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Comment by imaadrashied | Hacker News Reader

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."

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> 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.

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.

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