If the default chat app is featureful and universally supported, people tend not to stray toward non-default alternatives unless they offer meaningful benefits. Sure, this ship has in many ways already sailed, since those alternative apps have a lot of mindshare and network effects.
But if Apple added RCS to its default messaging app (or if Google were permitted to add iMessage support to its default messaging app), I would ditch everything else and just message everyone (including groups) using the default Android Messages app, relying on it to select the best non-SMS/non-MMS contact method for everyone, regardless of platform.
Sure, it would take a little more work to move messaging groups over, but the cool thing is that I could just do it myself, and not wait for my friends to download yet another messaging app. This is the problem I ran into when I wanted to get friends off of WhatsApp; I had to convince people to install something else, and not everyone felt like doing it. But everyone already has the default messaging app installed, so that problem just goes away.
> While it’s all sweetness and light that Google got into bed with the phone carriers to develop this new “standard” tied to a phone number subscription that brings along all the retrograde privacy nightmares of Big Telecom since the bell system broke up.
Just wanted to call this out as FUD. RCS existed as a standard long before Google was involved (nearly a decade?). I too don't love that it's tied to a phone number, but options for doing this well are limited, and building a second, parallel identity system has its own issues. RCS at least can be federated, and it'd be possible to allow phone users to choose their own provider. And in practice, phone number portability means you aren't stuck with the crappy choice of ditching your "identity", or sticking with a phone provider you hate.
Not sure how iMessage or WhatsApp or Google Chat or Signal is any better, though, as they're all controlled by a single company that requires you to use their identity system.
Bottom line is iMessage works really well and people like it. Same with FB messenger and Whatsapp. You want to move friends to something else? There needs to be a selling point much larger than just security.
Right, I mean, that's exactly the point. I can't force someone else to install a messaging app I'd prefer to use. But if we had an actually-good, cross-platform messaging standard that was implemented in the default, stock messaging app of both Android and iOS, I would not have to depend on my friends caring or not. I could just use it, and know that they will receive the messages.
For billions of people that default is WhatsApp and installing it is as much a part of setting up your phone as is plugging in a SIM.
You missed out the bit where you sign your soul over to Mark Zuckerberg.
I can safely know that any phone made today will have SMS/MMS capability, and nothing about WhatsApp/WeChat/Messenger/Telegram/...etc
And really iMessage is not so much better than the cross-platform alternatives that it's worth leaving some friends out.
" In another exchange, Apple executives discussed in 2013 whether releasing a version of iMessage for Android would make it easier to switch phone brands. iMessage is still exclusive to Apple products.
“I am concerned that the iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove and obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones,” Craig Federighi, Apple software senior vice president, wrote in 2013."
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/03/epic-games-v-apple-trial-app...
I'm on several text chains with a mix of iOS and Android users. It works fine.
1. No threading is supported. If you reply, it duplicates the message being replied to.
2. “Tapbacks” (reactions) duplicate the message being reacted to with “so-and-so likes message … message”
3. Photos are reduced to a size that fits in MMS (very low quality)
4. Videos look like postage stamps
5. The chat cannot be renamed or have a photo added
6. Members cannot be added or removed without starting a new group (conversation)
7. No message effects
There may be others, but this is off the top of my head.
> 1. No threading is supported. If you reply, it duplicates the message being replied to.
Threading (using "Reply") is not supported in mixed iMessage/SMS/MMS text chains. (I'm using iOS 16, so this may have been (unwisely) supported in earlier Message versions.)
> 2. “Tapbacks” (reactions) duplicate the message being reacted to with “so-and-so likes message … message”
You can now see iPhone tapbacks on Android phones in Google Messages. I'm not sure if it's on defaultly yet. https://www.macworld.com/article/610908/google-messages-andr...
The other things you list are limitations and side-effects of the standards used. They're valid, but I consider the experience "fine" without them. If the groups I text with cared about these we would probably use WhatsApp since everyone has that. Signal would be my preference, but it's hard to change people's habits.
I think the point I want to stress is that when everyone uses iMessage, it’s as easy as texting, but just about as good as WhatsApp/etc. from a feature/user experience point of view.
Agree that we can be friends. Hopefully my comment wasn’t seen as adversarial. I just get annoyed when I see the green text bubbles, because people try to use iMessage features and it’s just bad. Non-techies don’t realize it’s different because it’s the same app, but then wonder why photos aren’t high resolution, or things don’t work as expected.
I didn't realise it was still used in the US though.
MMS definitely doesn't work on my phone, though I'm not sure if this is a provisioning/settings thing or that the provider has abandoned it. I never really looked into it as I've never needed it. I just tested it once to see if it worked.
Okay, so let's say Apple implements RCS support. Should they support the version of RCS that the carriers want? The version Google implemented? Are they now going to be required to implement support for proprietary Google extensions? Will they have to run their own RCS servers because carriers don't support this version of RCS?
RCS is a fragmented mess. It's dead in the water. This noise is just Google flailing about after having binned yet another one of their messaging platforms. Personally I don't care what Apple does here. I still want SMS support for when I'm in an area with little/no data coverage and I'm still going to treat RCS with the same disdain I'd treat any unencrypted messaging platform.
They already have that, with SMS. Perhaps you only exchange messages with people in rich countries so don’t notice what is most commonly implemented by carriers?
If the issue is interoperability with Android users, fine. Google had successful messaging apps on iOS (I used a few) and they destroyed them through their own mismanagement. RCS doesn't solve that in the slightest.
> This... isn't really hard?
If you want E2EE the demand is now that Apple spin up its own Google-RCS servers and/or rely on Google's infrastructure. If you want Apple to rely on the carriers you don't get E2EE. Rather than work with the carriers Google fragmented RCS making implementation that much more difficult.
But either option is strictly better than the existing mess.
It's easy to say that if Apple bent to the will of the carriers the iPhone would never have been as good as it is. But look at RCS, Google had to stand up their own infrastructure because the carriers weren't cutting it.
It's not that RCS is not the right product it's that RCS is the wrong approach entirely. Even in the United States Android is wildly popular. They've had every opportunity to create a wildly popular messaging platform and have failed. Google killed their own products as a result of their internal culture. This isn't Netscape vs IE again, it's more like Mosaic vs Gopher (or AOL vs Netscape if you like).
I was going to write "as much as I'd like to see non-Apple devices brought into the iMessage fold" but then I realized that's not true. I don't care because I'd just use Signal. In fact I still use Signal with some friends that have iPhones. RCS wouldn't change that, it'd either be one more shitty carrier product to avoid or one more shitty Google product that's going to get killed in a few months.
Like SMS?
From the Wikipedia page:
RCS Business Messaging (RBM) is the B2C (A2P in telecoms terminology) version of RCS.
*This is supposed to be an answer to third-party messaging apps (or OTTs) absorbing
mobile operators' messaging traffic and associated revenues*. While RCS is designed to
win back Person-to-Person (P2P) traffic, RBM is intended to retain and grow this A2P
traffic. … RBM is expected to attract marketing and customer service spend from
enterprises, thanks to improved customer engagement and interactive features that
facilitate new use cases. *This was the primary reason for the development of RCS by
the GSMA*.
My take is that carriers should be dumb pipes. Voice, SMS, and data routing and that's it. Part of the reason RCS is already fragmented is because the carriers are trying to monetize it, you can bet your ass they're going to continue to drag their feet with E2EE – which is why Google's stood up their own separate RCS infrastructure.
The problem with RCS as a solution is that you're either going to rely on the carriers or Google and Apple to host infrastructure. Requiring Apple to implement support for Google (hosted) products is ridiculous as Apple already lists Google chat apps in their app store. Requiring Apple to host their own servers to interoperate with Google's services is also ridiculous because again Apple already provides software to interoperate with Google's chat services.
Requiring Apple to support RCS so their users can leverage carrier hosted RCS is also ridiculous because that's a fancy way of saying Apple should be required to monetize their users for the carriers' benefit. Per the Wired article linked to MMS was created solely to extract money from their users (or as Wired put it to "collect a fee every time anyone snaps a photo"). I'm sure most folks who are old enough remember when SMS (which literally consumes no additional bandwidth) was a paid feature, does everyone remember when MMS cost even more than a plain SMS?
RCS may not be a cash grab by Google, but they certainly haven't had any luck in getting the carriers to implement customer friendly features. Another lowest common denominator "standard" like RCS isn't an improvement at all, especially not in the face of the freely available, cross platform messaging apps.
What does RCS theoretically bring to the group chat table?
File transfers? Google's gonna mine them or carriers will charge exorbitant storage/transfer/viewing fees.
E2EE? Carriers don't, Google does.
Tapback? Meh.
Typing indicators? Really?
International communication? You're gonna pay…
Interoperability.
Interoperability
https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/04/google-disables-rcs-ads-in...
Making people switch is possible (use Telegram to chat with me), making a group switch is impossible as there is always at least one person that doesn't want to install a new app or can't (phones with tiny storage.) Anything else is irrilevant in my country. There are probably some friends of mine using iMessage when chatting with somebody they know to have an iPhone. They still to have to use WhatsApp to chat with everybody else.
(Beyond that, I've found the usability of Matrix on both desktop and mobile to be atrocious.)
And if we want to be technical XMPP was before that and it was federated by some large networks, however briefly.
> It however turned out that although the content of the message is encrypted, there is still a lot of user identifiable data that is not encrypted and can be seen by potential attackers.[0]
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266628172...
For better or worse, much of the fediverse is made up of small enclaves of hyper-paranoid tech weirdos who have often reinvented the wheel over and over, each in their own little group, which is a big problem for the casual person who wants to toss a server on a home server for friends and family.
And I say this as one of these hyper-paranoid tech weirdos. The network's growth is immensely stifled by the fact that people aren't keen on sharing, or building user friendly tools for the normies.
Is there a way to make an account with Apple that isn't tied to a mobile phone number? If so, I've never been able to find it.
Has Apple fixed the bug where it wasn't relinquishing your phone number and blackholing all iMessages which were supposed to be downgraded to SMS instead?
That said, I don't believe you need to use that phone number for messaging – an email address is used as the contact information when messaging with iMessage. This is especially important for iPads/iPod Touches and Macs, which most don't have a cell phone number.
They fully control those app's access to their store; Apple has full say over which communication apps you install on your iPhone, full-stop.
There are many reasons many IT folks actually prefer an iPhone over Android. The two biggest ones are privacy and security. Google, thus far, takes neither seriously. Google routinely sells your data (including location data, active timestamps for all apps, what you search for, the list goes on), and it routinely has malware show up on the play store. If Google could fix those issues and stop also murdering their various applications every year, maybe they'd be able to compete.
While it may sound like I have a hard-on for Apple products, I really do love Android, I just hate Google.
I've been downvoted to hell for it before, but I'll add mine to this list because I don't _think_ it's all that uncommon either: I don't want another PC to administer and support.
I've had a lot of Android phones over the years (started with the ADP1!). Taking my last one as an example--it stopped receiving updates way too soon. Once apps started breaking, I ended up updating it by putting LineageOS on it. But then my camera never worked right again because apparently there's a driver issue. One time I updated and my microphone stopped working in phone calls so I had to wipe the thing and install an older OS on it...
You know what that sounds like to me these days? _Work_. That's literally the same sort of stuff I'm doing all friggin' day. Between work and my kid I'm lucky if I've got a couple hours a day to portion out to chores around the acreage and maybe whatever I could do ostensibly for fun. The last thing I want is to be obligated to work more because my damn phone is being a PC and doing PC things.
The fact that it's not customizable, not open, and just generally an appliance _is a feature to me_. My five year old phone is still receiving regular updates. I install them, it keeps working. I can't mess with it (and and up breaking things) even if I want to. I don't have to think about how I want the phone to work because it just works the Apple way and if I don't like it I can just get a different phone. If anything ever does go wrong, I don't need to fix it because I _can't_, reimage the phone if that doesn't work then well you're screwed.
Basically, I treat it the same way I do a toaster. It does what it does, there's a single big knob that makes my options clear. If that knob can't make it do what I want then I either learn to live with it or find another toaster. It's never gonna cook a steak for me, and that's fine. I'd rather not have steak or use another device to cook my steak than shun the toaster and try and pan-fry myself toast every morning.
I pay a premium to get an appliance instead of a PC because I _want_ an appliance. I'm happy I can outsource all the decisions and work and keep the brain space free. Sorry if I'm contributing to the downfall of society and freedom or whatever, but I just don't have the time to do anything else anymore.
Part of my original comment:
> I don't have to think about how I want the phone to work because it just works the Apple way and if I don't like it I can just get a different phone.
That's a feature to me. I don't spend any brainspace when I'm using my phone on thinking about things that annoy me or things that could be better. Launcher sucks? Does it suck bad enough to make me switch platforms? No? Then it's not worth worrying about any further and so I won't.
When I used Android, knowing I _could_ fix those annoyances meant I _did_ fix those annoyances. That's just not something important for me to be spending my time on, but I know I will if put in that situation.
Perhaps not in your country, but they've certainly done it before - censoring Telegram in both Russia[0] and Iran[1], for example.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/technology/telegram-apple... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/01/world/middleeast/iran-tel...
It has been a bad thing for me because iOS decided to get me off Whtasapp and forced me using the much worse Apple message system without me having any say in it.
I have a SE and a relatively older iOS version on it, can't remember exactly which one. I don't have internet banking and don't have very much of a financial presence online, and, as such, I don't care that much about security on my phone (hence the older iOS version).
Some time ago I had checked the "offload apps"in case of full disk" option or something like that, with the implicit understanding, from my part, that I could "reload" any of those apps once I would have made enough space available (usually by deleting some older videos and photos). One of those offloaded apps was Whatsapp.
It turns out I cannot "reload" any of those offloaded apps if any one of them doesn't support my iOS version anymore. Whatsapp doesn't support my iOS version anymore, hence I cannot "reload" it, hence I cannot use it anymore. Trying to install the exact Whatsapp "version" that used to worked perfectly fine on my phone is, of course, impossible. This is very unsatisfactory for me.
And back to the subject at hand, of course that Apple can't hold a candle when it comes to more mature messaging systems like Whatsapp (I haven't used Telegram and Signal). The "upload photos" experience in iMessage is day and night worse and less intuitive compared to Whatsapp. I also don't know if iMessage has any builtin groups and, even if it were to have, it would be of no use to me because more than half of my friends and acquaintances don't own an iPhone so they can't use iMessage.
You can – unless the application publisher decides to disable this. It sounds like Facebook disabled your ability to install an older version of WhatsApp that supports the version of iOS you are running. All it would take for this to work for you is for somebody at Facebook to tick a single box that allows their users to do this.
Not sure how that helps users like me, but had you told me 20+ years ago that this was going to be “the state of the art” when it comes to app management (by two of the biggest tech companies in the world) I would have called you crazy. And I was a Windows 2000 user back in those days.
It’s also funny that, in a way, the WhatsApp app was the one that nuked itself. The “full storage” issue had been caused by some of my friends sending constant photos and videos of their cats (and one guinea pig) via WhatsApp, storage gets full, iOS decides to offload the WhatsApp app, I get left out of the app once I’m not allowed to “reload” it anymore. Again, crazy to think that this is the state of the art in app management.
"Want to sideload apps? No problem, just pay us $99/year for temporary installation privileges!"
"Want to sell your app? Here, just give us 30% of your proceeds."
"Running out of storage? Here's a red-dot notification in your Settings app begging you to pay for iCloud."
I don't think any of these companies will (or should) get out of this antitrust litigation unscathed. The amount of control all of these platform-holders exert is unreasonable, and unless the government steps in we're helpless to stop it.
I'd argue Google competes just fine. If you hate Google, then use AOSP or an AOSP-derived OS; there's not a drop of Google, Apple or anyone code out of the box. Of course, I'd wager that 'privacy and security' don't matter as much to IT folks as brand-loyalty or ease-of-use, so it's all a bit of a moot point in the end. Arguing that either of these OSes is more secure than the other is a bad comedy routine; they're both being spied on by PRISM, they're both vulnerable to NSO Pegasus.
Hmm, as I understand it:
"Timestamps for app usage": notarization checks happen the first time you start a new app, basically like OCSP to enable certificate revocation: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/gatekeeper-and-runt... I dislike online validation and would prefer a revocation list. I also dislike syspolicyd's perpetual, repeated, and CPU-hungry anti-malware scanning. Installing Xcode or enabling developer mode allows pointless online checks to be turned off for scripts in Terminal at least.
"tracks spotlight usage": Siri suggestions https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/siri-suggestions... I usually turn this off.
"Find My": a feature that allows you to go to icloud.com and locate your iPhone if it is lost, and also creates its own ad hoc network for finding iPhones. Probably that involves location information. I usually turn this off.
What I'd like to know is: Is there any evidence that Apple is retaining this information and using it for other purposes, for example to build user-specific profiles for advertising the way Google or Facebook might?
Sure; all sorts of data leaves your iPhone in the form of encrypted channels to Apple servers, whether you have telemetry/analytics enabled or not. When you fully power-down your iPhone with Find My disabled, your Baseband modem is still sending and receiving information from nearby cell towers. Apple has created conduits specifically for harvesting and retaining this data, they wouldn't collect it all if this wasn't the case.
Oh, and if you still don't believe me, you should look into some of the more recent PRISM revelations (eg. how iMessage and Find My can be used by law enforcement), or the ways that the CCP uses the data Apple collects for them. There is nothing besides marketing that suggests Apple has a commitment to privacy or security.
That is not what I hear from people who work there.
> you should look into some of the more recent PRISM revelations (eg. how iMessage and Find My can be used by law enforcement), or the ways that the CCP uses the data Apple collects for them
I'd be interested in references/citations if you have them.
It’s really oppressive that Apple doesn’t let you install WhatsApp, Secret, Telegram, FB Messenger or any other communications app beyond their own.
While it’s all sweetness and light that Google got into bed with the phone carriers to develop this new “standard” tied to a phone number subscription that brings along all the retrograde privacy nightmares of Big Telecom since the bell system broke up.
The points you want to raise are crucial, but this is far from the hill to die on.