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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."

That's a fair point that I hadn't considered. I agree that's a negative, but for me, personally, I don't consider it a showstopper. I do get that other people might, though, and am understanding of that position.

On the flip side, most people using RCS would otherwise be using an @gmail.com address as their identity if that was how it worked. I'd say that's probably better than the carrier owning the identity, but it's still not ideal.

> Google is just promoting carrier lock-in as a solution to Apple lock-in.

But, there is no "carrier lock-in" (at least not in the USA). In the USA, carriers are legally required to allow users to port numbers to and from any carrier thus creating competition rather than lock-in.

You can use iMessage with an Apple ID without having any phone numbers associated with it.

There's no carrier required at all with iMessage. With RCS you HAVE to have a carrier.

I'd rather be locked into a phone number than locked to apple though.

And with iMessage you need to have an Apple account, at least for carriers you have choices.

With iMessage, you must commit to doing business with one company as long as you use the service. That is vendor lock-in and is what Google is complaining about. With RCS, there is no one company that you must do business with to continue using they service.

That's the same with WhatsApp/Signal/Telegram/others... unlike email which was distributed.

porting numbers is a royal PITA with some carriers. "legal" and "usable" are worlds apart, and the cost of screwing up a number port is potentially gigantic.

Porting numbers from one carrier to another is always possible (even it is "a royal PITA"). However, if I want to switch away from Apple, I will immediately lose the ability to use iMessage entirely. It is not just a PITA, it is completely impossible to switch providers when using iMessage.

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

There’s a public site to disable iMessages too. Same exact design.

Apple do the same for [0] https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage/

It's interesting that both sites are very similar. Maybe Google copied Apple's site.

Seems like it. My points in that regard about only have this setting be accessible behind a login and 2fa is the way to go. You sold or otherwise deprived yourself of your iPhone and forgot to turn off iMessage? Contact Apple support or go to an Apple store. This functionality disproportionately benefits bad actors and intelligence agencies around the world.

You don't need to login also for Apple.

Why would an intelligence agency not be able to go to an Apple store or contact Apple support? This seems like it would only make things harder for users in good-faith scenarios without providing any real security benefit in others.

I was thinking more of in the field, just in time recon. Some things could be justified as imminent threat situations, at least after the fact.

As much as I detest RCS, those unenroll things are necessary for migration. Because it's for migration it can't be on device (you're migrating so you may no longer have a device).

I would guess that your devices will notify you if someone maliciously disables iMessage for you phone#, and maybe google does the same?

I think characterizing RCS as "garbage" because of the issue you describe is a bit of an overreaction.

Regardless, I don't see this as a big deal. The site will send a verification code to the phone before allowing anyone to disable it. If someone has cloned/swapped/stolen my SIM card and can intercept and use that verification code, then I have many many many more things to worry about before I worry about someone disabling RCS for my number.

But, as you point out in your edit, iMessage has the same issue. Potato, potahto.

> enter an RCS enabled cellphone number, in order to disable Chat features… including end-to-end encryption

This is _really_ misleadingly worded. The website asks for a confirmation code, which you presumably need access to the device in order to obtain, right?

Sim swaps are a thing.

> If you no longer have access to your phone, you should have to contact Apple support or go to an Apple store.

Requiring users to visit an Apple store to leave Apple's messaging ecosystem doesn't seem like an ideal solution, to put it lightly.

I think the status quo is actually not terrible, and with a simple modification (making any externally-triggered deactivation very visible on the logged-out device) it could be secure as well as being usable.

Please don't copy-paste comments on HN. It strictly lowers the signal-noise ratio, makes merging the threads a pain, and users hate it.

You copied this one 4 times—that's egregious! No more, please.

I was replying in different threads, and I am far from the only users who uses an on-topic comment in this way. I’ll avoid doing that in the future. Just wanted you to know I didn’t invent this practice, nor am I the only one doing it on HN. I take your point, though.

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

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

I address this in my post: there's an extension, and there's nothing stopping Apple from implementing it, as Google has.

Any other features that are missing or sub-par in the RCS vs. iMessage equation is IMO trivial compared to the harm we have now of the lack of interoperability.

But if it's an extension to the spec then other client implementors don't have to support it. And then you end up with a lower common denominator effect where end to end encryption is no longer widely used.

That is by every definition worse than what we have today.

> But if it's an extension to the spec then other client implementors don't have to support it. And then you end up with a lower common denominator effect where end to end encryption is no longer widely used. That is by every definition worse than what we have today.

This is a pretty literal description of how iMessage interfaces with non-iPhones today though, so not worse.

It’s worse because people might actually use it. I currently use WhatsApp for my main contacts that are on Android.

How is that any worse than iMessage degrading to the lowest common denominator of SMS/MMS? And SMS/MMS is a much lower common denominator than RCS.

Look, I'm not asking for the perfect messaging system here. Because we're never going to get that. I just want something secure and private, and that works by default. Agreed that other client implementors don't have to support E2EE, but Google does, and Apple certainly would, and that covers enough cases right now to make me happy.

I'd grudgingly accept an iMessage app for Android, or (better) iMessage integration with the stock Android app. But I'd much prefer a standard that isn't controlled by a single company's goodwill... goodwill that they have already shown is in short supply.

Right now though there is no one standard which is a good thing for competition and security.

And you want instead to move the world towards a single, insecure standard, dictated by carriers who have decades long history of (a) supplying data to governments, (b) selling data to random third parties, (c) intercepting messages for their own nefarious purposes e.g. advertising and (d) doing very little to secure and protect their platforms from abuse.

No thanks.

> Right now though there is no one standard which is a good thing for competition and security.

There already is a standard, one which Apple falls-back to when messaging Android: SMS.

The would-be-dystopia you describe well in your second paragraph is not a hypothetical: that is the world as it is today with SMS; Apple could change that by switching to RCS + encryption extension and protect their users' privacy, but they won't because they view it as a competitive wedge (we know this due to the Epic lawsuit, as mentioned in TFA)

RCS e2e can be disabled by anyone with your phone number and technical ability/means to sim swap. There’s a public site to do this:

https://messages.google.com/disable-chat

Maybe I’m misunderstanding the implications, but isn’t the mechanism mentioned below the exact same thing for iMessage? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29899880

If someone already has managed to swap/clone/steal my SIM, them being able to disable RCS on my number is pretty low on the list of problems I am going to care about.

I’m pointing out flaws with the implementations of both iMessage and RCS, not critiquing your own personal opsec.

Group RCS isn’t e2e, unlike iMessage. That’s the main point.

Other than RCS is tied to the 3/4/5G carrier networks and cant work over other media or physical protocols. It's more of the same bullshit layers on top of GSM instead of messaging being independent of the device.

iMessage is tied to your Apple ID, not your phone number or IMEI.

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.

Encrypted group chats are apparently coming soon.

https://twitter.com/lockheimer/status/1480663656463437824

It’s too late at this point: the vast majority of RCS clients won’t support it (if it happens), so the green bubble that google hates is destined to remain.

Google could have avoided this by not continuously releasing and killing chat services. If they’d stuck to one they would have a much bigger number of users - people complain about iOS, but lets be real: android is a much bigger market. Google allowing both the hardware and software to fragment in basic functionality is a questionable decision.

Yea - its frankly ridiculous at this point. The original Google Chat was great and was (as far as I know) their only offering at the time. Then it all went to hell.

And now we are back to Google Chat again!

> 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).

Not to mention the nine year gap since they killed off support for an actual standard in all their products (XMPP).

Nearly a decade and a dozen failed messaging products later, now they are shaming others for not being interoperable with their preferred spec?

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.

The government should intervene to force interoperability and stop the lock-in that comes with any of the tech giants

> 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.

> yet another competing platform

People are advocating for the opposite. Make apple stop using their anti-competitive market to harm alternative messaging apps.

> If iMessage was cross platform, it’s just another messaging app.

No, it is just as good, and better if it is forced to be cross platform.

You lose nothing, and everyone else gains, when anti-competitive markets are made to support alternatives.

> If you want secure cross platform messaging

Or, instead of that, we could use anti-trust law, against Apple to force them to be less anti-competitive, and allow other people to integrate with it. Problem solved.

> messaging anti-competitive market

I love how it's such an anti-competitive market that in many countries Apple isn't even close to being a popular service. WhatsApp, WeChat, Kakao, Line etc dominate in non-Western countries.

Even in all of Western Europe, WhatsApp clearly dominates, with iMessage coming in third or fourth in popularity in my practical experience (after Signal and lately, unfortunately, Telegram).

> I don’t see how you’re not suggesting yet another competing platform

I'm not suggesting another competing platform. I'm suggesting an already-widely-deployed platform (RCS) that is standardized, has been around since 2008 or so (older than iMessage!), and is the actual real elevation of SMS, not an Apple-proprietary protocol.

> If iMessage was cross platform

It's not, and that's the problem! Making it cross-platform would at least partially solve the problem, though it does mean Yet Another Messaging App I have to install.

> If you want secure cross platform messaging, use any of the other platforms built around that feature.

That's a huge pain in the ass. Not all of my friends have Signal, and I'm tired of evangelizing. Not all of my friends have WhatsApp, and I'm not interested in evangelizing a Facebook property. I don't use Telegram, and very few of my friends do, and I'm also wary of evangelizing a messenger that is not secure by default, and that has what is IMO a sketchy, secretive history around its cryptography.

Looking through my Messages history, there are 27 people I communicated with over unencrypted SMS/MMS over the past month. Only one of those people has Signal (not sure why they SMS'd me, but that just further illustrates the problem of how it's difficult to remember to contact people using the "correct" means), and maybe 6 or 8 of them have WhatsApp (for whatever reason, they/I don't really use WhatsApp often).

Why is this so hard? Apple! If Apple supported RCS (with the E2EE extension), literally every single one of those 27 conversations would have been encrypted, without me (or, critically, the other party, whom I have no control over) having to do anything special. As much as I love blaming Google for many things, they cannot solve this, because iMessage is a closed protocol that they are not permitted to implement, and the messenger app that is in the default install (the iMessage-supporting Messages app on iOS, and the RCS-supporting Messages app on Android) has a huge easy-adoption advantage that third-party messengers will never be able to match.

You can argue a bunch of "shoulds" here, but I'm talking about what the reality actually is.

Only one of those people has Signal (not sure why they SMS'd me, but that just further illustrates the problem of how it's difficult to remember to contact people using the "correct" means)

They are likely using an Apple device, so they can't use Signal as the default SMS/messenger app and have to remember to use it for the right contracts.

Android allows you to choose the default messenger app, and setting up Signal this way gives you an experience very similar to the iMessage one on Apple devices - messages to non-Signal-using contacts go over SMS/MMS, messages to contacts with Signal go over the Signal protocol.

> They are likely using an Apple device, so they can't use Signal as the default SMS/messenger app and have to remember to use it for the right contracts.

Signal supports SMS on Android because Android has API for apps to actually interact with the underlying phone SMS capability (because Android is a platform customized by OEMs).

Apple does not have public API to interact with the hardware to send/receive SMS, although there's no limitation on using SMS in other apps.

There are two messaging limitations in the platform:

1. The sms: url scheme can only go to the built-in app. Since this does not let you pre-compose messages, I've actually never seen it used in production.

2. The MFMessageComposeViewController is used to overlay iMessage with your application to send a chat message. Generally I've only seen this used in lousy applications (admittedly including Twitter and various Google applications in that list) - the modern approach is to use the Share and Action sheet functionality, which presents first and third party apps via equal heuristics.

>I'm not suggesting another competing platform. I'm suggesting an already-widely-deployed platform (RCS) that is standardized, has been around since 2008 or so (older than iMessage!), and is the actual real elevation of SMS, not an Apple-proprietary protocol.

The RCS Universal Profile is the first standardized version by the GSMA and came out in late 2016.

Google's RCS usage has primarily been via Google's own hosted implementations because of poor carrier adoption. Verizon AFAIK is planning to have RCS deployed this year.

Also AFAICT the e2e extension is not a standard but is Google-specific and currently exclusive to their Messages app. It also has several inferior technological, privacy, and UX impacts to other systems (such as only working for 1-to-1 chat, or requiring out-of-band verification code comparisons to guarantee the encryption isn't compromised).

It also is not a protocol evolution of SMS - its similarity is mostly that it like SMS was standardized through the GSMA. I also do not believe that the GSMA mandates its usage "instead of" SMS - it is meant to sit alongside SMS.

> That's a huge pain in the ass. Not all of my friends have Signal, and I'm tired of evangelizing. Not all of my friends have WhatsApp, and I'm not interested in evangelizing a Facebook property.

There's zero chance that RCS will replace Signal or WhatsApp or Telegram. It also won't replace SMS, at least this decade. It's just going to be Yet Another Option.

Google not opening up RCS to other applications is really annoying - I used to have a text messaging app I loved with TONS of customization and now I am basically forced to use googles damn messages app. It is the same shit as Apple is doing

Messaging platform for specific hardware platform is nonsense. Theoretically it shouldn't be widely used.

BlackBerry made a very success business doing exactly this for years.

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.