Comment by bern4444 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bern4444 | Hacker News Reader

I can understand Google's frustration but they have no one to blame but themselves.

Everyone is familiar with their graveyard of failed messaging applications (along with their graveyard of products generally).

When I had an android phone, I tried RCS with someone else on Android. It never worked. I'm sure it's improved, but as the common theme of this story goes, Google blew their chance.

I also don't trust google to abide by the "standard" they've created. Their track record is abysmal. I don't want to use yet another messaging service that they've built. I don't trust it to exist in the future, receive support and updates, and for it to be maintained. If google abandons it that means the telecoms are stuck holding the bag and when we demand even more from the next iteration of messaging apps, RCS will go the way SMS has today.

This is nothing more than Google reaping the results of their own failures. It's a shame they squandered the opportunity over the last 15 years to develop a cohesive messaging app strategy across their products, but its their shame and now they have to pay the price.

In a last ditch effort they're trying to throw all the blame on Apple who was able to innovate and launch a successful messaging service years ago. Apple recognized that SMS could be improved, and they improved it. They didn't wait for anyone and they recognize the importance of continued support - a quality Google does not seem to foster.

Google had their chance over and over again but they blew it over and over again. I don't care about the little things RCS adds, message bubbles, delivery confirmation etc. These may be nice additions but they truly don't make a large difference. If an Android phone wants to send a high quality image, video etc they can share a link. That's good enough for me.

Google failed, miserably and publicly. This latest campaign is just embarrassing for them.

> I don't want to use yet another messaging service that they've built.

You literally wouldn't be. You would keep using iMessage. All that would be different is that you could now send images and videos to Android users. Right now you have to switch to another app to do that.

This is not a '"standard" they've created', this is a GSM Association standard, and it would be Apple, not Google, implementing it.

Are you saying that Apple doesn't send MMS? because from my experience, it totally can.

I know because I've got the bill for it.

But to go back to the original point, I don't want google near my chat history. I don't really like Apple having it either.

Apple turns texts between iPhones and Android phones into SMS and MMS, out-of-date technologies from the 90s and 00s. But Apple can adopt RCS—the modern industry standard—for these threads instead. Solving the problem without changing your iPhone to iPhone conversations and making messaging better for everyone.

At some point we should require people to tell us whether they have read the link or not so we can know if it's worth taking their opinions into account.

> But Apple can adopt RCS—the modern industry standard—for these threads instead.

Ah, yes, the “industry standard” which relies on proprietary extensions made by Google which are only implemented in one of Google’s applications, and whose carrier adoption figures are based on Google hosting the servers.

RCS is better, but don’t oversell this as more than Google’s attempt to pressure Apple into helping them recover from repeated self-inflicted damage. If they hadn’t screwed up their messaging strategy so many times since the 2000s nobody would care about iMessage. We could be using an open cross-platform system if they hadn’t killed that concept trying to force people to use Google+.

Indeed. Ron Amadeo has done a lot of in-depth coverage of Google's RCS push the past few years, and he brings up some very good points I didn't see talked about much. Here's the latest article about Google's new campaign:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/new-google-site-begs...

I said in another comment that Google continuing to call RCS a "standard" is disingenuous. What they're really pushing for is Apple implementing Google's proprietary fork of RCS, where most messages are routed through their own servers. That doesn't sound like a standard to me and I don't see why Apple would/should go for that.

It’s also telling how they punted on the things people want like support for all of their devices or need, like E2E for all chats rather than just one on one.

Imagine an alternate universe where they backed a dump truck full of cash over to the Signal Foundation and said “hire all of the developers you need to make first-class desktop clients and add federation for people willing to meet CA-level requirements. We’ll ship integration in Messenger and Gmail this year.” Apple would have a lot more pressure from something which is open and better rather than a marketing play for a Google subsidiary.

> Apple turns texts between iPhones and Android phones into SMS and MMS, out-of-date technologies from the 90s and 00s.

Your first paragraph is copied verbatim from Google's marketing material[0] without attribution. I just wanted to point out for anyone out there if you google that phrase you will find it verbatim repeated across the internet. I know this isn't an academic environment - who cares about plagiarism - but just to highlight it as part of media literacy. Your comment is part of a media/marketing campaign, it is not an actual back-and-forth dialogue that one would expect on HN.

[0] https://www.android.com/get-the-message/

I just copy pasted from the link you are commenting...

> Are you saying that Apple doesn't send MMS? because from my experience, it totally can.

I'm saying you should currently use another app if you want to send images or movies, because MMS compresses media beyond recognition.

I don't understand why Apple users are against a simple fix that would let them send these things from inside iMessesage instead?

Why do you think this would let Google have more of your chat history?

I suspect it would let more people spam me.

> Their track record is abysmal.

And just to reinforce this, a decade ago Google supported a cross platform messaging standard: XMPP. And then they stopped it https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/networking/google-move....

> Everyone is familiar with their graveyard of failed messaging applications (along with their graveyard of products generally).

I agree

And that's why Whatsapp and maybe Telegram/Signal/etc are the "standards" today

If you don’t care about the additional RCS features, then aren’t you saying essentially SMS is fine? Do you prefer iMessage just since it is more secure (compared to sms that is)?

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