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Comment by maxsilver | Hacker News Reader

> This is a complete non-issue.

No it's not. iPhones intentionally don't support modern cellular messaging. There's nothing wrong with insisting they support LTE spec (RCS), like every modern smartphone does.

> The majority of people globally don't even use built-in messengers, they use WhatsApp or a similar application,

Completely unrelated. This discussion has nothing to do with iMessage / WhatsApp / etc. The problem is that Apple forces your SMS texts into effectively-2G-mode, Apple lies about the quality of the messaging you're getting from your native cellular service.

Imagine if they did the same thing to, say, your telephone calls from your phone number by running it through a ton of fake compression, and then said, "well, you could iMessage or Skype or Zoom instead if you don't want us fucking up your phone call audio".

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This is an incredibly disingenuous way to describe this. They support SMS as a fallback for iMessage. SMS is a ubiquitous and broadly supported standard. RCS is a boondoggle that nobody supported until recently when Google decided to add support for it to Android in yet another attempt at building their own messaging platform. There is no rational reason to take offense that iPhones don't support RCS.

I re-iterate, this a complete non-issue. The way you are phrasing it is incredibly biased.

> I re-iterate, this a complete non-issue. The way you are phrasing it is incredibly biased.

Again, no it's not. My family have iPhones, I have Android. Apples garbage SMS?MMS group messaging made it so that I missed a huge number of messages from them, photos were poor quality, videos were unwatchable. We switched to Signal a year ago and have been happy with it, but this impacted us for about 2 years. And I'm a tech person! The average user is going to have no idea what is going on. This affects a large number of people and saying it's a non-issue is dismissive.

> Apples garbage SMS?MMS group messaging

My wife has Android, I have iPhone, I know exactly what you're referring to. But this isn't "Apple's garbage SMS/MMS group messaging", this is just SMS/MMS group messaging, period. SMS/MMS is ancient, and it sucks, it was a hack when it was originally implemented and never really got better. Nobody here is claiming that SMS is good, we're merely pointing out that RCS is not the right answer and that SMS is the most viable /fallback/. Nobody should be using SMS as their primary messaging platform in 2022.

> We switched to Signal a year ago and have been happy with it

Good, I'm glad to hear this. More people should use Signal. I even managed to get my 72 year old mother using it without any serious issues.

> This affects a large number of people and saying it's a non-issue is dismissive.

It only affects people who refuse to use any one of the myriad other carrier-agnostic messaging apps. I travel extensively around the world, nearly everyone outside the US uses WhatsApp, and nearly everyone inside the US I interact with has at minimum FB Messenger or Discord. Obviously, all of these are operated by other for-profit tech entities and getting more people on Signal would be ideal, but it is what it is.

The right answer here is creating a new carrier-agnostic messaging standard with interoperability and privacy in mind, and then Google, various Android integrators, Apple, Microsoft, et al can build their own clients. RCS is not carrier agnostic, does not support E2E, and is really horribly designed protocol. Worse, because the carriers don't want to deal with it, de facto almost all RCS infrastructure globally is run by Google.

> RCS is a boondoggle that nobody supported

RCS is the official messaging spec of the GSMA, they effectively set mobile standards. It's on 90+ mobile operators in nearly every nation on the planet. It's just as widely supported as, say, Voice-over-LTE is (another standard by that same group)

SMS is the outdated standard that's been mostly unused on smartphones since 2018 and is only supported for backwards compatibility. RCS is the replacement for SMS, and is the current ubiquitous and broadly supported standard, since 2019 effectively all modern smartphones and cell network use it.

> Google decided to add support for it to Android in yet another attempt at building their own messaging platform.

No, that's a complete lie. Google added support for it, because they basically had to, it's an industry spec that practically every cellular provider uses. It has nothing to do with "Google's own messaging platform" because RCS is *not* a messaging platform, it's literally just how all messages on all phones work in 2022.

There's no Google service for RCS. There's no login for RCS, there's no accounts for RCS. RCS is not an "app" or a "platform", it's literally just the native default built-in way all messaging from your SIM card works on all ~2019+ smartphones.

> There is no rational reason to take offense that iPhones don't support RCS.

You know what, your right. And by your logic, there's no rational reason for iPhones to support Voice-over-LTE (that's a GSMA push), so maybe every iPhone should drop down to 2G everytime a phone call comes in (but not an iMessage Audio Call, of course). And by your logic, there's no reason for iPhones to support Carrier Roaming (that's another GSMA pushed thing), maybe Apple should ignore that one too.

> RCS is the official messaging spec of the GSMA, they effectively set mobile standards. It's on 90+ mobile operators in nearly every nation on the planet. It's just as widely supported as, say, Voice-over-LTE is (another standard by that same group)

Nearly every carrier supports it via Google-operated infrastructure, the carriers don't actually want RCS, have been vocal about this, and it's why RCS had no uptake for over a decade until Google decided to force-feed it to everyone. https://jibe.google.com/ is their platform they provide to carriers, through partnerships (example: https://www.verizon.com/about/news/verizon-google-messaging-...)

RCS is hot garbage, and if you've actually read the standard you'd already know that. There are plenty of arguments that can be made in favor of a carrier-agnostic messaging standard that provides broad interoperability, but RCS is not it. This is not the way.

> No, it's not. SMS is the outdated standard that's been gone since 2018. RCS is the current ubiquitous and broadly supported standard, since 2019 effectively all modern smartphones and cell network use it.

This is absolutely false. 1. SMS is supported by /every/ carrier in the world, period. This is exactly why it's the perfect fallback, because it is guaranteed to be there and even work with pre-smartphone T9 devices. 2. SMS isn't "gone" since 2018 or since ever. RCS is not ubiquitous, it is literally only used on Android, is not supported by any feature phones, and Android only constitutes "effectively all modern smartphones" because the vast majority of people in the world can't afford an iPhone. Globally almost 80% of the market share is Android... in the West/OECD it's like 50%.

> No, that's a complete lie. Google added support for it, because they had to, it's an industry spec that practically every cellular provider uses.

Uh... no... what you are saying here is a lie. Google added support for it because they wanted to, just like they wanted to make every other one of their previous 10+ messaging apps. RCS has been a standard since 2012 (or 2013, depending on who you asked) and the GSMA Universal Profile has been available since 2016, Google didn't even start deploying RCS until 2019 within Android Messages, and did so by cannibalizing the Allo team (another messaging boondoggle).

There is no legal or regulatory requirement or otherwise forcing Google to support RCS. The majority of carriers don't want RCS, and it was basically completely unadopted until Google footed the bill to build out the infrastructure for it.

> There's no Google service for RCS.

https://jibe.google.com/

I'm not going to even respond to the rest of your message. Look, I don't want to be uncharitable, but you frankly don't know what you're talking about and everything you are saying is incredibly biased in a pro-Google way without any basis in fact or reality. Please go actually read the RCS standard. Please go actually learn how RCS is implemented. Please go talk to someone that works with carriers on building out telecommunications systems (hint, I'm one of those people). You are straight out wrong.

> iPhones intentionally don't support modern cellular messaging. There's nothing wrong with insisting they support LTE spec (RCS), like every modern smartphone does.

Clearly every modern smartphone does not support it because iPhone does not. iPhone is half of the US market. A standard that only has 50% market penetration is hardly a standard.

> Imagine if they did the same thing to, say, your telephone calls from your phone number.

I’d be happy if no one could reach me via my telephone number. There would be a lot less spam calls to ignore. I would welcome a system where no one could dial me without me granting them permission first.

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