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Comment by pkulak | Hacker News Reader

As an Android user, yes, people absolutely care. I care, even. If I get added to a group chat (any group chat, since my entire family and social circle uses iPhones), that chat is immediately degraded to potato videos, every like is now a whole string of useless text, etc. I'll never forgive Apple for the crap they put me though _as a customer_. My family has iPads, MacBooks, two iPhones, AirPods, you name it. I'm typing this on a year-old MacBook. But because I run one Linux desktop and don't feel like replacing my old Pixel, I have to deal with their ire. Apple demands absolute loyalty.

EDIT: Reading down the page, it seems that other Android users have a different experience, where only they are degraded? That's odd. In my experience, my presence degrades the entire chat and everyone gets swapped to MMS.

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> But because I run one Linux desktop and don't feel like replacing my old Pixel, I have to deal with their ire.

SMS/MMS has technical limitations you're running into. It's the lowest common denominator that's going to work between Apple and non-Apple devices. Google and carriers have shit the bed multiple times over the past decade trying to come up with an equivalent to iMessage.

That's not an excuse.

There's no good reason why Apple and Google couldn't collaborate to design an upgraded and open SMS protocol that everyone can plug into. These two effectively control the entire mobile market.

They only reason they don't is spelled out exactly in this thread. Apple cares more about pressuring people into their walled garden than actually serving customers well and encouraging a vibrant market of products using cross compatible messaging protocols.

>an upgraded and open SMS protocol that everyone can plug into

that exists, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services

Which AFAIK Apple does not use. I have RCS enabled on my Android phone but it only works to other Android users who have a compatible phone that also has RCS. Still does not resolve the OP's issue that Apple refuses to send/receive messages to/from other vendors' devices unless it is via SMS/MMS. It's a sad state of affairs indeed.

I’ve seen it posted multiple times on this very forum that carriers have not done a good job rolling this out. How is this actually going over in Android-land?

My (european) take: nobody cares. Usage of Whatsapp/Signal is higher.

In Australia it's been on Telstra for a bit. I got it working on Optus last year. I don't know what happens to other companies running over the Telstra or Optus networks though.

Yeah. In the time it took them to not solve that problem, WhatsApp et al. took over the world of texting from under them.

> Apple cares more about pressuring people into their walled garden than actually serving customers well and encouraging a vibrant market of products using cross compatible messaging protocols.

Apple has already been serving their customers with Messages. A free E2EE messaging system usable across all their devices. Your "Apple walled garden" complaint rings a bit hollow considering there's tons of messaging apps on iOS. Why are you not complaining WhatsApp or Signal doesn't make their infrastructure cross compatible for Apple to use? You know, vibrancy and all.

Messaging platforms (Apple included) don't want to be interoperable. It slows down feature development and partners in development may be at cross purposes. It also means opening expensive infrastructure to use by third parties. The rollout of RCS has been an object example of those issues.

But no, it must be Apple bad. Walled garden! WHARGARBL!

There's a difference between interoperability and being cross-platform. Nobody is saying iMessage should be inter-operable with Signal or whatever, but that it should in some way be compatible with non-Apple platforms. All the other messaging services work on both Apple and Android devices, as well as often having web/desktop versions.

It's the definition of a walled garden. Google's messaging services aren't limited to Pixel devices or even Android in general, whereas Apple has made theirs available only on devices they manufacture.

> but that it should in some way be compatible with non-Apple platforms

It is fucking compatible. Messages falls back to the most compatible option between platforms and carriers: SMS/MMS. RCS has been a shit show, even Google has had to run their own parallel infrastructure for it just to avoid the implementation problems of carriers. Google also has proprietary extensions for RCS for E2EE which only works on Google's infrastructure and only between clients running Google Messages.

An app falling back to something else entirely does not make the first system "compatible". All Apple did was bundle SMS into their iMessage app. That has nothing to with iMessage, which is not allowed on non-Apple hardware.

Google Messages and every other default messaging app on phones falls back to SMS when RCS isn't available for the recipient. Google hasn't made their E2EE extensions available outside their app. Where's your "there's no excuse" outrage?

You're trying to excoriate Apple for not supporting an extremely poorly implemented "standard" (RCS) or investing tons of money fighting with carriers and partners trying to create some new "standard". It's absurd.

If Apple tried to support the RCS clusterfuck that would be a third protocol supported in their Messages app. Even if it was some new standard hammered out with Google and carriers there would still be an SMS/MMS fallback for the literal billions of handsets that won't support whatever new standard.

Yeah, I agree 100%. The issue is that Apple has used it's market share to force users onto something that isn't better, because iMessage isn't open to everyone. So you have Apple users bouncing back and forth between two shitty systems (in the same app, so folks don't really even know what's going on), and I'm forced to interact with them on Apple's terms.

RCS has been a thing for a while. Apple has no excuse.

RCS' rollout has been a complete shit show. Carriers have deployed it inconsistently between markets, messaging apps have had inconsistent support for it, different apps have added their own extensions, and interoperability between carriers has been inconsistent. Shit, Google Messages only started supporting it in 2018 with most users needing to use Google's servers to actually get it working across carriers. Google only added E2EE last summer and only in 1:1 conversations between Google Messages users.

So I'll repeat, SMS/MMS is the least common denominator that will reliably work on non-Apple devices and across carriers. Adding RCS support to Messages would mean building their own infrastructure like Google has done in order to have the feature work reliably.

Apple should let RCS die, involving carriers was a shit idea.

RCS has been a "thing" for years but nobody has bothered using it, because it's terrible.

Last time I checked it didn't even have E2EE.

Neither does SMS, but that doesn't preclude Apple from falling back to that.

RCS has been around a long time, but it has been deployed by major carriers in just the last year and certainly is not universal. Google also just did a bypass the carriers thing mid last year. It is not a this feature has been missing for years question.

Adding a full feature set is something to approach with caution since Apple does not go the Google approach of burn it down and start over every few messaging apps. Most of the zero days seem iMessage related.

> If I get added to a group chat (any group chat, since my entire family and social circle uses iPhones), that chat is immediately degraded to potato videos, every like is now a whole string of useless text, etc.

I think this should at the very least be classified as a new dark pattern - and it sounds as if it could potentially even have antitrust implications:

Apple's strategy is effectively that users of competing products aren't just put at a disadvantage themselves, Apple will disadvantage their whole social circle and rely on social pressure to drive them back from the competitor.

This seems honestly extremely anticompetitive. (Not to mention, has icky similarities to china-style social credit systems)

Thank fucking god my whole circle uses either Telegram or WhatsApp

And signal, and wechat (if Chinese frens), and Kakao (if Korean frens), and Line (if Taiwanese), and Viber (Thai, Vietnamese), and FB messenger. Those I know on iphone also rarely using iMessage.

> Those I know on iphone also rarely using iMessage.

I think there is a significant US vs. ex-US difference in how people use messaging. I am in the US and very few older adults I know use over-the-top messaging apps, with perhaps the exception of Facebook Messenger. The only people who use WhatsApp are folks who have traveled internationally, have international friends, or international business contacts. Signal is for crypto-nerds. Telegram is for... I'm not sure. Certainly nobody I know.

Interestingly, people I know who are in their 30s are more likely to use FB Messenger, because they're more likely to have been on Facebook since it was introduced.

But people in their 20s seem to have eschewed Facebook. Some of them seem to use Snapchat or Instagram Chat, but without the expectation that everyone is going to be on it.

So, basically, there is no universal chat tool that you can use in the US and basically expect people to be on, except SMS/MMS (and iMessage, which basically takes the place of MMS on iPhones from a users perspective).

Line is also the standard with Japanese friends

The article is about teens, and no they do not care.

They're on Discord.

My 12-year-old uses iMessage exclusively with all his peers. Guess he's a few months too young, but I'm not gonna blow off the whole premise of the article quite yet.

The people denying this seem to be ignoring the data the article quotes suggesting a sizable majority of American youth are on iPhones and likely social pressure has a lot to do with it. Sorry I’m not buying these anecdotes of “no one cares”. If no one cared they’d be on cheaper androids. Most likely they’ll say they don’t care and yet secretly do. If I as a 40 year old feel pressure from colleagues there’s no way a teen isn’t.

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