Of course it’s a whimper, Timmy wants you to buy your mom an iPhone to chat.
That’s it, for Apple the mere mention is already too much. Why would anyone want compatibility if they also just could buy an Apple product?
Also the reason why ipads and Vision don’t support multiple users: not only should you buy an Apple product, but so do your partner, parents, kids, etc.
IIRC, it’s controlled by the carrier and not encrypted. If that’s the case, it’s bad. We’ve been moving away from carriers and internet providers, and got some privacy back by various means. Why would be roll that back?
Because everyone is too distracted by “Apple bad” to realise how truly awful RCS is.
No, but that doesn’t make it good.
The whole world except a minority moved away from SMS a long time ago.
This makes no sense. Apple is bad, and also I want encrypted messaging. It’s called Signal. It’s free for iOS and Android both.
Except RCS isn’t awful at all. It’s also end to end encrypted on androids. If Apple’s participation isn’t encrypted, that’s on Apple.
Only Google’s proprietary extension has encryption. The actual industry standard specification of RCS has no encryption defined at all.
Edit: It turns out Apple have refused to use Google’s proprietary encryption implementation and are instead working with GSMA to update the RCS Universal Profile specification to finally have encryption defined and standardised so that any RCS client can handle encrypted payloads (whereas only Google Messages today can do encrypted RCS and requires other users to be exclusively using Google Messages otherwise messages are sent unencrypted).
Doesn’t rcs depend on having mobile data or internet access on? If I understand it right it is strictly worse than sms.
Many people just have data off most of the time and sending messages with the system app assumes things are delivered immediately and everyone easily receives them. If you forget your data is off or don’t have internet for a while then you end up assuming people received stuff when they didn’t.
All phone isps have basically unlimited sms for free when data is paid in huge amounts of gold.
Sms > Rcs
RCS was designed to be implemented by the carriers, but all the carriers tried it, failed to gain any traction, and dropped support again, so now the only server is the Google one which is used automatically by the Google messaging app (which, to their credit, does support encryption, through a proprietary extension which they are now allowing Apple to use as well)
What android application supports RCS except Google Messages? So, for me it is not about “allowing iOS users communicate with Android users”, but about allowing communications between iMessage users and Google Messages users.
Bingo. RCS is yet another proprietary protocol, one controlled by Google (GSMA who originally designed it have practically forgotten about it for a decade) and without an open specification. RCS also doesn’t have a standardised approach to encryption as it’s designed for lawful interception.
So unless Apple have licensed Google’s implementation and extended version of RCS, this will be a shitty, insecure way to communicate between the Apple Messages and Google Messages apps and nothing more.
Google did an impressive job applying pressure and suggesting RCS was a perfect solution when in fact it’s just putting more control in Google’s hands. RCS is not an open “industry” standard. You nor I as individuals can implement it without paying license fees to see the specification and fees to have our implementations tested and accredited.
And Google have extended GSMA’s RCS with their own features (such as encryption) which is not part of the official standard and they haven’t made open either.
If Apple had been pressuring Google to implement the iMessage protocol or whatever, we’d have been up in arms (and rightfully so).
But instead of us all collectively hounding Apple and Google to ditch proprietary protocols and move to open ones such as Matrix, Signal, XMPP, etc (ones where we could all implement, use open source software clients, etc) we’ve got this shit:
Proprietary, insecure, non-private communication protocols baked into the heart of hundreds of millions of devices that everyone is now going to use by default instead of switching to something safer, private, public, open, auditable, etc etc.
If Apple had been pressuring Google to implement the iMessage protocol
Lololol
Yes and if christians had been pressuring congregations to worship Satan that woulda been super upsetting too.
Edit: funny so many people are mad when you point out how absurd an argument is when it posits that a company might do the polar opposite of everything they stand for
Nobody said Apple would do that. I don’t know where you got that from.
They said that if Apple were to use their clout to pressure others into using an Apple-controlled ecosystem, people would be angry about it.
Yet, because it’s Google not Apple, people are celebrating Google’s RCS as a good thing and them being the good guys.
Samsung messages was using RCS since 2012… Years before Google messages adopted it.
There are others out there that use it but call it by different names like “advanced messaging”, “SMS+” etc
Google was the first to add e2e encryption and push it hard though, but if you send a RCS message from Google messages to Samsungs messages app, it won’t have e2e, and most likely will be the same with messaging Apple.
But given how much Apple have fought to make it hard (or at least inconvenient) to message between them, and shut down any apps that made messaging between Apple and Android better, this is a big step for Apple
I find it funny how transparent everyone’s pro apple bias is in threads like this. I’m proud to say fuck apple every chance I get because they say fuck users every chance they get. And yes I know because I have them probably $8000 over the course of 10 years or so. I was all in until the iPhone came out and they returned to the “proprietary is the business model” Apple roots.
They don’t even try to embrace standards except in cases where it makes them money. Their entire mo is to erase the existence of standards if a buck can be made off of it. Apple being such anti consumer monopolistic pieces of shit being uncommonly recognized is pathetic and sad, and the perfect example of corporations being a negative influence on society.
There probably are people who died because they couldn’t charge their phone and couldn’t call an ambulance. And no I don’t care about Apple’s security theater or other talking points. All of it is bullshit
RCS is a proprietary standard, but it is not owned or controlled by Google. They just happen to be one of the first major corporations to embrace and implement the standard.
A bunch of carriers implemented it originally, but their implementations were all horribly broken, with messages between carriers usually not working, the carrier-installed messaging apps sucking, etc. Eventually they all dropped it and Google picked up the ashes and “fixed it” by making their server the only one instead of having per-carrier servers like SMS/MMS.
Why celebrate a feature that was added for non-customers? Why celebrate a feature they were forced to add rather than chose to? Don’t get me wrong, I think this should have been done long ago, but what’s in it for Apple to waste some of their precious announcement time? The fallback mode of iMessages doesn’t fall back as far? Yay?
What do you mean added for non customers? The entire purpose of not adding RCS or supporting iMessage for Android devices is to create a worse experience for their customers if they interact with non-customers. Sure it likely drew more people to buy iPhones, but it’s also arguably pretty awful for any society that plays apple’s game rather than just downloading a cross platform app.
Or it’s great for society because they support text for every phone, even feature phones (do those still exist?) and it’s a good business choice for Apple to support more features for their paying customers
The detriment to society came when the standard for text messaging between all phones was updated to support more features and a major manufacturer intentionally didn’t update to drive sales. The US used to heavily punish that sort of behaviour, but in this case it took EU Chinese action to reign in a US company.
Samsung, Google, Sony, and a million other manufacturers could have implemented their own messaging system, but instead they chose to facilitate the use of devices however customers want without punishing them based on the personal preferences of their friends. In some circles people may even choose not to communicate with people who don’t have iPhones or exclude them from group chats which is bad in just about any way you spin it.
Why does it bother you, the presentation is made for investors. Investors want to know if Apple will still be able to compete in the European market and that’s all they really had to show.
The WWDC keynote isn’t an investors meeting, it’s for Apple to talk about their exciting new features that are coming and to prepare developers for what their sessions are going to be about. The announcement was made with little fanfare because it was like a “FYI, your communication with Android devices will be slightly better for them now”
It was originally for developers and press but it’s mostly for investors and press now. They practically never talk about APIs and tooling anymore.
The place users are expected to learn about the products are in ads, on the website, their favorite news outlet, or the apple store. No regular customer even bothers sitting through a 3 hour presentation.
