Tim Cook Shoots Down Idea of iOS Adopting RCS Messages | Hacker News Reader

Tim Cook Shoots Down Idea of iOS Adopting RCS Messages

macrumors.com

27 pointsAlphaWeaver66 comments

Well I'm sure the EU will be delighted to hear this.

As explained here [0], it will soon be mandatory for all large messaging apps to interoperable - as part of the DMA (Digital Market Act). As to how that will be done technically, nobody knows, but RCS is definitely a standard that could be used.

[0] : https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20220315IP...

I bet a different standard will be created instead. RCS puts carriers back into the equation, while major services (or as the EU calls them “gatekeepers”) just want to have as much control as possible.

The EU requirement is for platform interoperability—e.g. sending a message from WhatsApp directly into iMessage, and vice versa. How would the RCS implementation that Google is asking for, which is carrier-based like SMS, satisfy that?

Even if Apple and Facebook implemented a private message peering service and chose RCS as the protocol, I don’t see how that helps Google.

There is no doubt in my mind that lesser privileged kids get bullied when they get invited to an iPhone texting group and they instantly break all functionality with cheaper Android phones. Apple downplaying teenage (hell even younger now) bullying for profit and people leaping to their defense is disheartening.

I'll just leave this here since people may not be aware just how bad it is, https://connect.uclahealth.org/2022/03/15/suicide-rate-highe...

Jesus that’s one helluva leap.

You think so? It might be a tad dramatic but teens interface with the world through their phones and this purposeless "otherization" can not be having a good effect on society.

It’s public schools. Kids will find other ways to bully each other no matter the communication method.

A trad dramatic? Ha, it's incredibly dramatic. If it isn't green bubbles, it will be the wrong hair color, the wrong video game tastes, liking the wrong instructor, a million other stupid things. The correct solution is to exacerbate differences within students to the point that cliques are difficult to create due to less in common, and absolutely not attempt to create increased conformity.

Increasing conformity only further increases the obviousness of people's differences, no matter how slight. An extreme example would be Japan, which was so homogenous that discrimination by Blood Type is a thing.

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

My reply was not about the color, it is about breaking functionality. I think the color difference is fine.

Speculatively tying your pet peeve to a serious social problem is an old and tired framing trick. That way if people disagree with your pet peeve, you can retort with “oh, I guess you don’t care about teen suicide?”

It’s obvious and it does little to advance your cause, while trivializing the actual serious problem.

We’re not going to solve teen suicide with RCS.

Speculative tie-in? Google's claims are that Apple profits from peer pressure and bullying, I'm not sure but I would think that the people most bullied would be teens and then logically some would commit suicide because of it, I'm sure other bullying would be part of the bullying "package" if that appeases you.

It doesn't have to be RCS but Apple has made clear they don't want any interoperability, so that seems like bad faith.

> There is no doubt in my mind that lesser privileged kids get bullied when they get invited to an iPhone texting group and they instantly break all functionality with cheaper Android phones.

Sample size of one, but I asked my 13 y.o. daughter.

Me:

   This guy believes kids get bullied for having Android phones

Daughter:

   What guy

Me:

   Random guy
   
   As a kid, do people care about the blue vs green bubble thing?

Daughter:

   No
   
   Before I knew it happened when you texted an android i thought the green was special
   
   lol

I'm glad your daughter does not think this way or hang around people who do. You've raised her right.

Thank you! She's a good kid.

Another data point. I'm from Spain, and the ones who are bullied here are the iPhone users. Vast majority of people are Android users, and iPhone users are seen as snobs. That's among the adults. Nobody here would hand over an iPhone to a kid. It's not hugely expensive, but it's expensive enough.

While it's annoying that Apple doesn't do what people want them to do (like drop Lightning in favor of USB-C) I have to appreciate that there are still companies making "You do it our way or not at all" decisions for their customers. To quote Steve Jobs from 1997: at least people are making decisions about products instead of conducting polls or having a popularity contest.

Yep, both of their decisions (USB-C and iMessage) annoy me personally, but when I try to muster some outrage and characterize Apple as being extremely arrogant here, well, I can't find a difference between their decisions and "Opinionated" frameworks or stacks which I encounter in my day to day life without even an arched eyebrow.

It's just that they picked a lane I disagree with. The "buy mom an iphone" remark is pretty tone deaf and will probably cause a minor kerfuffle, but it's still consistent Apple and I can hardly be surprised at it.

Hoping I can buy an iphone 15 after the Euro twists their arm to get USB-C to match my ipad and macbook. :)

Dropping lightning in favor of usb-c means instantly deprecating millions of accessories, so it's not the free change people seem to think it is. Remember how much noise people made when the 30 pin connector was dropped for lightning - a cable that was better in every possible way? and there were far far fewer iPhone (and smart phone in general) users back then.

I feel you in the annoyance of periodically only have usb-c cable with a low battery phone, but I also have quite a few other accessories that I'd rather not have to replace (I've had a decade to accumulate such, and a lot of that time predated usb-c)

The Epic lawsuit showed it is not just being opinionated. They wanted families to have "obstacles in giving their kids an Android phone".

Overall, the default messaging app needs to do all it can to be interoperable. Are you ok with Outlook being "opinionated" and downsample email photos sent to non-windows clients?

Note that iPhone market share in US is above 50%.

We need a lawsuit here

Telegram is superior anyways to any green or blue bubble so just use that instead.

I can't just send people a telegram message, they need to already have a Telegram account. I can send anyone an SMS message.

You can't send everyone an RCS message either. Juniper Research predicts the number of mobile phone users who can access RCS will reach 40% by 2026.¹

¹ https://www.techradar.com/news/nearly-half-of-phones-will-us...

Right, but you can send anyone an SMS. It would've been nice if we had a beter protocol in the same situation.

For sure! And RCS Universal Profile may be as ubiquitous as SMS/MMS by 2030, so it wouldn't surprise me if we see Apple support by iOS 20 or so.

I intentionally have RCS disabled (I actively don't want the features it brings), but I still get the texts from RCS people -- they're just converted into ordinary MMS for me first.

Great, now convince all of my friends and family to onboard.

The network effect (if that's the right term) is real and strong.

Ah yes let's adopt RCS, a standard that requires a phone number, isn't encrypted (yes I recognize that Google has a proprietary extension to the standard but that isn't part of the standard and is not standardised), and is controlled by carriers (A group known for supporting development of features that make them less relevant).

The blue vs. green is a very easy to understand demarcation for secure vs. insecure. Blue = secure, green = insecure.

Is anyone surprised? The rest of the world has already ditched SMS. In the US Apple wants the iPhone ecosystem to be as closed as possible.

Supporting RCS won’t make iMessage any more interoperable than it already is with SMS.

More than 160 characters in a text. Hi-res images and videos. Sent/read receipts. Group chat features. Location sharing. Video calls. Sender verification. Blocklists.

Pretty sure all of this qualifies as "more interoperable".

Those are more features, which is nice but has nothing to do with interoperability. The set of people you can talk to before and after Apple implements RCS is the same.

If you define "talk to" as being able to share 160 characters of ASCII text then sure, but today messaging means a lot more to people than just that.

Your arguments would be a lot stronger if you focused on the SMS limitations that have not already been alleviated by MMS.

Yeah, and the internet is just sending 1500 bytes of binary data. There are no phones that actually cut you off at 160 characters, it's an implementation detail at this point. And MMS is fine, not great but fine.

But regardless, let's push the goalposts back, the whole point of interoperability is to allow people on different messaging networks to communicate. The users of RCS is a subset of SMS.

I don’t get why in the US people still use SMS. Third party apps run basically everywhere and they don’t depend on carriers and manufacturers supporting things.

Because of ubiquity - there are too many third party apps, and I don’t know which ones to reach you on. But sms is preinstalled on your phone. If your phone is an iPhone, iMessage works better than many of the other third party apps anyways and if it’s not it degrades to sms and you still get the message.

Some people want to communicate over Line, others Telegram, discord, a few on WhatsApp or Facebook messenger, and myself on Signal. I’ve gone down the path of installing now defunct apps like Allo before at friend’s urging, but I am too grumpy now to manage a mapping of people to preferred apps. Similarly, convincing all my friends, present and future, to use my platform of choice is a losing battle and managing threads between them invariably must decay to the lowest common denominator.

I think a better question would be why and how most other places moved away successfully from SMS despite this problem; and I think it’s because unlimited texting plans did not catch on with carriers there, so they had very strong economic reasons to prefer data messaging instead. Whatever app hit that market first became the new default.

> and I think it’s because unlimited texting plans did not catch on with carriers there, so they had very strong economic reasons to prefer data messaging instead.

In case it's not clear to anyone outside the US who reads this: unlimited SMS/MMS is available from virtually every carrier in the US including the budget MVNOs, and that's been the case for many years. But the "unlimited" data plans are expensive enough that there's still a significant market for cheaper plans with limits of a few GB per month—limits that SMS and MMS don't contribute to.

So i guess the cost of data is probably the reason why those apps didn’t get much traction when they were launched

I think it’s more that they were competing with “free” and pre-installed. By the time the apps launched, most US users were not being hit with sms fees that motivated them to look for the apps in the first place, and for the ones who did the data cost is so small I doubt users were really picking out the difference vs things like loading news websites with images. This is just a theory based on personal experience and I haven’t rigorously lined up dates to confirm it though.

I'm in Norway, one of the countries where most people don't use SMS.

As a result, there are some people I can only chat with on Facebook Messenger, some people I can only chat with on Telegram, some people I can only chat with on WhatsApp, some people I can only chat with on Snapchat, some people I can only chat with on Signal, and some people I can only chat with on Discord.

I'm not sure that's so much better than a single standard which everyone on every device on any software platform can integrate with.

I’m in Italy and as long as you have the phone number, you can just use whatsapp. It’s the de-facto standard and everyone has it. I really don’t understand the problem.

SMS works for everybody. To use a third party app, I'd have to find out which specific app the person I want to talk to uses, install it, then remember which app goes to who.

SMS just works without all that kerfluffle. And doesn't involve me with yet another service provider, as a bonus.

Is there any reason why iOS should adopt RCS?

So communication with Android can be better without relying on some third party app.

Having participated in multiple group chats with a mix of iOS and Android users, the only time this becomes an issue is when some idiot tries to send everyone a large video file. Personally, I want that behavior punished, not enabled.

Yeah, those absolute morons, who want to send files over the internet. What a bunch of complete idiots.

Happily for me, MMS efficiently destroys the dreams of the kind of people who send long animated GIFs to group chats.

mattnewton liked “Having participated in multiple group chats with a mix of iOS and Android users, the only time this becomes an issue is when some idiot tries to send everyone a large video file…”

I personally prefer 3rd party apps -- ideally those which feature end-to-end encryption -- to SMS/RCS/iMessage.

I mean iMessage is end-to-end encrypted so conflating it with SMS and RCS is kind of BS in the context of your encryption comment.

Disliking the client apps themselves is of course perfectly reasonable, as some of them are annoying and/or have weird UI that seems to optimise for things other than "I'm talking to another person, not looking to use whatever your pet UI feature is"

Then next day news will say Apple is trying to kill 3rd party chat app by fencing it with Google using RCS.

Spammer’s life will be easier for bombing everybody, don’t see any other real benefits.

Imho if RCS ever takes over SMS it will eventually get to a point where it’s equally obsolete. RCS requires carriers to support the standard and manufacturers to build features upon it that its not guaranteed will work as expected on all the devices. As much as i hate private companies having monopolies over online communication on entire countries, at least their services are reliable, accessible from basically every device and constantly improving.

Because they want to improve the user experience of their product.

The next best reason would be “because they’ve been legally compelled to do do”, but we’re not there yet.

> Because they want to improve the user experience of their product.

I'm looking at years worth of conversations in Messages right now, with a healthy mix of iPhone-only conversations and mixed-platform conversations. How would my user experience be improved?

mattnewton laughed at “I'm looking at years worth of conversations in Messages right now, with a healthy mix of iPhone-only conversati…

paxys laughed at “mattnewton laughed at “I'm looking at years worth of conversations in Messages right now, with a healthy mix of iPhone-only conversati…

Okay, I lol’d.

The good news is that Google now supports reactions since they fall back to plain text.

https://www.macworld.com/article/610908/google-messages-andr...

Sure, but this is a brittle hack based on scraping text contents apple can change arbitrarily, and only a cosmetic one for the android user. The iPhones in a green bubble chat still see them last I checked, just, infuriatingly not the original sender who probably doesn’t realize how they are spamming the thread.

Fair enough, thank you!

Who is “they” and who is the “user” in this context?

A random Google Product Manager representing both sides seems not the way to go.

I think it strange that there is no conversation or talk about Android adopting iMessage -- is that something Apple has previously refused?

I mean if you're going to dictate a standard to a duopoly, you need both to agree. I haven't seen the opposite side of this discussion anywhere yet.

Well, iMessage isn't a standard, RCS is. Maybe Google could reverse engineer the iMessage protocol (if encryption and secret keys and whatnot doesn't get in the way), but they would have no guarantee that Apple wouldn't eventually change the protocol without notice or intentionally prevent unofficial clients.

Besides, the whole iMessage system is highly tied into the whole iCloud ecosystem, and I don't think either party wants Android users to have to create iCloud accounts to use the messaging app.

RCS is a standard that was designed by carriers, for carriers. As such it is unencrypted, depends on having a carrier and phone number, etc.

That may or may not be a good enough reason not to use RCS, but it doesn't affect anything of what I said.

Yeah, I just reread your comment and I think I was essentially replying to something along the lines of “RCS is standard so is perfect” which is very clearly not what you said :D

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