their openness is mostly marketing. The existence of projects to remove Google services and difficulty in rooting many Android phones further illustrates this point. If Google were open, we wouldn’t need Microsoft to implement running native Android apps on Windows 11. They’re trying to recreate what Apple already has with the macOS and iOS unified experience, and they’re further trying to erode any advantage Apple has in the market by conflating what kids do to each other with what Apple does in the market and for its users, who buy Apple products because they are Apple products and function the way they do, including iMessage.
I just don’t see how any of this calls for demonizing Apple. Any attempt at interoperability would reduce the security guarantees of iMessage, as they don’t have a Secure Enclave in the way that Apple devices do. Low end Android devices are not the target market for Apple products and services, and neither are high end ones. You say that interoperability would improve the security of messages sent from Apple devices to Google devices, but it’s also likely to lead to bugs and a degraded experience for users who rely on blue bubbles to know that their messages are secure and end-to-end encrypted, and on an app, service and protocol, that they know won’t just be canceled and forgotten about in a year or two.
iMessage on Android dilutes the value of the Apple brand and the Apple experience. You may not agree, and that’s okay. I won’t demonize you.
Are you sure you're not thinking of FaceTime? Apple was planning on opening it, but was forced to change plans due to patents.
People are advocating for the opposite. Make apple stop using their anti-competitive market to harm alternative messaging apps.
> If iMessage was cross platform, it’s just another messaging app.
No, it is just as good, and better if it is forced to be cross platform.
You lose nothing, and everyone else gains, when anti-competitive markets are made to support alternatives.
> If you want secure cross platform messaging
Or, instead of that, we could use anti-trust law, against Apple to force them to be less anti-competitive, and allow other people to integrate with it. Problem solved.
I love how it's such an anti-competitive market that in many countries Apple isn't even close to being a popular service. WhatsApp, WeChat, Kakao, Line etc dominate in non-Western countries.
Messaging is easily a more competitive market than search.
RCS wouldnt change that one bit.
About 20: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-...
Is it still a powerhouse if no one uses it?
The 'internet chat' they introduced a different service called 'Chat' which runs in some consumer version of Google Workspaces.
I also really hate XML based chat, but the OG standard failed because the federated clients had a poor required minimum standard for interoperability and other stacks E.G. Microsoft's whatever version of it ... I actually forget offhand but it was something anti-competitive that also broke how useful it was outside of their particular implementation.
We were also supposed to get chat with Google Allo but they practically killed it before launch.
> Before launch, Google touted strong privacy in the app, with particular emphasis on messages stored "transiently and in non-identifiable form". However, at launch, privacy was significantly rolled back, with Google keeping logs of messages indefinitely (or until the user deletes messages) in an effort to improve the app's "smart reply" feature.
I remember my Nexus 5 came with at least two Google messaging apps at the same time.
The problem isn't just churn, it's lack of focus. I wonder how many different teams have been tasked with solving messaging, some at the same time, over the years.
One of the apps they broke off, Allo, literally used phone numbers as IM identifiers but didn't support Google Voice integration and they simultaneously launched a second app, Duo, for video calls instead of just putting it in Allo. How could someone higher up not say "this is the dumbest thing ever, merge the teams or reassign one to something else"???
I was farther in the future of converged communication in 2015 than now.
I still have a soft spot for Google Talk, that was such a simple name.
Which is pretty ironic now that I think about it because were talking about apps they likely used internally for COMMUNICATION
Seriously! Executives at Google surely must be aware of the memes by now. Are they so delusional they don't believe them? They don't care? When they chat with each other, which app do they use? Steve Yegg's platform rant still rings true: Google's dogfood is all snouts and hooves.
They tried that. The person who was put in charge of the merged teams picked one and killed off all the other services without a migration path.
I'm pretty sure this is taught as a 200-level concept in business administration right?
Only after you manage to recite "short-term profit over long-term success" 500 times in an hour.
Consider Peter Thiel. Musk. Bezos. These people think honesty is a weakness.
In academia, you get kudos for starting something, while there are zero incentives for maintaining something - same at Google with just a tiny bit less hyperbole.
At a large company, you can coast like that playing politics for many years — in Google's case that's especially easy because Ad Words means they have little fear of running out of money and Gmail was big enough to ensure that any new messaging service which integrated with it would immediately “have” millions of users even if many of them had been trained not to use it by that point.
My previous employer was UPS, a top to bottom Microsoft shop, and they were in the process of switching from Skype for Business (Lync) to Microsoft Teams when I left. Even Microsoft has done a better job with their messaging option.
Around 2008, Microsoft had a huge advantage in messaging compared to whoever came next. MSN was widely used in much of the world, on every continent, and the product was far ahead of its time. Maybe not as dominant in the US, but the US has always been weird about messaging and still is. Video calls, group chats, chatbots for companies, they had everything. They were set up for success.
> In June 2009, Microsoft reported the service attracted over 330 million active users each month, placing it among the most widely used instant-messaging clients in the world
330 million, now that was a big number in 2009. Competition? Blackberry Messenger for a while, but that was never going to last with the lock-in. Facebook Messaging was getting popular but that too was (and is) very barebones.
What do they do with this golden egg? They kill it and force people over to.. Skype, an (especially at the time) poor piece of software with maybe 10% of the functionality that MSN had (which did audio/video calls just fine) and they wasted billions on acquiring. If they'd have kept developing it and made quality messaging apps for all mobile platforms, I don't see how Whatsapp would've stood a chance.
Google at least never was in that position. They were late to the game, only needing to start caring about messaging after buying Android and it becoming a success. Microsoft had 330 million people actively messaging in 2009! Did Hangouts even have 330 million active(!) users in 2020?
Teams is still stunningly poor. We use it at work and the Windows (hah, how's that for integration) version is so poor that a lot of us run it in the browser, where it runs marginally better. Images not loading, pasting a file or image not properly working, slow as molasses, far too limited settings to filter notifications.
I don’t have a choice anyway since my company disables IMAP/Exchange for security reasons.
Google Talk
Google Voice
Google Wave
Google Buzz
Google Hangouts
Allo / Duo
Hangouts Meet / Hangouts Chat
Google Meet / Google Chat
+----------+-------------+------------------------+-------------+
| | Audio Calls | Messaging | Video Calls |
+----------+-------------+------------------------+-------------+
| Consumer | Duo | Messages (SMS/RCS), | Duo |
| | | Hangouts | |
+----------+-------------+------------------------+-------------+
| Business | Voice | Chat (Formerly | Meet |
| | | Hangouts Chat), Voice | |
+----------+-------------+------------------------+-------------+
Hangouts is almost gone, starting a video call just makes a Meet and sends the link as a message, the messaging still works but has been folded into Chat (They interop for now at least.) so there's no reason to keep Hangouts on anymore really. Meet is for larger meetings, Duo is mostly for one-on-one calls but has group support now too. Chat is basically a Slack clone. Messages is Google's SMS/MMS/RCS app for Android and it requires an Android phone with an active phone plan but it has a web interface for composing messages on your computer. Voice does phone calls, voicemail, and SMS and MMS with a number from Google, and is separate from Messages. I don't think Voice can do RCS which is odd considering how their pushing it on Android.
As suggested by this crazy headline, a lot.
“Google to simplify messaging strategy, will support only five messaging apps”
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/google-promises-to-s...
The problem is that open standards just can't compete with closed ones when it comes to giving users what they want (for a nice discussion of this, see the classic https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/)
True though that open standards are slower and harder to work with because they involve too many people and too much discussion. Apple is almost exactly the opposite example of this, and clearly their approach works quite well most of the time.
The article answers that:
"Google's messaging history is one of constant product startups and shutdowns. Thanks to a lack of product focus or any kind of top-down mandate from Google's CEO, no division is really "in charge" of messaging. As a consequence, the company has released 13 half-hearted messaging products since iMessage launched in 2011."
I'll hazard a guess that most of those products were left to wither and die due to an inability to significantly advance Google's "eyeballs monetisation" strategy.
However, at some point there are executives deciding strategy, and almost by definition they are out of touch. From my observation, the most reliable strategy is to let a start-up with passion build something great that people want, and then buy that start-up. This is what companies older than Google have been doing for decades. (Google does it too, but they were more in-house-first in the past.)
Apple tends to have user data encrypted in their cloud and to encourage more on-device processing. They are more likely to support data sharing between people via exchanged cryptographic keys than have access within their cloud. Unfortunately, user-initiated sharing delegated access out is not a flow OAuth really supports.
Google's previous social network aspirations caused them to chain access to lots of data through user authorization to APIs. They use API access as one of the attractions to sites supporting "Sign in with Google". AFAIK even API which do not necessarily need any user delegated authorization (such as reading a publicly accessible google doc via API) still require a user authorization.
Apple's APIs typically are not about delegated access to user data, but about access to user's application data (e.g. CloudKit app data access via REST api).
Apple does have a OpenID Connect implementation for Sign In with Apple and have left the option open for it to also be used for OAuth delegated access. So far, there aren't any access token scopes or API publicly documented.
RCS isn't a replacement for Signal or iMessage, not really, but it's a hell of a lot better than the current least-common-denominator, cross-platform approach of SMS/MMS.
Apple, with its desire for vendor lock-in, has every incentive to keep the "least-common-denominator" messaging standard as crappy as possible, to make iMessage's own experience between Apple users more compelling. They have no incentive to improve this and of course will drag their feet as long as possible.
Whatever you think of Google, and whatever you think of Apple, I hope you can agree that the carriers dragging their feet on RCS does nobody any good. There's no reason that RCS cannot co-exist with iMessage on IOS, except that Apple wants you in its walled garden.
Especially being Apple, they would not pick an external pre-standard and run with it when they built their success on in-house design and control. It would also be a huge gamble to build around someone else's young standard.
Do you remember phones in 2011? The Android-based phones were wildly different from each other (often flawed in unique ways). There were still popular Nokia based phones. Apple almost certainly did not target "lock in" as their priority when building their phone software. They targeted "stuff we can control which won't blow up in ways we cannot understand or prevent".
(I do admit their focus shifted after Steve Jobs died, but that was later.)
But also realize the carriers were in heavy competition for decades. I've worked with/for telecom companies off and on for a very long time, and the only coordination really happens when one big company buys another and has to try to integrate things.
Messaging services are sticky and have network effect so there will typically be clear winners - within a particular geographic area or demographic. Other areas/demographics will have other winners.
So perhaps a huge number of American teens use iMessage, while people 30+ use Facebook Messenger. Perhaps a huge number of people in China use WeChat, while Japanese people use Line.
Google is really complaining that very few demographics, not even the masochists, are using Google's chat offerings anymore.
There is no lock-in for the consumer on Google products. If you have a Google device you can use whatever apps you want. If you use Google services you can use whatever apps or OS you want.
The problem is that Google has been too open. They could have made a Google messenging app the default a decade ago and forced all SMS on Android to go through that.
As it stands now, any messenging app can be the default on Android. Some OEMs roll their own, FB Messenger can be turned into default SMS app, etc...
At rough count, around a dozen in ~15 years.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/21/22538240/google-chat-allo...
many, but also, Gmail
How many messaging systems has Google had over the years?
Their shotgun approach works financially, but it means that only a few of their projects really stick (win). The rest just trundle along until they get discontinued.
The hypocricy is tiresome. When there's a regulation that threatens them, they make a lot of noise about "free market", and "let the market decide". But when the market decides against them, they want some government intervention.