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Comment by NelsonMinar | Hacker News Reader

Apple could easily end this by adopting RCS support into iMessage. Android's RCS implementation is very good and the default these days, at least for Google and Samsung phones. It's an open standard. As the article points out, Apple executives know it's not in their business interest to allow this kind of interoperability so they won't do it.

All of this reminds me, exhausted, of the long sad story of AOL Instant Messenger and Microsoft's attempts to integrate with it. AIM was at one point even compelled to support interop as part of the anti-trust review for the Time Warner merger. But it never actually happened.

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There’s no question that Apple has not extended iMessage support to Android because it’s in their business interest. However, it is a bit rich for Hiroshi Lockheimer, who is obviously massively biased, to claim the Apple could “just adopt RCS” as a replacement for iMessage (and also for the author to let that comment stand without challenging it at all).

It has taken _years_ to get carriers on board with RCS (and RCS requires their involvement) and it doesn’t support all of iMessage’s features (e.g. only supports end-to-end encryption in one-to-one chats, and that after a near Herculean effort from Google). Moreover, the fact that it’s an open standard means that it will likely take quite some time for the protocol to support new features that OS vendors like Apple might like to add, and that that process will be fraught with compromises. It seems completely reasonable to me for Apple to not want to tie themselves to the whims of carriers (who, let’s recall, were charging _absurd_ amounts for text messages before proprietary systems forced their hand) or Google (look at what’s happened to web standards under their stewardship) when it comes to managing their messaging service.

That said, as an iPhone user, I _would_ love to see RCS support _alongside_ iMessage to improve the experience of communicating with Android users, and that actually might happen someday.

I'm not sure I see the problem really. iMessage already has a fallback to SMS. They can implement a fallback to RCS the same way and support more than basic features. It doesn't have to be a 1:1 feature complete equivalent. And in terms of devs - they have the money to implement it and support it.

Agreed. Purple bubbles.

No one is asking Apple to replace iMessage with RCS.

I've texted Pixel something to Pixel something over Google Fi and it's been shit compared to iPhone. I've been almost universally an Android user for ages.

Switching to an iPhone when the 13 came out has been a top notch decision.

Androids RCS adoption is good with major caveats:

- it's good only in certain locations, without global ubiquity

- it still very much depends on what phone you have

- it's only recently become good enough to be usable

- it's still tricky to deal with the SMS fallback problem, and you'll still see Android phones struggle with SMS fallback

So in the case of iMessage, for them to adopt RCS they'd need three tiers of messaging:

- iMessage (because it's not just for cellular devices)

- RCS (for those devices that handle it)

- SMS for everyone else

People act like RCS is a solved problem. It's not and while I'd love to see it integrated into iOS, it's not as trivial to do it as just saying: okay add it in.

> People act like RCS is a solved problem. It's not and while I'd love to see it integrated into iOS, it's not as trivial to do it as just saying: okay add it in.

Why?

I don't mean that flippantly. Let's not pretend that there are major technical hurdles to something like this for a company with as many engineering resources to throw around as Apple.

The reasons are pure business.

RCS is a carrier standard. It will stagnate and die a slow death over the next 5-10 years just like SMS and MMS. The carriers have absolutely no place establishing or maintaining a standard.

Google epically failed to establish a messaging ecosystem similar to Apple, and so they went to RCS. But they’ll regret it when the standard fades into uselessness.

I was working with RCS related stuff for a carrier R&D group in 2008-2009. I was sure it was a dead horse already then, so it blew my mind when the term reappeared a year or two ago. I actually had to check if it was just coincidentally the same name. But no, somehow the thing was still alive and now after over a decade actually adopted too.

It's anyway useless outside of US now as that ship has sailed, proprietary chat apps ate the market.

What problem would Apple be solving and why would they want to solve it?

They'd be providing a higher-quality and more reliable messaging conduit to non-iPhone users.

They might not want to solve it, but I don't think we should accept unethical business rationales.

I am somewhat resentful of Apple because as a currently-Android but formerly-iPhone user I am now unable to text some iPhone users in some situations because of iMessage. I guess fucking me with their bugs is a positive business outcome for Apple, especially because they create a environment where their bugs appear to be Android bugs. But that's an unethical stance on the part of Apple.

I had iphones from the 3G on up to about 2 years ago, when I thought I'd try android. I was surprised when group txt messages stopped working for me, even after I did whatever apple told me to do to disable iMessage after the fact. The whole time I thought we were using txt messages as a kind of least common denominator, but really it wasn't sms. I doubt if more than 50% of ppl using it realize they're locking themselves in when they start. To me, now that I'm used to Android, it's a reason not to go back to iOS.

Now I just need to convince my spouse to switch

Agreed. When others continue using old threads you’re left off entirely. Everyone has to stop using the old thread (usually be deleting it) for messages from them to reach you. That’s nuts. I’m honestly surprised Apple isn’t been sued for it.

In any decent world: not being curb stomped by antitrust law.

I'm genuinely curious how this is an antitrust thing?

Apple phones can send texts and communicate with any other phone on any other network and vice versa. They just don't use iMessage to do so. I can't DM my discord friends from my work Slack, for example.

The SMS fallback experience in iMessage is pretty bad. Some of it may be because SMS is bad itself (the unreliability), but the way iMessage features get downgraded to SMS creates a terrible experience for everyone. Add MMS in the mix and it gets even worse. To be fair this can be ascribed to technical limitations; in Apple's view iMessage works great and it's too bad you're using something crappy like SMS/MMS. But then Apple hasn't put any effort into making the non-iMessage experience better.

As for why it's anti-trust, it's right there in the WSJ article. Apple executives are explicit in the lock-in being useful for their market power.

Also it may have been years ago but I'll never forget the way Apple originally captured phone numbers into iMessage. Once a phone number was registered in to iMessage no Apple system would ever send SMS to it again. That created a major problem if the owner of the number had stopped using Apple phones. They were sued over this lock-in and finally implemented a way to release your number from iMessage jail. It's still kind of awkward though.

Giving their users a better experience when messaging their friends and family who are not using iPhones. As the WSJ article points out in Apple's monopolistic thinking, this is an anti-goal.

> Giving their users a better experience when messaging their friends and family who are not using iPhones.

That's literally the opposite of what Apple wants.

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