Google is ramping up its efforts to replace SMS with RCS
wired.co.uk
wired.co.uk
Furthermore, the strategy of implementing messaging through carriers came after all of their repeated failures to convince the public to use their chat apps, and having the carriers push the feature instead removes user agency. It's a way to force us to message with Google after we've repeatedly rejected them.
As per usual, Google is claiming to develop something in the open as a standard, but it's designed chiefly to bring everything under their roof.
RCS is kinda like AMP for text messaging.
Everything I need to know about why I don't want RCS is contained in this simple statement.
Disagree. RCS is most definitely an open standard that Google has bought onto in the last few years. The standard itself is 20 years old at this point I think. The problem was that carriers could not agree on a set of features to implement, which made all of the various implementations non-compatible. Google bought Jibe that was working on a standard implementation that carriers could roll out. The biggest thing really that Google has been pushing for with the GSMA is the universal profile, which defined a set of features that all carriers would implement.
We are now at the spot where universal profile has mostly been agreed upon. Carriers can implement their own version, get a self-hosted version of Jibe, or let Google host the RCS system. The last option is the easiest for carriers to do, but obviously puts Google in the middle.
The nice thing about RCS is that it is a standard. Google could totally walk away from it, and all the carriers and phone makers could still use it. You can't say that about any other chat app out there (maybe matrix would be the only one).
Not exactly unlikely...
Which products that Google has given an SLA on have they dropped without transitioning users and against SLA? Not prototypes or random free experiments but actual products?
So we should adopt a "standard" which Google profits off of? More specifically we should rely on something for which Google's profits are the primary goal? No thanks.
On a scale from bad to good customer support, Google is on the far left and Amazon on far right - from my (paying) customer point of view.
Your local government and your local carrier demand your communication isn't encrypted. A for-profit corporation will not fix that - Apple gave over encryption keys to China as well when the push came to shove. Not voting for governments breaking human rights will.
This seems incorrect, given that there are multiple E2E apps on the market today. Unless you're implying that Signal has also given encryption keys to China.
Regardless of why RCS isn't encrypted, it's not encrypted. I can vote in a government that supports encryption. But if I do that after RCS is standarized, the standard still won't be encrypted.
If what you're arguing here is true, this seems like a good reason not to implement RCS until after we get the government sorted out, or to abandon RCS and try to build a standard without government inputs.
I mean, what's the timeline for getting China to support encryption? 5 years? 10? Should I be throwing my support behind unencrypted messaging standards in the meantime?
If China isn't going to approve an encrypted standard, then that sounds like a pretty strong argument that standards processes like RCS that have to play nicely with the Chinese government are the wrong way to build a messaging protocol.
The preferable way to do this is probably to support a strongly encrypted protocol, and then build a bridge or a fallback for Chinese messaging since they won't adopt the standard. But then why not just use SMS as the fallback?
Given that RCS does not appear to be encrypted by default it's actually a step back over what most people are already using.
I don't think it's just silly, it's irresponsible. I wonder if software engineers were actual licensed engineers, would any make an unencrypted-by-default service today?
RCS also beautifully demostrates the problem with these open protocols - carriers simply refused to support it and federate between themselves, so you couldn't even send a message to a non-carrier branded phone, even if your exact carrier supported it. They (with push from governments) even demanded it's unencrypted.
This is Google basically stopping to wait for carriers to stop screwing their users and allowing some users to get this messaging protocol without waiting for their carrier to stop being incompetent. Unfortunately they're also going about it in the typical Google way with insane rollout rules.
No need to wait for carriers just try making something people want to use.
I'm caught up on rcs, I suppose it's an improvement over sms, but what isn't? It's not an improvement over email, or what's app or signal.
According to any kind of statistics - 100s of millions of people on the world. Yes, still. Please do look outside the bubble.
It's the same reason that I'll never switch from email to slack.
Right now I have iMessage, Snapchat, SMS, Messenger, GroupMe, Email, Discord and Slack along with a bunch of apps with chat as a feature. I have been caused no harm whatsoever by this setup except that my SO has a way to fill my notification screen when they’re feeling obnoxious.
How is that possibly not "harm"??
The irony is thick here. "Who uses the open, standard protocol for anything but authenticating proprietary, locked-in services competing on network effects?"
The whole point is to make it so the standard thing that everyone has by default doesn't suck as much, so we don't need to make messaging service decisions based on network effects and lock-in.
SMS has a strong network effect thanks to carriers wanting to charge you per message but basically nothing else going for it.
I do.
I still use SMS almost exclusively for the simple reason that it is standard—except for group messages, for which I use Signal.
I can only speak as an American, but sending an SMS to Europe costs 20¢ on my plan. Hardly astronomical, especially considering that when SMS was new, it cost 50¢-$1.00 per message.
I wouldn’t dream of communicating the same way if messages weren’t “free” (i.e. part of your internet fee)
I say this as someone with “most of my friends” living in other countries at any given time.
I might have sent 100 short messages just to my mother this month. That would be $20 just for talking to one person. Last time I had a UK phone contract I was paying £13 for unlimited data.
Yes, 20 cents is astronomical.
Nope. WhatsApp requires an Android, IOS, or Windows smartphone. WhatsApp is not a protocol you can freely implement, its a piece of proprietary software you have to install. No third-party clients.
Your carrier just provides you access to the SMS/RCS network, they have no control what software you use to access it.
> At the moment, RCS is not end-to-encrypted – this has been one of SMS's biggest criticisms.
It doesn't mention whether there are efforts to get RCS encrypted; maybe Wired left that part out. A cursory Duckduckgo search didn't turn anything up, just more people complaining that there's no point in switching off of iMessage (which is end-to-end encrypted) to a protocol that's worse. Maybe I missed something.
This is the first time I'm hearing about RCS, so I don't want to dismiss it out-of-hand. But it's difficult for me to imagine why I would want to jump to a new protocol in the future that's not E2E encrypted and that is going to have to fall back to SMS for old phones anyway, when I could just skip all of this and encourage my smartphone-owning friends to use Signal.
By the time RCS finally gets standardized, it's even possible Matrix will have finally gotten its act together on security, which will get rid of Signal's centralization problems and will allow me to message any internet-connected device, regardless of whether or not it has a phone number.
Given that RCS will also need to fall back to SMS for phones that don't support it, the only distinction I see here is whether it's easier to get all of my friends to move to a new phone that supports RCS, or if it's easier to get all of my friends to switch apps.
Either way, my friends that refuse to change will need to get SMS messages, as they already do today.
On the Matrix side of things, this is theoretically solved by making the protocol separate from the client. This allows any company or phone to have their own Matrix client, and allows users to swap out their clients if they have other preferences.
For existing clients that don't support the protocol, you use bridges. There is already a Matrix to iMessage bridge, although it's really not practical for most people to use because Apple locks down iMessage so hard. But the same question applies -- will it be easier to get Apple to switch to a brand-new protocol, or will it be easier to get Apple to support a bridge to their existing protocol?
Of course, in the worst case a Matrix client could fall back to SMS for unsupported contacts, which (again) RCS is already going to need to do.
The problem with Matrix pretty much comes down to security. I keep hearing people say that they're going to turn on E2E encryption by default any day now, and as far as I know it still hasn't happened. My impression is the technology is still a little immature to rely on for security-critical tasks, although when the alternative is SMS, that may not matter.
At this point I'm thinking that the only solution is to recommend iPhone for everybody.
Asking for real, I've never heard of the tech.
SMS for me are a godsend. They work with every phones, every carriers. They work on terrible networks. They work in the mountains, in the country side, in the trains and cars when going fast, in many tunnels and metros. They work in crazily lost places when I travel. Once I sent a text to my father from the Dogon country, a northern part of Mali where there is only sand and a few goats.
Lost your phone ? If you can remember/find the phone number, get a cheap sim, send a text, you are back in business. No permission scheme, no auth, no friends to add or certificate. 1 SIM = 1 ID is also very convenient.
SMS is the email of phone. Limited. Primitive. Efficient. Reliable.
So if you want to replace it with something else, you need a very good story.
But I guess old cheap phones will be left out but I think no sms support will be far in the future, especially if Apple won't support it.
And RCS sounds like the Google Wave of text messaging.
No delivery confirmation: messages silently drop and the recipient is unaware you attempted to message them. There is no notification to you that your message failed to deliver.
Profoundly long delivery delays: messages sometimes get stuck and get delivered hours or days later. "Hey dude meet me out front" delivered 16 hours later, etc.
Length restrictions: some phones still do not handle long messages correctly. If the character limit is exceeded, messages are cut into unordered pieces, or the message is truncated and part of the message is simply deleted.
I'm not saying RCS is the answer, just pointing out that SMS is garbage.
So is email, it just happens to be the best we have because like email it's ubiquitous.
Use SMS constantly. Often with extensions, MMS, read receipts, etc...
It just works. Faults are rare.
I do not disagree on it being "garbage", in the same way email is, but both bits of tech work well.
I can count faults on one hand per quarter, and that is among a ton of comms with many people.
All I can say is, in the past 15+ years of SMS messaging, in the US, on every carrier, with devices ranging from the early Nokias to the latest iPhones, I have had reliability problems that are frequent enough for me to avoid SMS when possible.
I travel a lot, internationally at times. SMS just works.
Maybe it has to do with hardware and carrier. I use Verizon, or whatever cheap plan I get on a SIM card.
Samsung phone, and it gives read notifications when the other party agrees to them, and is good on fails, in that I know when one did not get sent.
When I make mistakes, I even get SMS over major flyover cities. Like I pull my phone out, and several emails and texts came through.
So SMS is actually not that great.
The same cannot always be said for other messaging apps. Sure, you can communicate globally with Telegram and Whatsapp, but they require a slightly more stable connection and of course they use data which has a non-zero cost.
I work in a building that has horrible, horrible reception. The only thing making it out of those walls is text messages. Whatsapp even will rarely work, and Hangouts messages? Forget about it. It has to ping a server 17 times before sending a message, seemingly.
But this isn't a question about how much SMS costs the carrier, it's how much they charge their customers for it. Retail price is often completely divorced from the actual cost of the goods and services provided.
As someone else pointed out, it's SMS across borders that's ridicules. There is no reason why that should cost €0.5 per SMS.
Sure, the total bitrate of sms messages is low, but the software and services are all legacy, require people with special skills to setup, and have quite high license fees to keep running.
Set up your own SMSC and tell us how easy it was...?
And some of these areas aren't even that remote, just unintentionally RF shielded.
I think a better argument for the standard is simply that it's built into the protocol, and therefore unlikely to vanish anytime soon. Can't say the same for the trendy app of the week.
I have a cheap prepaid, still using SMS every day because I know I have unlimited use of it, to several countries even. Data is where they make their money
Imagine if SSH didn't exist and we were all still using telnet in 2019. If Google were backing a replacment that lacked even basic encryption, would you be OK with that, or would you point out it's absolutely ridiculous? Because that's what we're talking about here...
So, SMS does not go through google. RCS goes through google.
It's odd that you keep mentioning cost. Text messages are often metered at some ludicrous rate (or sold at a similarly ludicrous unlimited monthly addition).
> virtually any phone in a given area.
From what I understand, outside of the US, text messages are not quite as reliable. I don't know if that's cause or effect of the fact that outside of the US nearly everyone uses WhatsApp or WeChat.
What are the countries where they're unreliable?
That makes them impractical for realtime chat, and even makes 'verification codes' a pain.
As another data point, the choice of personal mobile plans in the UK is now almost entirely dominated by how much data allowance you want. Apart from some budget plans for people or devices that don't need significant amounts of data at all, the number of minutes of calling time or SMS messages you send is unlikely to be a significant factor in the plan you choose or the price you pay any more, being practically unlimited in most cases.
Google's move away from internet-based messaging (unconnected to the mobile carrier) was a step in the wrong direction, but one that was unsurprising given their track record with messaging applications.
Based on experience with things that come from the telco world, I'm guessing it's a fairly terrible protocol. Based on the glacial pace of rollout, I'm guessing the available software to support it is maybe worse than the usual telco stuff, or anyway is harder to setup, deploy, and manage than carriers care to.
But... It's still a standard that google needs to support as the OS for handsets, because carriers who went through the trouble to run RCS aren't going to want to sell phones that don't support it, and Google can't make the on device platform SMS libraries work right for RCS delivered messages unless they supply the client.
But, in house, they need to test against a server, and they've got what 7 messaging platforms? So it's not too hard to write a toy server, but somehow it escapes to real carriers and boom, now we have Google actively pushing this.
Google certainly gets benefits by being a platform provider of RCS, but I don't see it as coming from a nefarious place.
Benefits include whatever tracking etc, but probably they also get free messaging to connected carrier customers and a piece of commercial messaging. There's still a ton of value in commercial messaging, and being able to observe it provides competitive intelligence -- auth code sends are strongly related to user counts and can be cross referenced with app install data from android devices with Google services.
One problem with Google is that it can't keep any modern project running for more than 2 years. Such unreliability makes it difficult for people to use any new Google app as a primary means of communication.
Another problem is that end-to-end encryption goes against everything Google is about: information mining. Google can't make a direct profit of such a communication system, so e2e won't happen anytime soon.
Things like iMessage were basically dictated by Apple and operators had the choice between not supporting IOS and being abandoned by iphone fans or supporting IOS as is. These days, Apple just launches new phones and operators bend over backwards to be able to support it on the day it launches. Apple's negotiation position is awesome.
Google has the problem that there are a lot of Android OEMs and customizing Android by these OEMs is common. Their negotiation position is simply not that strong and a lot of these OEMs really need those deals with operators and are willing to do anything. Operators can really screw over these OEMs by blocking their access to the market; and this happens regularly. They can't afford to do that with Apple.
The first time I saw that app in the updates list I thought I somehow had gotten some badly disguised malware...
Can Google bypass the carrier on this, or can you only do that with something like a google voice number? All the other features aside, being able to receive text messages in my office that has no cell service would sure be nice.
Moreso if it integrates with Signal so at the least I actually get messages from my iPhone wielding friends with only Apple chat clients when I have connectivity to the internet.
> The GSM Association, a mobile industry body, chose to adopt RCS as the replacement for SMS back in 2008
Wasn't that the MMS days?
At this point I've lost all hope that the company can execute.
They're 3rd place in cloud computing. Elasticsearch is destroying them on search. They're constantly fucking up on Youtube.
70% of the developed world have an Android phone.. I'm typing this one one.
They might be third to cloud computing because they were late to the party. Having used their tech and AWS, I can say confidently that they're executing just fine. Especially with respect to k8s support (oh yeah.. they made k8s).
And how is ElasticSearch destroying them on search? ElasticSearch as a system of indexing things is not remotely comparable to the web scale implementation Google runs and orders via their Page Rank algorithm. Am I missing something here?
I'll concede YouTube. Nobody know how/why they rank shit there and it makes no sense.
Anyways, my point is that blanket statements for any entity as large as Google, MS, Apple, IBM etc. are largely ridiculous.
For the first time in years, Google will directly offer a better default texting experience to Android users instead of waiting for cellphone carriers to do it. It’s not quite the Google equivalent of an iMessage service for Android users, but it’s close. Not knowing when or if RCS Chat would be available for your phone was RCS’s second biggest problem, and Google is fixing it.
They could even make the default to reply to all SMS messages with RCS.
For one thing, Google devices stop being useful for numerous online services that now rely on SMS for automatic notifications and/or 2FA. I imagine the market for a phone that can't do SMS, at least here in the UK where such messages have become much more common over the past few years, is probably about two people, plus or minus two.
Wouldn't exactly be the first time a messenger system is dropped.
You may say "typing indicators and read receipts", I say "spying".