Google says iMessage is too powerful | Hacker News Reader

Google says iMessage is too powerful

arstechnica.com

With all the lock-in and connectedness of Google owned systems, they cannot complain. And it's not Apple's fault that Google can't build long term successes in most products it creates. That's a management/strategy problem.

How many messaging systems has Google had over the years?

Their shotgun approach works financially, but it means that only a few of their projects really stick (win). The rest just trundle along until they get discontinued.

The hypocricy is tiresome. When there's a regulation that threatens them, they make a lot of noise about "free market", and "let the market decide". But when the market decides against them, they want some government intervention.

I don't disagree with you, but at the same time, who else is going to make this kind of noise? It's not like we can rely on the US DoJ to investigate these things and find solutions, despite all their noise about "policing big tech".

I personally think the current situation with iMessage is garbage. Even if Apple doesn't care about Android users, they are hurting their own users: every time an iPhone user has to send a text to an Android user, they degrade the security and privacy of their own users.

(It's telling to see where Apple draws the line: being anti-competitive around messaging is more important to them than their customers' privacy and security.)

Even if Google had their shit together when it comes to messaging, there's always the "default install" problem: iMessage is on every iPhone, from the factory. That creates a barrier for any competitor to gain market share with an alternative messenger. Sure, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc. have been pretty successful, but they're not the default install. (Remember when Microsoft got in trouble in the 90s for bundling IE, at the expense of Netscape?)

As an Android user, all I really want is a secure way to communicate with others by default, without having to figure out which secure messaging app I have in common with each of my peers. Apple has made that impossible, and should be required to allow Google to integrate iMessage support into the stock Android Messages app. Or they should be required to support RCS (with E2E encryption compatible with Google's extension) on iPhones. I'll accept either option, though I'd probably prefer RCS rather than an Apple-proprietary protocol.

Seems like you're only thinking of one piece of the puzzle, which your Android phone sending RCS thanks to a carrier allowing you to. Doesn't address this part of the problem:

> "Even if Google could magically roll out RCS everywhere, it's a poor standard to build a messaging platform on because it is dependent on a carrier phone bill. It's anti-Internet and can't natively work on webpages, PCs, smartwatches, and tablets, because those things don't have SIM cards. The carriers designed RCS, so RCS puts your carrier bill at the center of your online identity, even when free identification methods like email exist and work on more devices. Google is just promoting carrier lock-in as a solution to Apple lock-in."

RCS is garbage. Here’s why:

There is a publicly-facing Google site to enter an RCS enabled cellphone number, in order to disable Chat features… including end-to-end encryption.[0] This feature should only be configurable on-device, ideally, or at least be behind a login and 2fa. It’s just there on a public site. This is basically asking for sim-swapping attacks. And you’d never notice, only wonder why your RCS e2e keeps turning itself off. I wonder which individuals and agencies may benefit from that…

Even with the Chat features enabled, RCS doesn’t not support e2e on group texts[1], unlike iMessage, which does[2]. Google is just playing dirty pool and calling Apple users bullies by proxy, and I’m calling them on it.

Edit: Apple has a similar site to disable iMessage. This setting should only be available on-device, or if it has to have an online workaround, behind a login with 2fa. If you no longer have access to your phone, you should have to contact Apple support or go to an Apple store. The status quo benefits bad actors and intelligence agencies more than it improves the experience for end users IMO.

[0] https://messages.google.com/disable-chat

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202724

[2] https://support.google.com/messages/answer/10262381?hl=en

RCS doesn't support E2E encryption out of the box.

So for me it seems like a far worse solution than the status quo.

Ok, but the problem is group messaging. RCS doesn't support encrypted group chats. Given that the "ugh green bubble" peer pressure examples seem to mostly be in group chats, implementing RCS wouldn't solve anything.

But security is besides the point: Google doesn't want RCS support for security, it wants people not to know they're communicating with a non-apple device because they're afraid of the peer pressure.

Given that android has a huge marketshare lead, and google definitely knows how to make chat apps, they just never made one and stuck with it. Instead they kept continuously shipping new, incompatible, disconnected, chat apps and services. Because of that no one really trusts Google when it says "use this chat app, this time we'll keep it around". Meanwhile a person with a first gen iPhone or iPad (or a Mac from that era) can still use iMessage to talk to someone using the latest generation software. I would guess there's a loss of feature set, but it should theoretically still work.

> As an Android user, all I really want is a secure way to communicate with others by default, without having to figure out which secure messaging app I have in common with each of my peers.

What you want is for everyone to support whatever messaging protocol Google is pushing today. There have been a lot over the years and it seems like RCS won’t be the last (it has its flaws — serious, fatal ones, IMO).

You bought a device and want every one else to make software for their devices to make your device work the way you want it to.

I don't think that's the way the world is.

Google doesn't even enable RCS with its own Voice product. It's worse than the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, it's like the left thumb not knowing what the left pointer finger is doing. Google cannot deliver, then cry foul instead of even thinking to fix the organizational hell they've created.

> As an Android user, all I really want is a secure way to communicate with others by default, without having to figure out which secure messaging app I have in common with each of my peers.

I'd prefer the opposite: an OS with _no_ messaging app, and let users pick their own (both for Android and iOS). Expecting OS vendors to ship one out of the box is asking for a new IE-like scenario where whatever big tech companies pick becomes the standard, no matter how good or bad it may be.

I don’t see how you’re not suggesting yet another competing platform (insert xkcd here). SMS is the default, and iMessage is an elevation of SMS; in the same way FaceTime elevates it’s respective default (phone calls). If iMessage was cross platform, it’s just another messaging app. We have that. If you want secure cross platform messaging, use any of the other platforms built around that feature.

I currently have 4 messaging apps on my phone, messaging is absolutely a competitive space. What you are upset about isn’t anti competitiveness, but fragmentation.

Messaging is easily a more competitive market than search.

Brave browser has the same problem on Android and iOS. Hopefully there will be some distribution deals in the future. But the default install is a huge problem for competition.

> every time an iPhone user has to send a text to an Android user, they degrade the security and privacy of their own users.

RCS wouldnt change that one bit.

> How many messaging systems has Google had over the years?

About 20: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-...

> Google once had a functional competitor to iMessage called Google Hangouts. Circa 2015, Hangouts was a messaging powerhouse

Is it still a powerhouse if no one uses it?

Hah I was just linking another Ars Technica article on that theme:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29901707

> How many messaging systems has Google had over the years?

I remember my Nexus 5 came with at least two Google messaging apps at the same time.

The problem isn't just churn, it's lack of focus. I wonder how many different teams have been tasked with solving messaging, some at the same time, over the years.

I still can't believe they had Hangouts doing IM, SMS/MMS via Google Voice, SMS/MMS locally, voice/video calls, groups, integration with previous Google Talk users, and integration into native Fi calling all from your choice of web page, browser extension, browser app, or mobile app... and decided the best way to move forward was to deprecate it and break it into half a dozen apps over 7 years to be left with only some features migrated into an enterprise slack clone that had to be fed back to normal users because all of the other one off apps failed.

One of the apps they broke off, Allo, literally used phone numbers as IM identifiers but didn't support Google Voice integration and they simultaneously launched a second app, Duo, for video calls instead of just putting it in Allo. How could someone higher up not say "this is the dumbest thing ever, merge the teams or reassign one to something else"???

I was farther in the future of converged communication in 2015 than now.

I just can't understand why Google has done what it has. They still could have reinvented messaging every year but they should have done it under the same name/app id so users would automatically get moved over to whatever the latest experience is. Rather than what they did which was introduce huge migration pain every time they redesign IM.

> When there's a regulation that threatens them, they make a lot of noise about "free market", and "let the market decide". But when the market decides against them, they want some government intervention.

I'm pretty sure this is taught as a 200-level concept in business administration right?

> I'm pretty sure this is taught as a 200-level concept in business administration right?

Only after you manage to recite "short-term profit over long-term success" 500 times in an hour.

Yep, they replaced the Business Ethics course with this one covering advanced business administration tactics as everyone said the ethics class was incredibly not useful in today's world. /s

The reason for their shotgun approach is because Google is still too academia adjacent. Which is why a cash blow-up like DeepMind that publishes a Nature or a Science paper is the perfect Google company.

In academia, you get kudos for starting something, while there are zero incentives for maintaining something - same at Google with just a tiny bit less hyperbole.

I wouldn't blame academia for that — this has looked exactly like the classic way companies founder once they get large enough that your ability to get rewarded is completely decoupled from actual business performance. Many businesses have the same dynamic you described where improving “someone else's” project doesn't help your career nearly as much as denigrating it and reinventing the wheel, hopefully round-ish.

At a large company, you can coast like that playing politics for many years — in Google's case that's especially easy because Ad Words means they have little fear of running out of money and Gmail was big enough to ensure that any new messaging service which integrated with it would immediately “have” millions of users even if many of them had been trained not to use it by that point.

I don’t even know what messaging service/app google uses NOW, and I use google and gmail every day

I work for a Shopify company and we're a self-described "Google shop", meaning we use Gmail/docs/drive/meet but our messaging app is Slack. That shows you how much Google has failed with messaging.

My previous employer was UPS, a top to bottom Microsoft shop, and they were in the process of switching from Skype for Business (Lync) to Microsoft Teams when I left. Even Microsoft has done a better job with their messaging option.

Google Chat, it actually loads on the sidebar of gmail unless you disable it... though I can't blame you for never noticing/caring.

>How many messaging systems has Google had over the years?

As suggested by this crazy headline, a lot.

“Google to simplify messaging strategy, will support only five messaging apps”

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/google-promises-to-s...

To be fair, Google was a champion of open standards for years and years, spending large amounts of time and money supporting them, before eventually capitulating to proprietary systems. Their enthusiasm for open standards is probably a major reason that they lost in messaging!

The problem is that open standards just can't compete with closed ones when it comes to giving users what they want (for a nice discussion of this, see the classic https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/)

Indeed they were open source proponents for a long time (and are far from that now), but the failure of their messaging platforms matches the failure of many, many of their other product (projects). They just do some periodic financial analysis and decide to cull the projects they don't see a big future in.

True though that open standards are slower and harder to work with because they involve too many people and too much discussion. Apple is almost exactly the opposite example of this, and clearly their approach works quite well most of the time.

> How many messaging systems has Google had over the years?

The article answers that:

"Google's messaging history is one of constant product startups and shutdowns. Thanks to a lack of product focus or any kind of top-down mandate from Google's CEO, no division is really "in charge" of messaging. As a consequence, the company has released 13 half-hearted messaging products since iMessage launched in 2011."

I'll hazard a guess that most of those products were left to wither and die due to an inability to significantly advance Google's "eyeballs monetisation" strategy.

It was a rhetorical question :)

What is it about Google's culture that creates this shotgun approach of halfhearted abandoned products? I have my own theories but I'd love to hear others.

Their culture used to promote 10 or 20% time side projects, many of which became full Google projects. That will certainly lead to some abortions.

However, at some point there are executives deciding strategy, and almost by definition they are out of touch. From my observation, the most reliable strategy is to let a start-up with passion build something great that people want, and then buy that start-up. This is what companies older than Google have been doing for decades. (Google does it too, but they were more in-house-first in the past.)

I mean I agree with you but the fact that iCloud does not provide a decent Api and OAuth makes it significantly worse in terms of lock in than Google.

The two companies have quite different world-views on the cloud.

Apple tends to have user data encrypted in their cloud and to encourage more on-device processing. They are more likely to support data sharing between people via exchanged cryptographic keys than have access within their cloud. Unfortunately, user-initiated sharing delegated access out is not a flow OAuth really supports.

Google's previous social network aspirations caused them to chain access to lots of data through user authorization to APIs. They use API access as one of the attractions to sites supporting "Sign in with Google". AFAIK even API which do not necessarily need any user delegated authorization (such as reading a publicly accessible google doc via API) still require a user authorization.

Apple's APIs typically are not about delegated access to user data, but about access to user's application data (e.g. CloudKit app data access via REST api).

Apple does have a OpenID Connect implementation for Sign In with Apple and have left the option open for it to also be used for OAuth delegated access. So far, there aren't any access token scopes or API publicly documented.

A stopped clock is right twice a day, as they say.

RCS isn't a replacement for Signal or iMessage, not really, but it's a hell of a lot better than the current least-common-denominator, cross-platform approach of SMS/MMS.

Apple, with its desire for vendor lock-in, has every incentive to keep the "least-common-denominator" messaging standard as crappy as possible, to make iMessage's own experience between Apple users more compelling. They have no incentive to improve this and of course will drag their feet as long as possible.

Whatever you think of Google, and whatever you think of Apple, I hope you can agree that the carriers dragging their feet on RCS does nobody any good. There's no reason that RCS cannot co-exist with iMessage on IOS, except that Apple wants you in its walled garden.

I'm not a messaging historian, but according to Wikipedia RCS group was formed in 2007. Apple's iMessage was launched in 2011, which means it had been in development for some time.

Especially being Apple, they would not pick an external pre-standard and run with it when they built their success on in-house design and control. It would also be a huge gamble to build around someone else's young standard.

Do you remember phones in 2011? The Android-based phones were wildly different from each other (often flawed in unique ways). There were still popular Nokia based phones. Apple almost certainly did not target "lock in" as their priority when building their phone software. They targeted "stuff we can control which won't blow up in ways we cannot understand or prevent".

(I do admit their focus shifted after Steve Jobs died, but that was later.)

But also realize the carriers were in heavy competition for decades. I've worked with/for telecom companies off and on for a very long time, and the only coordination really happens when one big company buys another and has to try to integrate things.

Oh yeah, for sure there are ulterior motives, no doubt. But just because one kid complains that their sibling has been hogging the Nintendo all day doesn't mean they shouldn't stop hogging the Nintendo.

It also doesn't mean they are hogging the Nintendo.

Messaging services are sticky and have network effect so there will typically be clear winners - within a particular geographic area or demographic. Other areas/demographics will have other winners.

So perhaps a huge number of American teens use iMessage, while people 30+ use Facebook Messenger. Perhaps a huge number of people in China use WeChat, while Japanese people use Line.

Google is really complaining that very few demographics, not even the masochists, are using Google's chat offerings anymore.

What lock-in?

There is no lock-in for the consumer on Google products. If you have a Google device you can use whatever apps you want. If you use Google services you can use whatever apps or OS you want.

The problem is that Google has been too open. They could have made a Google messenging app the default a decade ago and forced all SMS on Android to go through that.

As it stands now, any messenging app can be the default on Android. Some OEMs roll their own, FB Messenger can be turned into default SMS app, etc...

"How many messaging systems has Google had over the years?"

At rough count, around a dozen in ~15 years.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/21/22538240/google-chat-allo...

I was thinking the same thing. I've seen Google Voice (audio), Hangouts (text, audio, and video), Allo (text), Duo (video), Meet (video), Chat (text), and Messages (text) all in quick succession. Which one of these do I pick to compete with iMessage, Google?

> How many messaging systems has Google had over the years?

many, but also, Gmail

And Apple should say Google search is too powerful.

Google search doesn't have lock-in through network effects, nor is it hard to change search engines. (Well it might be hard on mobile Safari, but that is actually Apple's fault.) If Apple wanted to build a better search engine for their users and the users of Android, they could do so easily.

Yes, Google's most popular service Google Search has no open API if you are willing to pay for it. Why they don't open it up so others can integrate?

What? It's a cross platform website, you can access it from any browser and any device. It's not like it only works on Google devices, chrome browser or ChromeOS.

Apple does an awful lot of this as well, working to make things harder for businesses supported by ads and easier for walled gardens.

How many major walled guardians other than Apple are not supported by Adds?

All Google had to do was to keep improving on their original messaging software, Google Talk.

Similarly, Microsoft would likely be a dominant player in the chat space today if they hadn't rebranded and renamed MSN Messenger several times and then abandoned it altogether.

MSN Messenger was frickin awesome. You could draw pictures into the chat window. You could play a game of checkers while you chatted. It had a thriving ecosystem of apps and plugins. Everyone I knew used MSN Messenger... and then one day, Microsoft just said screw it, everyone can move to slow and clunky Skype... and that was the end of it.

Hell, ICQ might still be around if AOL had put more development resources into it.

The chat space is so bloody fragmented now, but it has nothing to do with Apple. Any one of the above mentioned companies could be killing it in this space if they hadn't pissed away what they had.

It's been a persistent source of black comedy that basic messaging across almost every platform with even some encryption, mixed media, workable audio and some experimental video chat was like a solved problem in 2008 and seemed like it would be totally in the bag and then a complete dumpster fire again by about 2016.

Even people like me that hated MS and AOL had chat clients that could communicate with their networks and Google Talk/Hangouts and MSN Messenger were both great for what they were. At the time I felt like we had lost something important by moving to "push" networks versus e-mail but I'd take those days now in a heartbeat. Maybe by 2030, something like Matrix will have us back to what XMPP was doing and I'll be able to send a message to someone's shitty Teams from whatever Google's fifth chat replacement is by then.

It's even worse when I'm traveling in east Asia and there are like 5 different Korean and several Chinese chat networks in addition to WhatsApp trying to be the next LINE and becoming the one-stop access point for nearly everything. I'm honestly expecting to see a 7-11 integrated messaging network at some point.

We need a new Pidgin https://www.pidgin.im/ :(

There were a few brief wonderful years when I had AIM, FB Messenger, GChat, and a few lesser known protocols all in different tabs in the same window.

It's not like they all needed different interfaces; same data, different wire-noise...

For whatever reason enterprise was slow to adopt messaging. I think a lot of this floundering about by Microsoft was an attempt to get wide scale enterprise adoption of a messaging protocol, and make money off of it.

For cross service integration I recommend mattermost, too. It has plugins and a simple enough API you can use anything with almost anything else, even if you don't want to use mattermost clients.

I believe it's fragmented by country too.

Despite living in the US, I actually don't know what's dominant here...is it iMessage? WhatsApp?

Korea is dominated by KakaoTalk. I believe Japan is Line. China I believe has their own walled garden app ecosystems (WeChat & co.?)

Judging from what all my European friends use, WhatsApp dominates at least the UK and Western Europe?

China has WeChat and QQ (though WeChat is way more popular). Both are basically mini OSes at this point, with apps and other third party functionality able to be built on top of them. I'm not Chinese, but use both of these apps to stay in touch with Chinese friends and family.

Yep, WhatsApp for normal people in Europe; Telegram or Signal for those suspicious of Facebook.

I kind of miss XMPP, which seemed like the answer at one point. As it is, I need about six messaging apps (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Telegram, a Matrix client, Slack, and I'm probably forgetting one) plus SMS/iMessage to keep in touch with everyone.

In the U.S and Canada the dominant chat app is facebook messenger.

WhatsApp seems to dominate in Europe and South America.

In Asia, it's a mixture of whatsapp, LINE (Japan/Thailand/Korea), Alichat, Wechat. Australia is a mixture of FB messenger and Whatsapp for families. Kids use different services depending on how old, snapchat, tiktok, instagram, discord (very much so for kids in the "fortnite years").

LINE and Ali/We chat are now more like platforms, for example, LINE has a wallet called LINE Pay that you can use in retail stores that grew out of selling virtual stickers for their chat client. They integrate to transit services and other things too.

Also Viber that used to be the main contender of WhatsApp in Western Europe up until a couple of years ago. I believe it's still beating WhatsApp on market share in a couple of markets like Israel iirc.

WhatsApp dominates most of the world. Yes in Asia there are a few heavily used apps. Line. WeChat etc.

Even still most in Asia also use WhatsApp.

Source: me, I've lived on all continents

It's funny how Google Talk and MSN were so much popular but weren't able to successfully transition to mobile and capture that market. WhatsApp is number one messaging app in the world right now and probably will stay for some time.

What I like about whatsapp is that they don't do any bullshit. Unlike Viber, when they tried to pivot into some sort of social network for celebs and what not.

Because Facebook and Apple built closed networks that locked Talk (XMPP) out.

Even AOL Instant Messenger was awesome! I used it for almost 20 years. AOL could've turned it into Slack back in the 2000's. I used to work for startups that used private AIM chat rooms for ops issues, deployments, etc.

I miss it, used it since middle school. My wife and I used AIM until it shut down as our primary means of messaging even. RIP sweet prince.

I guess you might be able to say that ICQ is still around? And one of the largest messaging platforms around, if not the largest?

Of course I'm talking about the QQ variant, which is probably so far from the original ICQ that I have no leg to stand on making the above claim. Still, a very interesting story to follow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tencent_QQ

Acquired did a fantastic episode on Tencent (owner of QQ/WeChat)

https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/season-3-episode-10-tencent

And another far-from-original variant is still kicking, aptly named ‘ICQ’ [1]. AOL sold off its ICQ assets to Digital Sky Technologies (now Mail.ru) group [2] which continues to develop and invest in it to this day. From what I understand, like LiveJournal (acquired similarly by a Russian company Rambler [3], ICQ continues to have a sizable user base in Eastern Europe from what I gather.

[1] https://icq.com [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICQ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveJournal

Skype before Microsoft was great. It was simple and reliable.

Microsoft just kept making it slower, buggier, easier to eavesdrop on, and kept "refreshing" the UI over and over again until it became unbearable.

And now it seem Microsoft is pushing Teams instead of Skype. There are even two different Teams Apps in Windows 11, one for personal use, one for work.

That sounds like how there were two versions of MSN Messenger/Windows Messenger/Windows Live - one for 'personal' and the other for 'enterprise'. Cannot quite recall the exact differentiation now but I do recall many folks having problems with log-in credentials for one not working with the other about 20 years ago!

Same happened with Skype after it was bought by Microsoft, and I seem to recall this is relatively recent. There were (are?) two Skype clients - one for 'personal' (the original Skype) and another for 'enterprise' (rebranded Windows Live for Enterprise possibly?) and not compatible. Again, I recall trying to help confused Windows users figure out why the (incorrect) client wouldn't log-in with certain credentials.

Thats because there were also two different Skypes - Skype for Business (which was Lync) and Skype. Two totally different platforms with different code. God knows why they named them the same.

Teams is supposed to completely replace Skype for Business

Buying Skype for billions and then killing MSN to force people on to it is easily the worst decision I can think of by consumer-oriented big tech company after 2005. If anyone involved in the decision still works at Microsoft they're doing something wrong. People make mistakes but this was one that has ended up costing tens of billions in value (possibly 100+) and that even a child could've told you was an awful idea - I was pretty young and I sure could've! Maybe the failure to make Windows phones big is a bigger failure but that's more of a failure to produce a good product than one decision. You could name Yahoo "not buying" Facebook/Google but deciding not to do something is more understandable than throwing away a golden egg.

The same company buying Nokia (world's largest mobile phone company for years) only to let it rot completely wasn't much better.

> Hell, ICQ might still be around if AOL had put more development resources into it.

What are you saying? ICQ is still around.

I don't know anyone who uses it anymore, do you? :D

Google shouldn't have done its part to kill XMPP if they really cared about lock-in.

iMessage is incredibly popular with certain demographics in the United States -- it's an in-group signifier the way teens have always had in-group signifiers (when I was in high school, it was AIM, a Nokia, and wearing Abercrombie) and that isn't about bullying. If Google had its way, its products would be used as the ways to "bully" the out-group. So this is much ado about nothing.

It is notable that iMessage has persisted with its popularity in the US for as long as it has. And it is true that iMessage is definitely an ecosystem carrot, again, in the US. But in countries that didn't adopt SMS/MMS the same way we did in the US (b/c of cost/international variance/etc), the in-group messaging app is something else. It's always fascinating for me to go to other countries and see a ton of iPhone users not using iMessage but something else because that app has become the in-group signifier.

And every teen I know uses Discord more than they use almost anything else. The ranking typically goes Discord, IG, iMessage.

Having said all of that -- even if you took away iMessage, the iPhone would still be a status symbol/in-group signifier for a lot of people, especially young adults in the US. Samsung has had the best track record with some of its devices with approaching similar brand loyalty/"it" factor, but even if Apple adopted RCS -- it's not like the phone all the influencers and cool teens would be using would be Pixels. It would still be the iPhone for a host of reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with technology. White earbuds have been a fashion marker for 20 years now and that's what this comes down to. It isn't about lock-in or regulation or technology. It's about fashion.

> Google shouldn't have done its part to kill XMPP if they really cared about lock-in

Exactly this, Google was happy to be against open communication platforms when it felt it was in their interest but as soon as it goes the other way "Oh we should all be using RCS"

Reap what you sow

My problem with Apple's approach is they have essentially hijacked the SMS protocol and put a layer on top of it. Then they actively push against anything that would endanger that, including moving on to better standard protocols because it would eliminate some of the "prestige" or "status" that now comes with the bubble colors, reactions, etc. In the end that hurts not just Android users, but also Apple users.

I'm honestly surprised more people don't complain about it...and given Google is really the only other big phone software maker now, it is their role to try to say something imo. "You reap what you sow" (as this article says) honestly sounds ignorant (or just pro-Apple) and really ignores the major problem here. Google has been bad at messaging apps, that doesn't mean this concern isn't real or a fairly big problem. Especially when the stats show that this is creating a hardware monopoly for Apple (look at the stats for young people,) in 10-15 years this creates a much bigger hardware market share for Apple. That is not a desirable outcome.

> Apple's approach is they have essentially hijacked the SMS protocol

This is supposed to be a technical community so can we stop with this lazy abuse of terminology.

Apple has not hijacked the SMS protocol in any way, shape or form.

They've simply created an app that supports two protocols: SMS and iMessage with a UI that abstracts the difference.

> This is supposed to be a technical community so can we stop with this lazy abuse of terminology.

Since this is a technical community, and you're a technical person who presumably knows how iMessage / Apple's infrastructure works, can you explain if this is correct:

- I'm an iPhone user with phone number N. In Apple's system, I'm flagged as supporting the iMessage protocol. Presumably Apple has some gateway that routes messages, and this sends me down the iMessage route.

- I swap phones. I now own an Android device. I have the same phone number N.

- Apple's system is slow to update, and its gateway still sees me as an iPhone user supporting the iMessage protocol.

- All messages from other iPhone users to my phone number are routed incorrectly and I don't receive them until Apple updates its gateway to use SMS for my phone number.

If the above is correct, what would you call that? People who want to contact me have no idea what a protocol is, but Apple has impacted their ability to communicate with me. They think all text messages are the same, but this layer Apple has built isn't open or interoperable, and is additional friction for anyone wanting to switch off their platform.

It's very hard to excuse this behavior.

They have created an environment that takes an SMS protocol that users think is standard across all cellular devices, and is apart of their monthly phone plan, and instead uses their own protocol (but only for their own devices.) That is hijacking. What other word is there? The average user has no idea that their SMS is actually being rerouted by Apple into their own system, they just know the bubble color is different. Some often assume that because their desktop iMessage doesn't always recieve messages from Android phones that the Android system is broken, when in fact it's not. So you are rerouting an open standard to your own platform, and you are giving users a false impression on reliability of your competition...how is that not hijacking?

They held my number hostage for a while after I switched off iPhone. I think it took months for iPhone users to be able to message my number before it actually started reaching me again.

I think there's a lot of truth to the word "hijacking" here.

If I want to use the iOS messaging app to send an SMS message (not an iMessage) to another iOS user, how do I do that?

I’d say the problem is that Apple reserves this as a privilege for themselves.

On Android you can set Signal as your SMS handler and use it as a similar dual client. I miss that feature when using iOS.

Apple has absolutely hijacked SMS. I missed a text from a family member for months becuase Apple decided it should go to my iPad that I never knowingly activated iMessage on.

I don't know what you'd have them do that doesn't result in them giving up a competitive advantage.

They're a minority phone player. They have their own messaging platform as a feature of their mobile OS, so making it available to other platforms is anathema to their own business goals and success of their own platform.

I don't feel hurt or victimized by their choices here. It's not in my way at all.

Minority phone maker? Apple is the biggest corporation on earth...and make up the majority of smart phone sales in the US. Yes they would have to give up a competitive advantage. That's the point.

There is nothing stopping Apple from implementing RCS. They can continue to go their own way with Apple devices, and support RCS for interop with non-Apple devices and for users who would rather not route their messaging through Apple.

That they choose not to support a standard protocol as a competitive advantage is exactly the problem.

Imagine if you bought a 4K television that had AppleTV built in, and then you find out that the 4K feature is only available if you use the built in AppleTV interface, and HDMI is limited to 1080P.

There is a case to be made that such anti-competitive behavior is illegal.

You are describing anti-competitive behavior: Harming their own customers and others to protect marketshare.

A messaging platform is for communication, not just for the individual customer.

what's the better standard? RCS is trash. Google is literally pulling a "think of the children" campaign when the children don't even care what anyone is using because they're all on snapchat, whatsapp, and everything else.

> Google is literally pulling a "think of the children" campaign when the children don't even care what anyone is using because they're all on snapchat, whatsapp, and everything else.

Except stats don't back up what you are saying, at least not in the US. RCS is no less trash than SMS, it's actually an improvement over SMS. They could come together, along with carriers, to create an even better standard but one party is holding out...and blocking any innovation (hint, it's Apple.) I don't get how people are ok with them hijacking an open standard.

An open standard would be better. Google should be able to follow apple's specification to add the additional features, and when apple updates the standard, Android texts turn green until the update is pushed.

Worse than that, they hijack the whole contact. I have an iPad and an Android phone. Whenever someone with an iPhone would send me a message it would always go to my iPad via iMessage. I think the sender could change it on their end to use SMS for my messages, but you have to explain it to every iPhone using friend and they all tell you it “just works” with iPhones. Lol.

Eventually I had to disable iMessage.

> In the end that hurts not just Android users, but also Apple users.

Apple iMessage user. The water is fine here.

Isn't this just embrace, extend, extinguish all over again?

Both companies are in the wrong: Google for its half-assed and broken messaging solutions and its current claims that RCS will suffice, and Apple for promoting lock-in by only supporting iMessage and SMS and nothing else and being quite clear that they consider this a competitive advantage.

There needs to be an interoperable, highly functional solution that doesn't depend on wireless carriers.

Why does Apple need to do anything at all? It's not like there aren't a gazillion iMessage alternatives, so you can't argue monopoly. There is no lock-in, there is just lock-out. The lock-in that is being described is literally the result of building a good product that people don't want to get rid of (for whatever reason, including social pressure). But there is nothing actually locking people in to iMessage from a technological perspective.

Apple built a superior service, and the price of using that service is an iPhone. Does it suck for Google and Android users? Yes. Is that the whole point? Yes. Is there anything wrong with that? I don't think so.

Apple stands between me and my carrier’s sms service, and then layers it’s own service on top of that. There is no API messaging app developers can use to do the same thing. It’s clearly monopolistic behavior to interlink your service with a basic infrastructure service. It doesn’t matter to me if a company achieves a monopoly - what matters to me is them seeking one in a way that harms users. Google is guilty of this, apple is guilty of this, hell - since there’s money to be made and no good enforcement of this - most large companies are guilty of this.

I think people strangely confuse competition with monopoly nowadays. The point of competition is to drive people to use your product because it’s superior. That’s the whole benefit. Apple provides a competitive messaging service and others can provide alternatives if they think they can do better in some way. The point of monopoly is to crush competition. Apple isn’t stopping Google from developing a better messaging service. Honestly, they should put more thought into developing features than bashing competition on Twitter.

Completely agree.

I'm an iPhone user, but rarely use iMessage. Most of my instant messaging actually happens on some combination of Google Chat! (or whatever they call it these days), KakaoTalk (I'm Korean) and WhatsApp. Plenty of other alternatives out there too.

I think I have just one friend who I use iMessage with regularly.

You haven't tried getting rid of iMessage after embracing it: it's a nightmare.

It's like a zombie dog that will follow you whatever you do, and will keep eating messages sent to you again and again. There's an ecosystem of tutorials online to go the right step to minimize the effect (e.g. https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/three-steps-...)

That doesn't look like a "Apple did no wrong" situation from any angle we look at it.

How soon we have forgotten the lessons of the browser wars..

What do you mean by "Apple only supporting iMessage"? If I want WhatsApp I use that app, it sends notifications, it can even ring my device for a call. Same with FB/Signal/Telegram/etc.

The view that Apple is forced to support other protocols or networks "just because" is pure idealism.

The history of technology and business is a "maze of twisty little passages, all alike" for longer than we admit. Interoperability relies on government/intergovernmental mandating of standards - if you leave it to industry you get patent encumbered formats (see H.265).

> There needs to be an interoperable, highly functional solution that doesn't depend on wireless carriers.

Carriers have a lot of control over Android and they simply didn't want to be cut out. Google could have just copied iMessage from the start if it wasn't for carriers not wanting to be cut out of messaging.

Why should Apple need to "support" anything else?

You can download WhatsApp or Signal or Facebook Messenger or whatever else you might want, and have those work fine. iMessage works really well, and Apple enjoys some network effects here, but you say "they consider this a competitive advantage" like that's a bad thing.

They made a better mousetrap here. Bully for them!

You can download WhatsApp or Signal or Facebook Messenger or whatever else you might want, and have those work fine.

Signal on Android is a far better experience than Signal on iOS, because the former allows you to choose it as your default SMS app and the latter does not.

> Apple for promoting lock-in by only supporting iMessage and SMS

In Europe I see people using anything but iMessage, so...

Because in Europe Apple doesn't have a dominant market position.

In the US in many places (like teenage users) they do have a dominant market position, and they abuse by actively trying to worsen the user experience of buyers of their products who dare to include an Android phone user in their friend groups.

But apple does support many other messaging platforms. For example, i use WhatsApp and signal. So perhaps their default messaging app doesn’t support everything, but that’s partially because they’re making iMessage a strong offering.

Like Signal?

Like Matrix. Signal can't even be installed without Apple or Google.

I mean yes, but Signal needs to grow up and decide if it's going to find a way to play ball with business, or stick to it's ideological purity and weird cryptocurrency experiments (I use Signal solely for all my messaging now).

Spot on.

iMessage took over because iPhone users could no longer send group SMS. Apple killed group SMS. Google never did this. Only tried to change Sms and enhance it.

What are you talking about? It’s possible to send group SMS messages on iPhone.

Apple killed group SMS?

One of the group chats my wife uses for work is all SMS users except for her.

Or am I misreading your comment?

... I have sent group SMS (MMS) with an iPhone.

It’s strange how many apple fan boys are all over this forum trying to downvote me.

Honestly, Google has spent far too long creating and throwing away messaging applications. This is almost entirely their fault for not enabling an easily cross-platform method years ago.

I've made the switch to Signal, my girlfriend uses it on her iPhone to replace iMessage since I made the switch to Android last month. She can also use it on her Windows laptop unlike iMessage. My family members who are tech-y enough use Signal with me, and when they're not, I can still send standard SMS through the app. Signal even implements responses similar to iMessage 'likes' and 'hearts'. I don't think I could praise Signal enough for the great implementation they've built. Their crypto-enterprise this past year did make me feel a bit slighted, but as I don't use that feature, I can't comment on it.

It almost seems like launching a messaging app is some sort of rite of passage for a certain kind of PM or engineer at Google.

I'm sure there will be more attempts to come.

Can I log into the same Signal account on two mobile devices yet? That’s the showstopper for me.

Nope, and it is a completely artificial restriction. For example:

- iPhone + iPad? Supported.

- Android Phone + Android Tablet? Supported.

- iPhone + iPhone (no SIM card/no phone number)? Not supported.

- Android Phone + Android Phone (no SIM card)? Not supported.

This, according to them, because they want to simplify the setup experience. But in reality adding a bypass option to the onboarding process to provide the tablet setup experience would be trivial and should have happened three years ago.

You can add this to the "list" like no Gifs on PC even though the code exists for mobile clients, and they share a lot of source code already.

Not exactly mobile, they have an iPad app that'll let you login into the same account. But not available on Android tablets. Or on other phones, but clearly the technology is there.

You can send SMS through the [Signal] app?! Been using it for a few weeks now but haven't figured this out. Or do you mean send SMS through the stock SMS app?

Aye, you can send SMS messages through the Signal app itself.

To do so, you have to go into your default apps, set the default messaging app to Signal (factory default is Messages for Pixel devices, likely whatever Samsung uses for Samsung devices). I just checked to see if there were any extra settings you have to enable in the Signal app, but it doesn't appear to be so. If a user uses both SMS or encrypted chat, you can long press the send button and decide between which it will use.

Do note, that any previous messages sent via SMS from other apps won't show up in Signal for message history. Likewise the same if/when you switch to another SMS app.

[android only]

The thing about iMessage is that you don’t need a separate app. You can have iMessage and SMS right next to each other.

Google never seemed to understand this convenience. They released Allo without any SMS support and were hostile so suggestions that it was a gating feature to adoption. Allo predictably failed as it offered no benefits over competing services, and no SMS fallback so that it could be the single messaging app.

If Google wants to level the playing field they should do it by competing and innovating. I suggest they start that endeavor by better understanding why people actually use iMessage in the first place.

The really sad thing is that they actually had this.

Hangouts on a Google Fi phone used to let you consolidate everything to hangouts - SMS, Chats, Calls, etc. It was a pain it was limited to Fi, but it worked just fine. You could also pop open Hangouts in Gmail in your browser and there all your sms messages were, nicely grouped and tracked.

Then apparently hangouts stopped being cool enough - so Google decided to shutter it in favor of "Google Messages". Technically - "Messages for web" also supports the same feature set as the integrated hangouts, but it FUCKING SUCKS.

The phone/browser syncing is bad, the UI is a complete regression. Just the process of enabling it required me to actually contact support at google fi (you have to open settings, disable previous sms settings for fi, stop hangouts, update your google account, and then opt into a beta).

Basically - Hangouts did exactly this, but Google continues to act like Google, and shutter any product that might actually be a good foundation to build/maintain, since Google has shown AGAIN AND AGAIN that it can't actually maintain any product.

Google can innovate just fine - it's the follow through that they lack.

I also had the Hangouts/sms combined app on my Google Nexus. But as you said, after annoying everyone because the sms app was suddenly gone, they annoyed everyone again because it was suddenly back. And then the annoyed everyone with several new messengers, though I am not sure who still payed attention at that time. Leaving out how annoying the death of google talk before all that was.

Google has messengers on every android phone preinstalled and nobody uses them, because they create them, never significantly update them and then abandon them. It's completely their fault they don't even get a mention when people talk about messaging apps.

Strong agree, and here's my anecdote:

Around the time that they started f-ing around with 15 different chat apps and killing off products, and integrations with other products, was when a Google account with "integration" started to become more of a hassle than worthwhile to me, personally. I used to use gChat, Hangouts, etc. but now I just use iPhone stuff since everyone I know has iPhone stuff. Apple hasn't deprecated anything since at least 5 years ago (the last time I had a work iPhone) so to me that signals that I can keep iPhones and not have to continually figure out what the "new way to chat" is, like I had to with Google. I've almost completely migrated from Google, except for Photos (which is superior to alternatives, IMO; I can actually backup my Google Photos from my Linux CLI whereas I couldn't figure out how to reliably do that with Apple Photos) and Google Search usage. I have had my Gmail account since ~2004 and I basically killed/deleted all of the services in my Google account now (even Google Voice sucks now, so I basically abandoned my phone number I used from ~2001 that I ported into it) except for forwarding email to my new email address and using Photos. I used to be "all in" with Google, but they made it too hard to keep using stuff that kept being killed off, so they dug their own grave.

Yes I used Hangouts and Google Fi for this exact reason. It was perfect. If they would have just rolled this out globally to all Android users I believe Google would have won the messaging battle with Apple.

I've since switched from Android to iOS, but Fi+Hangouts was amazing at the time. Too bad Google seemingly abandoned both projects.

This is what annoyed me the most. Google was there, they had an awesome solution. Then they just abandoned it. Even in its old, clunky state, it was still immensely useful, and user feedback was -very- vocal about its utility. They just don't care.

Yup, and didn't this exist pre Google Fi? Maybe it was just certain android phones, but I remember messaging one or two friends from hangouts in Gmail while at work, and they would respond really quick because they got the messages on their android phones. This may have been back before iPhones had SMS handoff built into iMessage on Macs, so in a way Google was more advanced than Apple's solution then.

Of course Google has killed all that many times over. They made their own bed.

I don't think they even need to innovate much.

I never understood why Google didn't just clone Apple's app many years ago. Hangouts was pretty close - take that, add e2e encryption for in-app threads (like iMessage) and make sure SMS is there as a peer. Make a client for the major platforms and then let the project slip into maintenance mode.

Instead, they championed RCS which (last time I checked) isn't encrypted which is borderline unethical IMHO.

According to Google they have crypto in RCS: https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/15/22534173/google-android-s...

I remember being baffled by the introduction of duo and allo when they already had both messaging and video solutions in other apps.

Network effects are big and they were intentionally reducing theirs! Shockingly it hasn't gone well since then.

I don't have duo or allo or anything like that on my Android phone, but I have one friend that I get different background color - a darker blue than normal sms, read receipts, and encryption, in the Google Android "Messages" app.

We've never really dug in to why, as we're both using the default app. No other conversation has ever had this blue message and lock symbol and checkmarks going on.

Yep, I have one of those as well. Just one...

RCS doesn’t need a separate app either. You can have SMS and RCS conversations in the same app regardless of if you’re using Google Messages/Samsung Messages/etc

> The thing about iMessage is that you don’t need a separate app.

Given iMessage basically has no base outside of the US because everyone uses Whatsapp or Line I'm not convinced this is terribly neccessary.

This comment is in response to Google complaining specifically amount iMessage usage in the US.

I fully agree with the article. Google shot their own foot in many many things and is now slowly reaping the rewards. They had complete carte blanche to do as they wished on Android in terms of messaging, and they chose to run around like a chicken with its head cut off. RCS is a non-starter, no one outside of the US is eager to go back to an SMS-like protocol.

HN opinion has been negative on Google for a while, and this is filtering into the consumer landscape.

It doesn't mean they are going out of business tomorrow or at all, but I see a period of MSFT-like regression, reflection and then a Nadella to bring them out of their malaise.

On the other hand, the US is unique for this because iMessage is not as popular outside the US.

I see a period of MSFT-like regression

I've always seen it this way:

Facebook is trying to be the new Google.

Google is trying to be the new Microsoft.

Microsoft is trying to be the new IBM.

IBM is trying to be the new Oracle.

Meanwhile, Apple is trying to be the new Sony.

Apple was trying to be Sony in the 90s and early 2000s.

At this point, Sony wishes it could be Apple.

After reading the story about Google taking away a feature from their speakers, due to a patent dispute with Sonos, I can't help but wonder if the reason Google does such a terrible job at messaging has something to do with patents. Maybe they know they need to compete with iMessage but just can't because some patent farm or other company got there first?

Surely between one of their 8 messaging apps/teams they have the required expertise and patents? I'm not particularly keen on giving them any benefit of the doubt. They're one of the biggest, richest companies in the world.

RCS is garbage. Here’s why:

[0] https://messages.google.com/disable-chat

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202724

[2] https://support.google.com/messages/answer/10262381?hl=en

While I’m not a proponent of Apple’s walled garden approach, I think this stuff about bullying over the blue indicator is just Google using something to shame Apple so that Google can get what they want. Even if Apple introduced RCS to their phones to give better compatibility to Android features, the blue indicator would still show that the message was sent with end-to-end encryption which is something RCS doesn’t do according to this article. In my mind, a better solution for Apple would be to release an iMessage app on the Play Store or to work with Google on building a better messaging service that includes those features. But Apple probably won’t do that because it’s actually better for sales if they do have features that allow their users to feel superior to others, as cynical as that sounds.

I'd have more sympathy for Google if they hadn't spent the last 20 years creating and killing messaging apps: Google Talk, Plus, Buzz, Wave, Hangouts, Allo, ... And, instead of fixing it, the VP in charge is blaming 12 year old "bullies".

iMessage is really good because Apple focused on making a great product.

Blaming bullies is the new "get out of jail free" card.

Google just deployed the same logic to remove dislike counts on YouTube, despite those being valuable for users.

Of note is Google never took the plunge on any of these the way Apple did. Which one of those products failed back to SMS messenger for compatibility and provided a default rich communication option like iMessage? They've never tried anything like iMessage, no idea why. It would be a different story if they were goading Apple in public to interoperate with their version of iMessage, beloved and used by all Android users. But this position they're taking here just looks kind of lame.

> end-to-end encryption which is something RCS doesn’t do according to this article

The article is not quite correct. The base RCS standard does not include E2E encryption, but at least Google's implementation includes it as an extension. Not an ideal situation -- IMO it should be a required-to-implement part of the base -- but it's definitely there for those of us using Google's infra, at least.

How does E2EE work if one portion of the chain is not encrypted? Would it only work if both you and your message partner installed the extension?

Part of the elegance of iMessage is that E2EE isn't optional.

It's fitting that Google seized on this article that completely ignores that some kids don't have a smartphone at all, the article's author didn't even ask the interviewees about kids without phones being ostracized . This was probably placed by Google's PR dept.

Kids without phones may even, gasp, be bullied over it. Wouldn't that mean that Google, Apple and all handset vendors benefit from fear of bullying over not having a phone at all?

A very brief history of every Google messaging app

https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/21/22538240/google-chat-allo...

List of discontinued Google products.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discon...

That article misses Google Currents (https://currents.google.com/), which is what Google+ became.

From European point of view and our SMS infrastructure, I find really funny this kind of discussion.

Besides, almost everyone uses Whatsapp, regardless of the phone brand.

If you're outside of Europe, it really depends on the country. Some countries it might be Telegram, Whatsapp, Line, WeChat, etc. There's no real universal standard.

Nobody outside the US uses iMessage or SMS.

I can guarantee that plenty of people use SMS in Europe.

In fact, here is a small taste only with French data, which I guess is still an European country.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1188330/sms-traffic-volu...

I wish that was true. Recently in Europe and couldn’t sign up for a few taxi apps because they required sms and it didn’t route correctly.

I am outside of the US and almost exclusively use iMessage. Rarely Facebook Messenger.

Canada still uses it. As data is expensive

Not just from a European POV, but also from Eastern-Asian and South-American POV. I don't know the rest of the world.

For me and my peers, SMS is for 2 factor auth, spammy advertising, and the occasional parent that mistakenly sends a SMS instead of a WhatsApp message.

Every young person in Sweden uses Snapchat

People forget that Google had a perfectly good messaging service called Google Talk that lived inside Gmail (the biggest product besides the iPhone at that point), interoperated with XMPP and AIM back in 2007, and threw it all away in 2011 as part of their mad dash to make a Facebook competitor in Google+. With Google+, we got Hangouts, which later became a standalone product in 2013 so that they could sunset Google Talk.

If they had just kept iterating on Google Talk and made it similar in functionality to iMessage, they would be in such better shape today. Instead, they’ve thrown away the last ten years on messaging.

and they were quite quick to drop federated XMPP, because.

Before Google complains about Apple holding back interoperable rich texting with RCS, Google should make RCS work with Google Voice. The people in charge of product at Google remain utterly incompetent. Get your house in order.

Yep, and before Google complain that Apple doesn't allow iMessage on Android, maybe they should make sure their closest product (Messages by Google) is available on iOS?

How do you expect that to work? Apple doesn't allow third-party SMS apps, and as far as I understand RCS is also pretty closely tied in with carriers so it probably wouldn't work without official support from Apple either.

Back in the original Palm Pre days, webOS had the best messenger app.

Would do regular SMS messages but you could configure your AOL, MSN, and even Facebook messaging at one point IIRC all inside of the same interface. It's too bad it lost out compared to Android. Was so far ahead in so many areas.

Right, it had a jabber/XMPP client for that brief window when everyone was pretending to try to standardize. Google, AOL, MSN, Facebook, they were all (mostly) interoperable. Now we're back to all walled gardens.

What a sad place we've arrived compared to where we started

That feeling when iPhone finally gets a feature I had on my TouchPad.

webOS was just the best.

Google is really becoming the old Microsoft. In old Microsoft it was believed that competing teams for the same product would lead evolution for the best product. Google is now doing that.

Hangouts was cool much before iMessage and Zoom as mentioned in the article. I remember it being my main messaging platform. I remember being amazed with the video chat quality with multiple people. Google was at least 5-6 years ahead of the game. But then, it just fell more and more behind.

As far as Google products go, nothing is user-centric and everything gets clunkier. Only Google product that feels staying alive is Google maps and maybe Google search. Not that Bing is better but there are times, I Bing a search to find something I can't find in Google search. I feel like even Gmail is falling behind now; it stayed the same billion years. Simple filtering, organizing tools stayed the same.

Nope, search is toast too

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/19/google-...

https://twitter.com/mwseibel/status/1477701120319361026 (posted on HN)

Hilariously, I had to use bing and HN's algolia search to find these

I have read many comments here and in other places saying that Apple makes the green SMS bubbles annoying and hard to read. But from looking at this screenshot, I don't get that vibe at all. They don't look more annoying than the blue ones. In fact, I'd say in the top part of both screenshots, the blue ones look like they have less contrast than the green ones.

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/scree...

The blue ones have more contrast than the green ones, making them easier to read.

Convert that screenshot to grayscale in Photoshop to see

https://i.imgur.com/U8mEB93.png

This has always bothered me. Apple definitely knows this and is doing it on purpose. The color green they chose is just hard on the eyes. They don't think it's a good color.

That color was used for all messages before imessage was a thing. Blue was added later.

It will look different depending on your settings[0] and the type of screen, affecting the gamma and gamut.

On mine, that screenshot looks like the green has an unpleasantly high saturation compared to the blue. The higher saturation increases the perceived value/lightness, lowering contrast.

[0] On my phone (a Pixel5a running Android 12), Display > Colors is set to Adaptive, rather than Natural or Boosted.

The color isn't the problem, never was. The color simply indicates that the person is using basic SMS, and that has an effect on all members of the conversation.

There was an article making the rounds the other day that argued that Apple had changed the green bubbles to have less contrast and thus be harder to read that they were in previous releases.

> so it lacks many of the features you would want from a modern messaging service, like end-to-end encryption

This bit annoyed me; while the base RCS spec does not include E2E encryption, Google implements it as an extension. Now, I don't know how their implementation works (is it the Signal protocol? is it some homegrown thing? haven't looked into this), and it absolutely should be in the base RCS spec as something that's required to implement, but saying it lacks E2E encryption is not quite correct.

Yes. When RCS is enabled for both parties and they are both using Messages, it uses the Signal Protocol for all one-to-one chats. It does not work for group chats.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messages_(Google)

Good to know, thank you for the reference! Disappointed to learn that E2EE only works for 1:1 conversations, not group chats. I wonder why they chose to limit it in that way.

More RCS opinions on author's Twitter: https://twitter.com/RonAmadeo/status/1480679515298934786?ref...

So RCS is bad because it's messaging based on phone number rather than email address? Why isn't SMS bad?

See his next tweet: https://twitter.com/RonAmadeo/status/1480679860381138947

I think he's right: the big problem I have with SMS is that it's run by the carriers, who are terrible at non-phone infrastructure — that's how you get SMS delivery latency ranging from seconds to days, completely opaque to the user, and new features are a long, slow grind. RCS preserves that model going forward.

SMS would be terrible as a new solution now. It is still useable because it works in any situation where you get a 2G signal, but it is mostly used as a fallback. And around here SMSes are free and unlimited in €2/month plans (data is the new cash cow).

Imagine if Google had implemented the small feature set of iMessage and supported it on all OSes. Imagine how much market share they could have captured.

What you're describing is WhatsApp. So we don't need to speculate.

iMessage benefited tremendously from being the default. Combine that with Apple's mobile market share in the US and you get the present situation.

My gripe isn't really that it won in the US. Its that you need Apple hardware to participate.

Google may be self interested but they're right about one thing: knowingly allowing and fueling this social dynamic is inconsistent with Apple's brand. But it was never really about values, just making consumers feel good about their purchases.

I also described signal and a dozen other competitors. None of those apps are made by Google. Google ships Android. I don't think my point should have been missed.

> What you're describing is WhatsApp.

Can WhatsApp do sms/mms now?

It's funny to read all the apple support here. I would guess most of these people have iphones and think apple just made a better product than google. That's not the issue nor the truth. Android messages works great for Android to Android, just like iMessage, because it does the same thing: routes messages through Google servers if it can, and falls back to sms when it can't. So the issue is that Android to Apple (and vice versa) messaging sucks and Google is looking to fix that. Yes, it's in their business interest, but it's also in all consumers' interest. Though, making it better is certainly not in Apple's interest. They control this "cool-kid" narrative that has all apple users looking down upon anyone who doesn't use apple and thinking apple is just a better product.

I always considered RCS to be raising the lowest common denominator up a bit from SMS, not really a replacement for any of the various data-based messaging services.

Google made a pixel phone. I liked it. Unlimited photo storage for life they said. Google hangouts and duo they said. Google this and that they said. Seems they rug pulled on every one of those programs.

Now, what is the selling point of a Pixel phone? They are designed to spy on and abuse their users by default. The entire business model is built around collecting data on you for sale to other parties. Phones are VERY personal, most people wouldn't even share their phone with a friend!

Maybe phones have just become too personal as a device? Maybe it is time to close the book on businesses like Google that ship shiny spyware where the utility features of a phone (messaging) is an afterthought...

I still have an iPhone for now (am waiting for mobile Linux to become just a little more mature) but I’ve turned off iMessage. When I get asked about how I can be reached by IM I tell people they can find me on Signal.

Been doing this for about two years and now ~80% of my personal conversations are over Signal. And most of these friends are not very technical.

I love my little successful rebellion against the walled garden. And it will make my eventual transition away from iOS much easier.

Just a somewhat related personal anecdote, sorry to deviate a bit from topic.

EDIT: Yes, Signal is centralized and I would have loved to use Matrix. But the clients are bad. Email me if you want to build a better one

Surely at least one of Google's 87 different chat platforms can compete.

Google shouldn't have given up on hangouts. It worked, sms, messaging, internet calls all from one app. Instead they wanted to get behind an open standard which works but is tied to carriers and phone numbers...

I travel a lot and now essentially live in 2 different countries at once so tying all my communication to a phone number is a no-go. Now FB messenger ironically is my go-to (only real cross-platform app that everyone seems to have), even though I'm not a fan of FB at all.

Don't forget carriers got us here by charging PER text.

I remember when iMessage came out, and for some people it was a way to get away from getting charged for texts. Especially international! Things have changed so much it's hard to see the original inspiration in 200x.

As for interop, in 2020s it looks like platforms are the style du jour, things like XMPP didn't quite cut it. I'd be happy to see that change, but for google to lay this claim sounds lazy to me.

This was a great line, and sums up Google's chat history:

"If the company really wants to do something about iMessage, it should try competing with it."

Google really needs to get its nearest competitor under control before they go after others. But Google can't get itself under control. Too busy shooting its own products before they can run, walk or even crawl.

Bikeshedding at scale. This is what it looks like. I'm surprised that their home automation systems don't have some incompatible chat platform embedded in them.

Google had a great thing with the integration between Google Fi SMS and Hangouts. They could have added E2E encryption and had a comparable product to iMessage. Instead they killed it and switched to the next messaging system flavor of the week and now I can now longer see SMS messages in my gmail window and the whole thing is much worse.

That's rich coming from Google.

If you're a Google Fi users (cell phone service) you have to do some wonky hacks to make iMessage work because Google doesn't support it. Then every time you run a software update, you have to re-enable iMessage.

Google lost a fight, and is crying about it.

They do EVERYTHING in their power to screw over people on iPhones... and then they want Apple to play fair? Ha.

The worst thing is that when you travel between countries, iMessage is really the only good way to text friends without getting silly international text fees.

Therefore, all of my friends have to have iPhones... or I've basically stopped texting them. It's sad. But hey, that's on the phone companies too for charging money for texts. It's all shitty.

But Google being shitty and then bitching about Apple... that's rich.

iMessage is built in to every iPhone so that’s 70% there, and has a free vs paid indicator(blue/green), Us vs Them, private vs not private.

> and has a free vs paid indicator(blue/green), Us vs Them, private vs not private.

Or, in less loaded and hyperbolic terms, a visual indicator of the medium used for the conversation.

Us (iMessage) vs Them (Those without iOS or macOS) vs Those without smartphones (Mail) vs Those without internet (Phone) vs Those without phone or internet (Maps)

The state of chat shows just how much of a miracle the federated interoperability of email is.

I guess that business were never built upon chats, while email (and conventional mail) is really the backbone of the enterprise world

When I lived overseas several years ago, and was on an ancient plan that only allowed 200 free SMS messages, the blue vs green was a critical distinction. After my free SMS allotment, it indicated whether I was being charged or not.

Jony Ive fancies himself a wizard of design. Well, he dropped the ball when he decided to go with white text on a light green background. This is called low-contrast visibility and reduces accessibility for those with visual impairments.

Jony and Apple could have left a switch setting for black letters instead, but no, the Apple way is read white letters on a mid-tone gradient.

My last iPhone, I never upgraded it from iOS 6 because I didn't agree with this design direction, and I have to say it's a breath of fresh air using Android because you don't have to deal with a single guy making all the decisions for you.

Settings>Accessibility>Display & Text Size>Increase Contrast takes care of that across all Apple apps and most third-party ones.

LOL Google is pontificating on a messenger app, of all things? Google, I'm not sure you're qualified to have an opinion on this topic, given your historical failures in this space :)

Google is just jealous they’re not able to read the messages and show ads, Remember Google Allo the shameless app that reads every message and “suggests” businesses automatically?

Google did this to themselves, and now are crying that the law should protect them, despite them having larger market share than iOS.

RCS would be a regression for people who /do/ use iMessage, as RCS can randomly drop encryption, does not support multiple devices per account, and does not support group messaging. In addition to that, RCS's feature set is defined by carrier groups, who like to charge extra for "value add"/new features, and who don't move at the speed of tech release schedules.

But it would be a step up for people who use SMS on iPhone, which is everybody who texts a non-iPhone user, which is everybody. It would also be a step up for every Android user who texts an iPhone user that doesn't support rich texting. Apple is wrong not to support an interoperable rich text protocol, and Google is also wrong not to support it in Google Voice.

It would still need green bubble treatment as the security guarantees are weaker than iMessage or any of the myriad google chat systems.

At its base level it is meant to be e2e encrypted but that fails frequently enough that google has to have special UI to indicate the failure, even though they endeavor to minimize how visible that indication is.

For group chats (the ones that seem to pop up in examples) RCS does nothing: it isn’t e2e.

Group e2e is challenging, which is why it’s still rare even though it has been the behaviour of messages’ group chats since day 1. That said it is mind blowing to me that the carriers specified RCS’s group protocols as anything other than fully e2e. If you’re going to make it a standard you don’t get to half ass it. :-/

Then as others have said, in RCS your keys and account are tied to your phone number. This is not as much of a problem in the US, but in many countries changing carrier means changing number.

I will listen to Google's plea when it stops siphoning web browsing behavior from Chrome, tying Android phones to Google accounts and banning genuine scientific debates on Youtube.

Heh, now Google feels the pain of proprietary protocols. Had Google pushed for XMPP and RSS odds are they wouldn't lose so miserably to Apple and Facebook on the social side.

Lol

It's bizarre how many people here say "oh, walled garden lockin of communications is fine because the alternative is Facebooks app people use outside the US!"

If people can disable iMessages, and also use other messaging apps, what is the issue here? If people don’t want to be in the “walled garden” are they not allowed to switch from iPhone to Android? Certainly someone willing to dish out the cost of an iPhone can afford an alternative device if they wanted one.

All Apple has to do is wait this out as the social ostracizing is just a convenient side effect of their scarlet lettering. The color coding was made to inform users that SMS fallback was being used if green, which went on to mean "unencrypted". Monopolies are tolerated if no anti-competitive practices are employed, here, the competitor shot itself in the foot 13 times and asked Apple "why did you do this".

> "Teens and college students said they dread the ostracism that comes with a green text. The social pressure is palpable, with some reporting being ostracized or singled out after switching away from iPhones."

This can't be true, because if it is there is bigger problem than some google's protocol. Why are they still torturing kids with these parades? Get some celebrities to make the green texts cool, this is madness.

Google used YouTube in the same way against Windows Phone. They actively made it technically and legally difficult for Microsoft to develop their own YouTube app for WP while only developing a version for iPhones and android. At least with sms you can still functionally use messaging, but google closed off entire services by actively preventing them from being developed for their competitors platform back in the day.

Has anyone tried out the open source project BlueBubbles?

"Server for forwarding iMessages to clients within the BlueBubbles App ecosystem"

You have to have a mac desktop/laptop/VM to use it. Pretty complex setup process, but looks promising.

https://github.com/BlueBubblesApp/BlueBubbles-Server

I remember when the ethos at Google was to compete on technical excellence. Yes, those days are long gone. Yes, technical excellence isn't enough to "win" the IM market (assuming that winning is possible or even desirable). However, it never stops hurting to see the change in tone.

For a company that is reticent about so many important problems, this seems like poor form.

RCS is an excellent messaging system if you completely disregard the fact that the internet exists. It's basically the SMS v1.1, about 15 years too late.

For the rest of the world, I don't think it'll ever pick up at all. SMS is long dead in the past, and, AFAIK, only still relevant in the US. Elsewhere, SMS is for verification codes and spam.

The vast majority of iphone users just do not care about imessage, much less even realize that they are sending an imessage instead of a text. If there are really groups of kids who ostracize people because their message bubble is green or whatever that does not surprise me. Kids find 100 dumb excuses to make fun of their peers all the time.

Tell them to tip a few tens of millions into funding Matrix. Go back to the good old days and give it another chance.

Google is just complaining that they're too dumb to make something, improve on it, and keep it around.

The only bad part here is that YouTube's days are numbered. The other stuff doesn't matter. I suspect that worldwide iMessage and whatever Google is pushing on a given day is a rounding error.

Google isn’t dumb. They are an advertising company that creates hype with other experimental products (to increase stock prices) they fully intend to dismantle, and buys out functional tech companies.

They are using hype to increase their stock and axe them later to show a better earnings report further increasing stock prices.

They are intelligent and runs on innovative hype but at their heart they’re an advertising company.

How are YouTube's day numbered? I see no competitor in the space at all.

By some measures, they've already been overtaken by TikTok.[0] That's what a YouTube competitor looks like.

[0]https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/7/22660516/tiktok-average-wa...

iMessage seems like the WeChat of America. It has a ton of integrations but if you exist in any other part of the world, it really doesn't make any sense to use it, since maybe 1 out of 5 people will be reachable.

SMS is like a spam graveyard where 2FA codes and other regulatory compliance related stuff shows up. SMS is primarily texts from my bank and spammers. Most folks in the rest of the world are using WhatsApp, with the occasional country where Telegram is more popualr.

Messaging with a layer of rich features for billions seems like a hard problem. I'm not sure what iMessage is built on, but WhatsApp is using customized erlang/ejabberd and Telegram is its own golang MTProto stack. Each probably handle millions of connections on FreeBSD or something I suspect.

I use a Pixel 6 and Ipad Pro (11) daily. It would be nice if they got along more.

Larry Page wanted to buy WhatsApp so Google can compete in IM app business but WhatsApp sold to Facebook. I think Google had Gmail chat called Gchat, that thing could've been successful idk how it failed tbh.

Google infighting plus a bit of a complete failure to push back against American carriers.

Yea but it doesn't make sense since they were already partnered with carriers who were offering Android phones to their customers.

Google needs to stop complaining and make RCS web accessible like hangouts was. messages.google.com is not it. that requires your cell phone to be on to pass through the texts.

I don't know about blue and green bubbles, but it is super annoying when somebody "likes" my message. Really? A simple Ok or Thanks will suffice.

It's interesting how country specific this is - in the UK most people use WhatsApp so this is not an issue (although that does create its own issues)

I'm sorry, but what you're saying is impossible. The HN comment section has made it clear that Apple has a monopoly on messaging, and no one can compete with them.

> Google once had a functional competitor to iMessage called Google Hangouts. Circa 2015, Hangouts was a messaging powerhouse

Is it still a powerhouse if no one uses it?

They killed Hangouts, but they first specifically killed SMS integration.

The American is hitting themselves in confusion!

These threads are hilarious for anyone that's not part of the chosen 3% (or whatever) of the worlds population.

I only use Signal over SMS because Signal is encrypted and has groupchats. Those are the only features I would need in an SMS replacement.

Completely misses the point with their claim: "Google is just promoting carrier lock-in as a solution to Apple lock-in."

That's not what RCS is.

Can you have the same identity if you change your number/carrier?

Can you use it not on the smartphone?

Can you use it without cellular data Eg with Wi-Fi only?

Can you throw out the SIM card and still send/receive messages?

If the answers is 'no' then it is a carrier lock-in.

> Can you have the same identity if you change your number/carrier?

Identity seems to be tied to a number (not carrier), but Messages uses Google Contacts as an optional layer of indirection.

So, if you change your number, and the other person changes (or adds) the number to your existing contact, your identity is preserved (for them). If the other person creates a new contact for your new number (or doesn't associate the new number with any contact), identity is not preserved.

> Can you use it not on the smartphone?

Yes, you can use Google Messages for Web on a computer, but the authentication is still tied to the phone via a QR code, and I think that communication actually is relayed through the phone if the conversation is via SMS rather than RCS.

> Can you use it without cellular data Eg with Wi-Fi only?

Yes.

> Can you throw out the SIM card and still send/receive messages?

I think that the answer is generally 'no', but there are a few edge cases (eg. I'm not sure what happens if you auth Google Messages for Web on a computer, set it to remember the device auth indefinitely, and then remove the SIM or turn off the phone).

> If the answers is 'no' then it is a carrier lock-in.

As you can see, the answer isn't quite so black and white.

Whatsapp is also bound to a phone number ...? Is that carrier bound?

RCS works through QR code outside, just like you can end text-messages.

Why throw out a sim card? You can use RCS with ANY carrier. If you can use it with ANY carrier, it's not carrier-lock in.

In Belgium, the number is personal and not from someone else. If you transfer carrier, you are allowed by law to take the number with you.

Can I use RCS to chat from my laptop signed in with an email?

That's exactly what RCS is about - except it's the Telcos that went to wrest control back. No thanks.

I'm so glad this is chiefly an American problem, as I wrote previously in another post about iMessage. Outside the USA and maybe some CANZUK countries, SMS are dead, iMessage is irrelevant and chat apps such as WhatsApp, FB Messenger, Telegram, Viber, KakaoTalk and LINE dominate the market - I live in Italy and I haven't received a single SMS from an actual human being in several years.

In those countries where Apple didn't have a > 50% market share in the early '10s, people simply couldn't use iMessage. For instance, this is a summary of how things went in Italy. I think something along these line could have happened in most other countries where prepaid traffic was the norm though:

1. In Italy, basically the entirety of mobile plans were and still are prepaid, which meant you charged your account with money which you then used to pay for your traffic. Most people also had plans you could easily change, which gave you stuff such as SMS and phone calls minutes for a fixed fee, and you paid for them using prepaid credit. More "serious" contracts were heavily taxed, and thus only make sense for corporate phones or if you have a VAT account to deduct some of the taxes (and even them they were not the cheapest option).

2. No prepaid plan included unlimited SMS until around 2015, when they had already become largely irrelevant to most people. Before then, you generally got a very limited amount of SMS per month or day, and those were often tied to numbers belonging to the same carrier.

This meant that most people in a certain area were basically forced to stick with a certain MVO for most of the '00s. For instance, a very popular 2007 Vodafone prepaid plan in Italy costed €6 per month, and included 100 SMS a day towards all Vodafone numbers (99 actually, you had to pay the first one). Having the "wrong" carrier in that time period meant that people had to pay a lot of extra credit to have a proper conversation with you - this was often a deal breaker for romantic relationships among teenagers, or led to people not contacting you at all. A very interesting time indeed.

3. MMS were basically never included in any plan ever, and when they did, they had the same limitations as SMS. Often, if your plan followed the "pay the first message, get 99 free" clause this was also true for MMS, meaning you had to pay for the first SMS AND the first MMS. If People were so wary of them that they actually deleted the MMS APN from their phones to avoid sending one of them by mistake - if you wanted to send a photo to someone you simply waited until you got home, in order to use MSN Messenger or email. The only usage of MMS I remember of in the '00s was sexting.

3. When iPhones and Android came out in the late '00s, data packs suddenly became a necessity to most early adopters. The iPhone heavily pushed its Internet capabilities a lot, and you often had just spent a hefty sum (remember: prepaid meant you had to pay the whole phone cost upfront) so you wanted to squeeze value out of it. Carriers at the time came out with the idea of selling extra prepaid packs with a limited amount of data (i.e. 50 MB a day, or 500 MB a month), which was not an awful lot but it was enough for maps and some light browsing.

4. I actually bought an iPhone 3G back in 2008, and it was truly amazing for its time. I paid around €550 for it, which was quite a lot for a teenager - I had to sink a lot of the money I had earned from my summer job in order to buy that. Most people around me were very against the idea of spending so much money on a phone - after all they could get by by simply buying a random Nokia 6610i or whatever for €100 and pay your 10 euros a month in prepaid credit and do whatever you needed to do. The fact that carriers in countries like the USA basically forced you into 2 year plans meant that you often got iPhones for cheap, which helped get a foothold in the market.

5. When people started to actually switch to smartphones around ~2011, most people picked up shitty €200 Android phones which utterly sucked, and the higher end saw a lot of fierce competition between the iPhone, Samsung Galaxy and the likes. Still, you could expect at most 1/5 of your contacts to have an iPhone, and still people were locked in those carrier walled gardens when sending SMS. If they had an iPhone you could send them iMessages, but that was not the case. The fact iMessage was integrated in the SMS app didn't help either: people back then had to actually _count_ how many SMS they had sent a day to stay under their daily caps, and mixing in special messages you didn't have to pay was actually pretty confusing. I think most people in Italy today still don't really know what iMessage is actually.

6. Data is carrier agnostic - as soon as true chat apps with push notifications such as WhatsApp and FB Messenger came out, people started using them as a loophole to avoid paying for MMS and SMS. Group chats, which were really not feasible before (remember: SMS caps), suddenly became popular. Feeling left out, most people left feature phones in order to use chat apps, causing SMS to quickly disappear in less than a year. As an example, I went from sending 100 SMS a day in 2012 to 20 a YEAR in 2013.

>Group chats, which were really not feasible before (remember: SMS caps), suddenly became popular.

Good point. Messaging apps enabled group chats for real this time. SMS was something like proto/quasi messaging app.

>I live in Italy and I haven't received a single SMS from an actual human being in several years.

Btw spammers still use SMS. But spamming bots are not humans tho ;)

Google's point about iMessage is that Apple shouldn't be promoting and profiting from kids bullying each-other. The article's author has a brand he's selling as someone on the Android beat who's willing to poke Google. Google is also making the case that since iMessage bootstrapped itself on SMS/MMS, perhaps it should continue to embrace the updated versions of these standards, enabling encrypted messaging with Android users.

iMessage is indeed way too powerful, but RCS is nowhere near as good. Even basic things like fast high quality photo/video sharing, reactions, and apps like in-chat games.

I suspect Apple will eventually support RCS as a strong improvement over SMS. This will help a lot with bridging the gap, but Apple will still use iMessage as a differentiator.

How are we really in a place in the world where making a text message blue instead of green is considered “bullying”?

If they really want to make iMessage less powerful, they should force them to hire Google's messaging execs.

I mean, well, yes, obviously, but those who live in glass houses possibly shouldn't throw stones, Google.

> the company [Google] has released 13 half-hearted messaging products since iMessage launched in 2011.

Saruman thinks Sauron is too powerful.

I don’t really understand why people keep referring to the text bubble color here.

"Teens and college students said they dread the ostracism that comes with a green text. The social pressure is palpable, with some reporting being ostracized or singled out after switching away from iPhones."

Why is text color an issue? Or, is it just a stand in for referring to the different apps?

It’s more about the what the color of the bubble symbolizes. When you see a green bubble, you know you are losing features when communicating with this person - the nice link previews, the reactions to individual messages, threading, mentions, and various other iMessage tie-ins that people have.

In a one-on-one conversation, it’s not the biggest deal…but in a group text it is a massive loss of functionality, enough to make people set up separate group texts with only iPhone users to restore the lost functionality when they don’t need to message the non-iPhone users.

Guess that guy who posted a link to an article about PR teams writing articles wasn't BS.

If Google had played nice with Microsoft on Windows Mobile they would have more sympathy.

Google don't let Google Apps accounts convert/migrate to Gmail or migrate purchases between Google accounts when I last checked.

It makes it very difficult to exit the Google system when I tried to migrate to Fastmail.

I don't really trust Google to manage messaging long term. Their messaging products have changed so often, I gave up trying to use them.

Is it Google’s way of saying iMessage is well thought through, designed and maintained?

Semi-related: Does anybody know of a way to export iMessages from your iPhone?

They're stored in a sqlite database on your phone. If you make an unencrypted backup of your device, you can find the db file in the output. The filenames are all mangled, but there's a manifest database at the root of the dump that has a mapping to the source file metadata.

From there, you just need to export the data you want from the messages db. The schema is kind of amazing, but not in a good way.

You don't need to buy a tool - you can write a python/ruby/whatever script.

You can extract them from an iTunes backup using iMazing or Reincubate Backup Extractor, though both are paid.

It doesn’t matter if Google ruined android messaging. The point is, tons of people use android and google is trying to make it better. The title of this article suggests an orientation towards google of contempt, as opposed to showing that google is trying to do right by its former mistakes. And does not point out that apple has not been nice in the past either.

The article promotes a zero sum mentality. That only apple should win because iMessage is better and because google already messed up.

As opposed to a value oriented mentality that a new standard, RCS, could be better for android and iOS users alike.

Google hasn’t always been a great company. I don’t understand why we can’t celebrate wins, especially those that would benefit others, such as rcs.

To do otherwise is to indefinitely call some parties good and some parties bad, to engage in black and white thinking. Which is more harmful for ourselves and says more about ourselves than the individuals and corporations of the world.

I don't think the article is promoting a zero sum game.

It's rightfully calling out Google for calling out Apple when both companies are to blame for this.

What was posted by the official Android account ("Message should not benefit from bullying. Texting should bring us together, and the solution exists. Let’s fix this as one industry."), and the opinion of the article's author ("Google took to Twitter this weekend to complain that iMessage is just too darn influential with today's kids") bare no relation.

The author clearly doesn't like RCS, which is an opinion he's entitled to.. but Google's approach to try and get multiple vendors to adopt an open standard (RCS), instead of creating a walled garden seems like the better path.

“..google is trying to do right by its former mistakes” - this entire thread is a joke. I mean come on… they don’t even let their products have a chance to breathe before shutting them down just so they can release the same product with tweaked branding and a different UI.

The truth is Google could introduce an app today, and if it was good enough and outdid iMessage, and people would start switching over within a few years. They could make it part of Chrome to supercharge adoption but nope.

Google sounds like dudes who whine about cancellation.

The problem is that the same app would be replaced by another Google messaging app before any mass adoption could take place..

RCS just seems like an improvement over a legacy infrastructure. Why do we need it at all?

iMessage for Android, please!

FYI: https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/9/22375128/apple-imessage-an...

Let it be ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Whatsapp works for us.

in other news, pot calls kettle black

Google Wave.

I could never figure out why Android did not copy iMessage and offer the same within the Android ecosystem. The Android equivalent of the green and blue bubbles. No one is interested in a carrier driven initiative like RCS at scale.

Good question. It seems that there may be too many PM’s trying to make a name for themselves. There may also be a lack of vision, and a lack of willingness to let a product live and to make incremental changes to it… it either succeeds right away or they replace it with a similar product (rebranded) /shut it down.

... even though Google locked-in the entire Android ecosystem by forcing people onto Google's RCS servers because they couldn't wait for carrier implementation?

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