Yea that's what happens when Apple teams up with teens to bully anyone without an iPhone.
Android phones just aren't good enough to be worth the switch, especially when they're the same price. I've never paid more than $300 for an iPhone.
There's no actual draw to Android, your choices on the market today are iPhones and worse off brand iPhones desperately trying to be iPhones. It used to be a meme that at every WWCD Apple would announce features that Android had for years and we'd all have a laugh but now it's flipped the other way which is honestly embarrassing for Google who burnt through so much of their advantage.
Where, if I may ask, do you get such a good deal?
I have managed to push most of the people I know to not use SMS or iMessage and use Signal - we can all have a high quality chat and media sharing experience with a comparable (or superior) security model on whatever device you have. iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, Linux, etc.
Apple forced Google to screw up it's messaging strategy for all these years?
>Google has been unable to field a stable, competitive messaging platform for years and has thoroughly lost the messaging war to products with a long-term strategy. At least some divisions inside the company are waking up to how damaging this is to Google as a company, and now Google's latest strategy is to... beg its competition for mercy?
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/new-google-site-begs...
The article I linked to points out that RCS, as used by Google today, is a proprietary closed source fork of RCS that Google has refused to create a public API for.
>Google's version of RCS—the one promoted on the website with Google-exclusive features like optional encryption—is definitely proprietary, by the way.
If this is supposed to be a standard, there's no way for a third-party to use Google's RCS APIs right now. Some messaging apps, like Beeper, have asked Google about integrating RCS and were told there's no public RCS API and no plans to build one.
If you want to implement RCS, you'll need to run the messages through some kind of service, and who provides that server? It will probably be Google.
So the pitch for Apple to adopt RCS isn't just this public-good nonsense about making texts with Android users better; it's also about running Apple's messages through Google servers. Google profits in both server fees and data acquisition.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/new-google-site-begs...
I agree though, right now it really isn’t a defensible argument from Google.
Even ancient no-longer-updated dumb phones support SMS.
Is this the argument you guys are seriously making?
The solution for a competitor having a better product than you is to pick a single strategy and keep iterating on whatever it is you build, instead of abandoning one product after another.
That’s news to me, interesting.
So is this fork fully incompatible with the spec, or it just adds some features beyond that spec? I.e. if Apple implements the open spec can they communicate with Google systems using the base spec features?
If Google built and run their own non-interoperable fork as a competing messaging system then I strongly agree that they don’t have a leg to stand on.
I’m a bit less convinced with the whole “Google wants your data” angle. The whole reason they used RCS in the first place is because carriers want to run their own messaging infra, and I believe the carriers still do even if they are using Google’s spec (eg see https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/30/22556686/att-android-phon..., though I am not certain on this point). In the past Google tried to get carriers to buy in to their own proprietary service and failed.
It looks to me more that AT&T, Verizon (a bit) and T-Mobile are all running Google’s version of the RCS spec on their own networks and servers, so even if it isn’t open (it should be), it is still a de facto industry standard. So I think they still have a case here that Apple should fall back to this spec instead of SMS.
> the #1 most difficult [reason] to leave the Apple universe app is iMessage. . . iMessage amounts to serious lock-in,” Schiller commented that “moving iMessage to Android will hurt us more than help us, this email illustrates why.”
They know it's lock-in, and won't be fixing it any time soon.
Granted, moving to Whatsapp would resolve this but then you're using a Meta product.
This entire comment is headboggling, amazing how one can be so closeminded that they only see value in Apple.