Upgrading Messaging on Android in the U.S. with RCS

On Android, I was constantly using new Apps, looking at /r/android for release announcements, and getting excited about all the new releases. Then, at some point, I realized I just wanted a phone that works. That's when I switched to Apple. That's not to say my Pixel didn't do everything my iPhone does. It could do it all and in many cases it could even do it better or in a more customized way. But, it also required effort. Effort to learn the new apps, effort to change all the settings, and effort every time Google decided to change something that I thought was already working just fine.

Then I switched to Apple and I realized I didn't want necessarily want to spend all my time learning my phone, I wanted to spent my time USING it. To me, my iPhone is more like an appliance than a new tech gadget. It doesn't necessarily provide you with all the options and capabilities that an Android phone does, but it absolutely nails its core competencies and is very easy to use. I don't spend a single extra second trying to figure out HOW to use it, it just works.

Everything just works great, I never need to worry about stuff randomly slowing down or my battery dying midway through the day (mind you, my previous device was a flagship android phone Galaxy S8+, so it isn't like I am comparing my iPhone to a cheap entry-level android device).

First week or two were a bit confusing, because the UI/UX shortcuts and flow are so different from android. But after that, I found things to be more intuitive and efficient. The phone displays zero signs of battery degradation or slowing down, everything is just as blazing fast as it was the day I bought it. Battery lasts me easily over a day of normal usage, almost 2 days if I use it lightly.

OS updates arrive fast and to all phones at the same time, without me having to wait 6+ months for my manufacturer to finally push them. With Android, it was extremely annoying to see all those cool new features that people got, but I have to wait many months for (not even talking about security patches). And that's assuming I will ever receive any kind of OS updates on Android 2+ years after the release.

Also, App Store experience is definitely more refined than the garbage pile that Play Store is.

Switching out iPhones is painless too, as all your session data is included in the (encrypted) backups. So you don't need to log-in again into every single app and set up all your custom settings again when you get a new phone. You just wait until the restore from backup completes, and you are set.

I realize that my take might sound a bit biased, and it probably is, but I am just very glad I've made the jump. My last iPhone before going all android until the last year was iPhone 4, and imo it is miles ahead of where it is used to be in terms of overall user experience.

tl;dr: if you want a solid device that just works well and performs exactly as you want it to, you won't be disappointed. If you want to fully customize your phone, sideload a different OS, do some hacky stuff, then Android would be a better choice.

Like it telling me what song is playing from lock screen, while offline. Certain maps and local features are just better.

* Google apps (Calendar, Tasks, GBoard) really helped with the transition and were imo superior to the corresponding native apps

* Used Outlook for mail to ensure that I still got push notifications for imap accounts (vs. polling on the native Mail app)

* Used Resilio Sync to bring my ebooks over to the device vs. pfaffing about with cloud storage

* Was able to find good free apps for ssh and otp

* I appreciated the fact that incognito on Safari appears to have per-tab isolation

It took me a lot of struggling to get the device working as I wanted, so hopefully it helps you somewhat.

For me Apple Watch is the star, the battery life is a bit short but it can do everything I need in a wearable device (calendar, notifications, chat) and nothing I don't need which is a bonus.

I would buy a cheaper phone and get the best watch, but your use case might be very different.

I think it has to do with you being unfamiliar with the phone and more friction that comes with it.

When I check for an example of a person participating in society (US) without any phone, I come up empty handed. Then try with me to even describe a setup where a person could reasonably participate but not need a phone. I am vaguely certain this is actually not possible (credit/transportation etc). Perhaps the dire wolf citizen of privacy is pulling this off..but what a high bar to set on an entire population, without their informed consent. Similarly it may be an impossibly high bar on regulators to provide a "life doesn't require a phone number" consumer option.

I guess a person could fashion "phone number to email as a service" where you get an unanswerable "phone number" which just forwards transcribed content to an email?

I hear you. I reached that place a couple of years ago.

My current smartphone probably has 2 or 3 years of life left in it, so I'm considering that as a deadline for coming up with an alternate plan. In thinking about it, the main thing I like about having a smartphone is having a personal computer in my pocket. So...

First, I badly want out of the Android ecosystem, so I going to carry a real pocket computer that runs real Linux. That will be my primary device.

I'll supplement that with the dumbest feature phone that I can find that will allow tethering data connections, and use that for texting, backup internet access, and emergency phone calls.

It's not going phoneless, but it's as close to that as I can get without missing out on functionality that matters to me.

Not gonna lie, Apple's phone models confuse me.

It appeared that the Android team was kind of forced to support C++ for game developers, and they did an half baked release with Android 2.0.

Using headers and toolchains different than what regular Android (internal Google teams) were using, thus took them all the way up to release 14 to actually provide unified headers.

Bionic wasn't fully ISO C compliant and has been being improved throughout all the NDK and Android releases.

Back when they decided to drop Eclipse there wasn't a roadmap for C++ support going forward, and they were kind of rescued after JetBrains decided to create CLion, which they took up to integrate into Android Studio, almost two years later.

There were two reboots for new build system tools, until they decided to keep ndk-build around and settle with CMake as alternative.

Even though the NDK APIs are written in C++ (or C++ wrappers over JNI calls), they are exposed as extern "C" to userspace, thus being more prone to unsafe coding pratices.

Only now they are starting to think about supporting NDK package management, so far each Android NDK developer using AARs had to come up with in-house solutions to package NDK libraries across projects.

Small rant, plenty of other stuff to complain about. However I would also like to add that the (apparently) small NDK team has improved the experience a lot, when comparing with what the Android 2.0 NDK state started from.

I'm resigned to OP beaming everything I do to PLA military intelligence or whatever, but frankly I don't do much on my phone anyway besides surf and YouTube.

Customer service has been great whenever I've needed it, which hasn't been much.

Google is so far behind on faceID it's laughable. And this is coming from someone who switched from an iPhone 6 to a Pixel and stuck with google all the way until the Pixel 4. Sorry - the hardware is getting worse, not better. And the spying/data collection has become too much. When you've got a CIO that says he'd let any house guest know he's got devices recording them and would suggest anyone that has google devices in their house do the same - you lost me.

No you just swipe up. You don’t unlock and then do something, you just do. That’s the whole point. When I pick up my iPhone I just swipe up. The unlocking of the phone is something that just happens to happen. You don’t pick up the phone “wait” for it to unlock, and then swipe to the home screen. That defeats the whole purpose.

Which will always be the biggest fundamental flaw with something like Signal or WhatsApp (the need for centralized servers, the requirement to install 3rd party software).

There may be a role for these telecom services to exist perpetually as a backup services, while everyone still uses apps as their primary communication method. But RCS seems to be trying to bring SMS to parity with messaging apps supporting emoticons and media-heavy content, the intention is the same "conversations with friends" use-case as the messaging apps.

There may even be an argument to keep SMS dumb and simple like phone lines. Especially if they aren't going to adopt encryption with the rest.

The second and most important advantage of WhatsApp is that you don't have to maintain an address book anymore. People change phone numbers and the new number is automatically reflected in WhatsApp. It's quite likely that address books on phones are outdated and thus stale.

RCS competes with iMessage and WhatsApp, which are both "free" services (IIRC WhatsApp business model is paid commercial messaging customers and iMessage business model is paid devices). Both of those offer encryption features.

[0] https://lwn.net/Articles/638621/

[1] https://git.silence.dev/Silence/Silence-Android/

To be fair, while Google certainly could have had a better strategy, replicating Apple's would probably have been a failure.

For several reasons, iMessage's success is very US-centric. SMS fall-back is really not an option in countries where unlimited SMS isn't the norm. Google should have tried harder to acquire Whatsapp, or at least grab another big fish in this space (like Viber).

RCS is going to benefit carriers more than Google, since they might claim back some of the IM traffic. Google realizes it can at least try to control the app (Messages) which will be deployed to most low and mid-range Android phones, that are running stock or close to stock Android.

I think another issue is that Apple just doesn't care about the user experience of anyone who isn't using an iPhone, to the point that I feel like they pretend non-Apple products don't even exist. I bet many iPhone users would like to be able to send encrypted messages and non-horribly-pixelated video to their friends who use Android (for example), but Apple acts like they don't even consider that as a use case.

Google's Messaging app is just one implementation of the protocol. There are other implementations, that are actually used. Samsung have their own, some carriers have their own. It really is an ecosystem.