Google is literally operating an RCS SaaS company for marketers and telcos, so I'd take any of their statements in support for RCS with a grain of salt: https://jibe.google.com/
SMS is certainly long overdue to be replaced, but I don't want it replaced with a Google service. Hopefully the iPhone adoption will be some incentive for carriers to implement RCS properly.
As antiquated as SMS is, at least all carriers support it, and people largely don't need to worry about their existing conversation threads being interrupted when they switch carriers.
I believe that that's not true for RCS at least for group conversations.
Apple and Google ARE NOT PEOPLE. They do NOT HAVE FEELINGS you need to defend. Jesus.
Being able to send a rich message from iPhone to Android and back (including location, pictures, videos) is really not something that will cause you pain and Apple won't lash out and punish you for it.
That's incorrect. Apple here refers to a group of people, not the fruit. Google here too refers to a group of people, not the software that provides search features.
> They do NOT HAVE FEELINGS you need to defend.
Their feelings need to be defended as much as any other person. Which, logically, is not at all, but as you are defending your own feelings here what is logical is already violated, so...
No, its not.
Its more like a grouping of a subset of the actions of a group of people in some contexts, and a shared subset of the interests of a different (narrower, but overlapping) group of people in others.
But its not generally simply a way of referencing a group of people.
No, that's exactly what I said it was not.
A subset of the actions of a group of people, or a subset of the shared interests of a group of people, is not a group of people.
A subset of the actions or interests, not a subset of the group of people (the latter would, indeed, be just a different group of people, but isn't what I said.)
> If people somehow magically disappeared, the corporate entity would disappear at the exact same time – it's the same thing.
No, its not the same thing.
If North America disappeared, all the piles of dog feces in North America would also disappear, but the piles of dog feces are not the same thing as North America.
Direction is the word you are struggling to find, but it is the direction of the group of people. You have not added anything drawing attention to this so-called subset. It changes nothing about the discussion. It's just silly wordplay to divert our attention from your grievous error at the onset.
# Chrome
## Better Browsing for Everyone
Web browsing changed the way we communicate, but it’s out of date. Today we want a web browser that lets us do things like watch videos, edit documents in real time, notify us of breaking news, or make video calls.
Google Chromium and V8 makes all this possible, and now the browser industry is coming together to bring it to users everywhere.
## The universal Web application
While Web applications were designed to move Web browsing beyond reading documents, different approaches made it difficult and costly for websites to bring it to users.
By aligning on the W3C's universal Web standards - with the Google Chrome client app - websites can now provide Web applications across the browser ecosystem.
Everyone can make his own app, it's just that he would need to develop a whole RCS-client for it to interact with (Google's or carriers') RCS-Servers as well. So what is missing is Google offering their RCS-client with open API's for other apps (than Google Messages) to use.
To be fair, maintaining interoperability of those apps with the underlying client would then be a huge endeavour, Google Messages itself is already updating quite frequently...
The carriers (full members of GSMA) came up with RCS as a replacement for SMS/MMS at a network level and then didn't have the appetite to implement it.
Instead, they either A) adopted Google’s Messages as is, B) adopted Google’s Messages in white label form, slapping their logo on it, or C) made “their own thing” running on Google’s Jibe servers.
With very few exceptions, it all goes through Google. And Google uses this to pretend that their proprietary iMessage competitor is “the” RCS standard.
The actual RCS standard is dead for all intents and purposes because nobody uses it like that, except for Apple in the short term.
Apple adopting RCS means that there is another player to balance this field. A much-needed player, and the only one that's relevant (other than maybe WeChat and WhatsApp)-
> With very few exceptions, it all goes through Google.
Yeah, because the mobile end-device for RCS is currently always an Android device. If there would be support from Apple, an RCS-server of Apple could handle the communication to Apple-Devices.
The idea of every carrier owning his own RCS-server was anyway already dead before the first client was released. The number of carriers never increased after the initial rollout of the major working-group members, simply because there is no way to charge for the service and monetization of such a small userbase with other services was not sustainable.
It's worth to put this into time-context here: When work on RCS (or "RCS-e") was initiated, WhatsApp was already well-established and leading the European market.
Clarification - many of the carriers are using Google-hosted RCS servers as well. I don't think Apple especially likes the idea of iPhone user metadata (and message contents) going through Google-hosted chat servers every time they message an Android user.
> If there would be support from Apple, an RCS-server of Apple could handle the communication to Apple-Devices.
The issue there is you need something that authoritatively resolves a phone number as being routable via a particular server, and (ideally) to a public key for encryption.
This is the hard problem for chat services - knowing how to route and how to protect data. If there is a problem, then you have some other party monitoring your communications or even manipulating them.
If the same phone number could be authoritative to either Google or Apple RCS servers, then some other component has to make that call.
Every time an iPhone user sends an SMS or MMS to an Android user, it ends up on an Android phone, which Google could snoop on if they so desired.
And, regardless, if Apple implements Google's E2EE extension to RCS, it doesn't really matter whose servers they go through.
Maybe that will change now that Apple is adding support.
RCS is still standardized and maintained by the GSMA
https://www.engadget.com/att-starts-using-googles-jibe-platf...
This is applicable ESPECIALLY to large-scale carriers of US, which are big enough to customize every spec and force their suppliers to adopt it.
The only reason why Google's RCS works better than any attempt before that, is that Google is forced to unify the implementation. It's not their spec, they are part of the RCS working-group like everyone else, but by stepping in they instantly reached a cross-carrier rollout-scale where they can't comply to every custom requirement of ATT, Verizon, Vodafone, T-Mobile unless they all agree to make it part of the standard.
Having beaten Apple with the RCS stick for the last year, Google might find themselves now getting beaten back.
The goal of a profit-seeking entity is to maximize profit. That is achieved by becoming a monopoly. Competition is just the consequence of multiple entities trying to become a monopoly - there can be only one. This is the motive part of market economy. The energy source.
Now, monopolies are obviously bad for society. Therefore, markets are regulated to prevent monopolies. This turns the market into an engine. You have constant inflow of upstarts dreaming of riches, fighting each other out to reach the throne of a monopolist, only to be denied it by regulation, and eventually become broken and/or pushed out by the younger followers.
Or, via another analogy: the market economy is designed like a donkey chasing a carrot on a stick attached to the animal, while standing on a treadmill. Being surprised that monopoly is the goal of companies is like being surprised the donkey would chase the carrot.
Markets are regulated to enable monopolies. Bell would have never become a monopoly if there wasn't the regulation involved in laying copper and Microsoft would have never become a monopoly if there wasn't intellectual property regulation.
For Microsoft: I think that's a weird argument. Plus I think there would have been lots of things pushing towards a single big player for desktop computing in the early-middle days (network effects).
Same goes for Microsoft. Everyone and their brother would have released their own 'Windows' if regulation weren't there to disallow it. Again, that regulation offered a moat which allowed them to establish their monopoly.
On the Ms point.. is your argument that we should have no intellectual property rights for software at all? It seems odd to single out only this example. I’m broadly not in favour of software patents but I’m not clear that they were relevant to MS success anyway. I think you need to make a clearer argument about what regulations we would have forgone for others to really evaluate your case.
Obviously not. That would require opinion, and sharing opinion is in bad faith. Discussion is merely for talking about how the world is. And as the way the world is, a monopoly needs some kind of moat to emerge. Intellectual property regulation exists to enable such moats.
> It seems odd to single out only this example.
Why? One example is all that is necessary to convey the idea.
But also, it is the only convicted monopolist in that respect that I could think off off the top of my head. Google was recently charged, but not yet convicted, so I could not include them. I am not about to suggest that other companies are monopolies based on my opinion. That, again, would be in bad faith. But, theoretically, the same could apply to other companies. It is not something that needs to be strictly limited to Microsoft.
Indeed. It's so obvious and apparent that even Adam Smith himself made this exact point.
Industries where direct competition is allowable do not suffer from these problems.
No, they suffer much worse. Haven't you noticed how all goods and services go to shit over the years? This is not an accident, this is competition optimizing out any quality it can get away with removing.
No. I can't think of anything I buy that I would want to go back in time with. The quality in my experience has only improved, often dramatically. Those who try to skimp on quality get destroyed by the competition. What are you referring to?
The only thing I can think of that you might be referring to – based on what I hear other say, not based on my own buying habits – is things like appliances where manufacturers have really dug deep into computerization so that they can enjoy the same legal moats other tech companies do. But what you are experiencing there is the lack of competition we spoke of earlier.
(Discontinuing their old magazine features, with nary a month to back up my purchased collection, as a one by one download was the latest thing).
will RCS still break most imessage group chat capabilities?
I dont really think “at least my videos will send at full resolution to android users” is really that much of a difference
multiple generations of people use phone chats for all the capabilities they offer, which is way more than higher resolution picture and video attachments alongside text
Where it belongs. Google's fork of the open RCS standard is closed source and proprietary.
> Google's version of RCS—the one promoted on the website with Google-exclusive features like optional encryption—is definitely proprietary, by the way. If this is supposed to be a standard, there's no way for a third-party to use Google's RCS APIs right now. Some messaging apps, like Beeper, have asked Google about integrating RCS and were told there's no public RCS API and no plans to build one.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/new-google-site-begs...
Google did, Apple will, what stops other companies from doing it aside from effort and money ?
> and there's barely any carrier adoption
Expecting carriers to do adopt new technologies is usually a losing bet.
The "monopoly" argument feels like vague hand waiving to me. It's probably a complex and costly situation, but nothing close to why we don't have different browser engines on iOS for instance.
But the point to me is that I don't care whether it's "bad faith" or not, just that (again, to me) it's actually the correct point of view. Messaging integration between iOS and Android, in the US at least, is not just fundamentally broken, but the presence of a single Android user in an iMessage group chat can break the experience for everyone (e.g. potato quality video), and if you are the "odd man out" on the Android people start resenting your presence in the chat (and, to be clear, I'm middle aged, not in middle school). For an example, see https://www.instagram.com/p/CwLKeGRLieb/
There is no reason for there to be such messaging incompatibility between iOS and Android. My feeling is that Apple knows the regulatory winds are shifting very much against anticompetitive behavior, and their iMessage incompatibility was just looking like the blatant protectionism that it is.
iMessage is and always was for iPhone users to communicate with other iPhone users. It will send messages over SMS as a fallback but it was only ever for use in communicating with other iOS devices in the same way iOS is only for Apple devices.
I see all arguments to force Apple to open up iMessage as punishing them for building a platform that people want that the majority of the US has bought into.
And android is bigger everywhere outside the US.
Also Europe has already solved this. If you want to talk to iPhone and android users in Europe you just use WhatsApp or another third-party service.
Why must Apple dilute the experience to communicate with folks not on its platform?
In electric car charging Tesla built out the super charger network investing billions in service of making their cars more useful. (iMessage is this to iPhone users.) there’s another standard out there or handfuls of other methods of charging cars but the market leader is the super charger network. And wouldn’t you know? Folks are adopting it because Tesla is licensing it but it was their choice.
To force Apple to open up iMessage as a protocol to other devices by fiat seems wholly totalitarian and invasive.
I see all arguments that Apple shouldn't be forced to open up iMessage (or implement RCS) as forcing me to have a worse phone experience because I didn't buy an iPhone from the company that said "if you want to sideload apps, buy an Android".
"Just use a third-party app" is not a solution for people who text with the normal messaging app, and I sure as hell would never beg them to migrate to Whatsapp of all things.
>To force Apple to open up iMessage as a protocol to other devices by fiat seems wholly totalitarian and invasive.
You have this backwards. The totalitarian and invasive part is when I have to beg Apple for permission to use software they wrote, to sell apps to people using devices they sold, etc. This bootlicker mentality of "it's Apple's devices and software" needs to die. Apple is the totalitarian, the EU is trying to stop tyranny.
In many places, most people wouldn't. But Europeans (and some others) seem eager to BCC all their texts to Mark Zuckerberg for some reason.
There is zero evidence that Facebook is engaging in passive mass surveillance of WhatsApp messages.
Because YOU don't want to adapt you're asking nay advocating the forceful opening up of another platform to do it for you. That's just lazy.
Think about it like this:
You create a super successful bit of software -- let's call it an operating system -- that runs on a very popular and well designed piece of hardware referred to as an internet phone -- let's call it an iPhone. :-)
It takes off. Market share is just above 50% in the country of it's birth. w00t.
Now folks that haven't licensed your software by buying the hardware you built it for are out with pitch forks to force you to support other internet connected phones when you already do support them just not in the same way. Messages are still able to be sent to these devices but they don't share the same richness.
Why would anyone advocate that something a person with autonomy or a company for that matter be forced by fiat to open up a messaging system or any other bit of kit because the mob wants them to?
People are just frustrated and entitled. This isn't open source software. You can't just go and fork it. There are entire companies that have cropped up that are trying to bridge this blue bubble green bubble divide and that's the solution to take. Until, and unless Apple caves and opens up iMessage it seems wholly un-American to force them to do so when there are alternatives be it something like WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, normal SMS and the green bubbles that come with it or moving to an iPhone. I'll never buy the "waaa because I use the built-in app on my Android phone and I want to have blue bubbles when I talk to my friends on iPhones ... waaaaaa!"
There are solutions, I've already outlined them. Pick one.
> Apple is the totalitarian, the EU is trying to stop tyranny.
The EU tends to do this. A successful platform is created and to give shortcuts to other companies to build on that success they force that platform to open to competitors. This is exactly why the EU doesn't have companies that innovate like the US does.
Yes, it's called creating standards and fostering free market competition. This has happened REPETEDLY and time and time again.
Pretty much every standard, cable and tech you're using that works on multiple manufacturers was "something a company built by fiat".
If I'm facetious as you - I'm surprised just how deep corporate bootlicking goes here that outright hurts your ability to vote with the wallet and make modern market capitalism work for you as a user.
Free markets are I create something awesome and profit from it not am then forced to allow you and everyone else to build off of my hard work unless I choose to or am forced to.
If Apple was approached by governments or other institutions to use iMessage as the basis of some standard which iirc hasn't been done that'd be one thing. What we do know is that RCS is inferior to iMessage in many ways.
So Apple will adopt standards compliant RCS but it likely won't be the same and lazy Android users who want to stick to the stock app will get to enjoy the spoils of a half-baked solution.
My issue is with this mob mentality of forcing the hand by fiat, lawsuit, or otherwise to coerce a company to open up a tech/product/platform when they built it with no intentions of opening it -- it's proprietary by design.
The free-market works when someone else builds something -- in this case a better phone experience -- that would cause folks to move to that and abandon iMessage. But no -- let's keep our pitchforks and keep insisting some wierd collective ownership bias that means you or I or anyone else has some say over the property and tech of another person or company. Because, sure that makes sense.
The free market fails when the cost for anyone else to enter the market is completely out of reach to anyone else.
But there's no reason to move. Your messages still get to iPhone users via SMS with a different color. What's the beef with the blue v. green anyway? The messages get there. Don't like it? There's plenty of iPhones or other iOS devices that can be had for cheap. They'll last a long time, they'll get tons of updates, they're secure. What's not to love?
Or there are third-party services that you can pay for like Beeper that will act as a bridge.
And if they hadn't done so by choice, they should absolutely have been required to open up that network to all cars.
Can you imagine a world (for ICE cars) where you'd have to find a car-manufacturer-specific gas station to refuel? That's ridiculous.
I think that point would be stronger if anyone else was open. Google used to run an open messaging service but shut it down as part of their failed attempt to compete with Facebook, and their current professed love of open RCS hasn’t extended to allowing anyone else to use their implementation. Android developers aren’t given access the way they were to SMS, and nobody except Samsung is allowed to use their proprietary E2EE servers.
I think this is basically Apple calling their bluff and telling them that they need to actually release their proprietary work as open standards. I’m sure that will be their argument to regulators.
Google wanted the carriers to all host their own servers. They refused, so Google took it on. Agreed that there are going to be interop issues with Google's RCS implementation, but let's not place all the blame at Google's feet, here.
> I think this is basically Apple calling their bluff and telling them that they need to actually release their proprietary work as open standards. I’m sure that will be their argument to regulators.
Which would be a great outcome!
The idea was for every carrier to be the gatekeeper of his subscribers, so no one was giving up anything and everyone wins. The strongest carriers in the working group rolled out their own servers in the initial stage of development, a total of five only IIRC. No one else followed because there was no visibility on return of investment.
At that time, major device vendors maintained their own SMS-app to navigate all the custom requirements of the carriers in the world. Google aimed to standardise the client and include all these carrier-specific customizations, but RCS was about to fragment this space even further, as every vendor was expected to integrate his own client.
Google then stepped in in 2015 by acquiring Jibe, a main supplier of RCS servers and the developer of a vendor-agnostic RCS-client. At this point only ONE carrier still considered to buy a own server.
Google continues maintaining the existing servers and also offers to host RCS as a service for carriers. Overall goal was to defragment both the server and the client area, as this was the only way to scale.
It's time for others to step in and balance the playing field again, Apple is the best candidate for that.
I have no love for the carriers but to me open would sound like things Google could do unilaterally:
* Android developers can now use the RCS APIs, not just our own app
* Our extensions are released as an open standard waiving any IP litigation except in self-defense
* Our E2EE key server is open to users of other apps and/or supports this federation protocol
It's funny to read this criticism, when comments in another thread are criticizing Google for running an RCS implementation as a service for carriers.
RCS is an open standard, and Google does let others use it. However, other carriers didn't adopt it themselves, so Google set up a service that carriers can use and is running it themselves to ensure compatibility. There is no API for Android apps to use, yes, and that is a problem they should fix, but it's not exactly a self-serving decision, especially because it hampers Google's own products as well. The reason for the lack of the app API is likely because RCS hasn't been widely adopted enough to warrant it.
Android also has APIs to register another RCS client to the OS.
What's missing are open APIs for apps to control Google's RCS-client. Indeed this would be convenient, but considering the potential for misuse there, Google would probably need a separate certification process for each app, which is quite a scale for something that didn't scale yet...
A own RCS-client still requires accreditation to ensure interoperability with the RCS-service. API-access to Google's client would either require accreditation of the app using the client, or would need to be limited so dramatically that it's probably of no use...
Nah gov doesn't give a shit they just see the incapable outcome and the rest of Apple's behavior.
It is still such a laughable issue from the POV of any other country.. SMS is there for text-only, it’s a legacy tech that didn’t ever get popular in different places due to it having shit support for non-ascii letters (writing a single ü would almost halve the remaining chars I can write), and not having unlimited SMS sends, so internet-based messaging spread like wide-fire. iMessage is the latter, the normal SMS is not. But there are also Telegram, Whatsapp, Facebook, a million other solutions.
It’s a made-up issue.
My biggest pet peeve is when people have an issue that doesn't affect them so they need to declare it as "fake". Just because you don't feel the problem doesn't mean "it's a made up issue".
The following are simply facts:
1. In the US, among iPhone users, iMessage is by far the dominant messaging service.
2. Among certain socioeconomic groups in the US, iPhone is by far the dominant mobile phone. I have been in several friend groups where there was at most 1 other Android user.
3. In group chats, not only does the limited functionality for Android users make it harder to converse, but the presence of a single Android user can break the experience for everyone (I've had messages randomly not show up, abysmal video quality, etc.)
So while I would absolutely love it if other people would switch to Telegram or WhatsApp or whatever, you try telling a group of 10 people "Hey, can you all switch the messaging app you are familiar with and use all the time so I don't feel left out?" If you think that's viable you just don't understand human nature.
The other option is for Apple to simply make an Android version of iMessage (like all the other messaging apps you mentioned), but they don't seem too keen on that.
I do experience the human aspect, and have 4-5 different chat programs installed, which is not ideal, but it is just simply can’t be expected that everyone uses the same stuff. I just remember to use Telegram with friends X, Y and Signal with W.
[0] Google Fi integrates with Messages for Web to allow you to use your phone number even if your phone is damaged or destroyed. It's absolutely amazing. I've used this (back when it was Hangouts integration) to use my number on an iPod touch and it worked surprisingly well when I was waiting for a replacement on my Nexus 6P that I had shattered. I also have Messages for Web pinned to my iPad dock for similar reasons.
Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has an app called DND which lets you register your phone number to opt out of marketing and promotional SMSes. It works really well and in case someone sends you a promotional SMS despite opting out, you can report them to your SIM provider (or carrier) and they are legally required to take an action.
But as soon as RCS is enabled, you will magically start receiving a lot of spam messages with rich text and link previews. Unfortunately, the DND app cannot see or detect those messages which means you cannot report them.
That might be country dependent, in the UK the four largest networks do officially support RCS I believe (combined market share of around 85-90%).
Does this mean that now if you send a message to someone from an iPhone that doesn't go through iMessage, it will instead go through Google's servers? Sure the service will hopefully be better than SMS but at the cost of giving Google the keys to pretending they're a "standard."