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Comment by m348e912 | Hacker News Reader

(iPhone user here) It does seem to me that Apple isn't playing fair and this is no longer the technical issue it once was. Apple has so far refused to adopt RCS (the successor to SMS and MMS) which is now an industry standard for text messaging. Because of that, aside from the green bubble, the text messaging experience with non-iPhone users is subpar. Images and videos are compressed and things like tapback and group texts just stink.

https://www.android.com/get-the-message/

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RCS is awful. It’s an out-of-date, encumbered “standard” with poor global commonality in adoption. It exists for one reason only - because US carriers wanted some way to keep charging per message like their old sms cash cow, instead of being reduced to just proving dumb internet piping. Despite that, the carriers couldnt even agree amongst themselves on the "standard" RCS features to deploy for 10 years or so, until google co-opted the effort for their own goals semi-recently. Let it die.

US carries haven't charged per message in like a decade.

No but when RCS was invented they still did because they hadn't lost the war with messaging apps yet.

That’s only sort of true. Consumers don’t pay directly, but the carriers charge each other for them, and they still make a lot off people injecting sms into the system (think twilio, marketing, 2fa, application generated traffic). RCS was aimed (and priced) to try and make lots of money off a2p

There are some bad points for RCS like encryption, but still it's far better for openess/compatibility compared to iMessage. Perhaps good to have as an alternative to MMS for fallback of iMessage.

It’s better than MMS is about the only good thing I can say about it. But that’s a terribly low bar

RCS is not end-to-end encrypted. (But neither is SMS, I get it).

The fact that they're pushing a protocol in 2022 that has state-of-the-art design for fifteen years ago, is disingenuous, and is emblematic of all the chefs that have their hand in the pot with the Android ecosystem.

> RCS is not end-to-end encrypted.

While this may be some technicality in a spec, the reality is that all the people I know using Android are enjoying end-to-end 1:1 encrypted conversations using Google Messages. Group messages were announced to get e2e encryption soon.

> RCS is not end-to-end encrypted

RCS uses TLS, which is about as good as iMessage if you turn on iCloud Backups[0], as they just copy your private keys.

[0]: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/security-of-icloud-...

Given the iPhone's marketshare, is it RCS really the industry standard?

Does the iPhone have a standard that other phones could adopt? Ie is your argument that Apple has been pushing an alternate standard, but Google is rejecting it? If so what is it?

I could argue the industry standard for interoperable messaging is still MMS. Because Apple.

Android is ~72% of the global market: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile

So, yes.

The month-day-year format is the standard for 4.23% of the global population, but it's the default in most IT systems, including every globally-deployed cloud system I have ever used.

What's your point?

You should say thank you for localization system.

Ah yes, that system where if I see a date like 11/12/22 on the web, then I can safely assume it is one of the following:

    12th of November 2022
    11th of December 2022
    22nd of December 2011

Until I see a "disambiguating" date in the exact same context, I have localization to thank for making it impossible to determine what I'm seeing.

And I mean exact same context, because there are web portal where you will see date formats in multiple formats on the same page!

But most of those Android users are on WhatsApp. So, it's really WhatsApp that's the global standard, not RCS.

You only need 15.6% of a market to claim there are no standards?

Given the source of the claim, are you surprised by the claim?

> Given the iPhone's marketshare, is it RCS really the industry standard?

It's funny to me seeing this statement, as half of the people out there push it the other way when discussing App Stores. "Well iPhone isn't a monopoly world wide."

Naive question here. What's the encryption story here with RCS?

What I like about iMessage is that I feel its relatively secure. Given the choice of trusting Apple vs a Frankenstein arrangement between Android and the various carriers, I'm inclined to go with Apple, unfair practices aside.

RCS with Google's implementation allows e2ee for two party conversations (finally, as of last year). It doesn't do e2ee for group chats, and other implementations don't provide e2ee.

They have no incentive to adopt some external standard if 4 out of 5 teens will be adopting their platform in the not-too-distant future.

RCS is less of an industry standard than iMessage.

Apple built something better. So did Google. Then Google killed theirs. Then they did the same thing three more times.

It's no wonder nobody wants to use Google messaging, and that Google resorts to smear campaigns. People would rather use WhatsApp spyware from FB/Meta or totally unencrypted Discord/Slack than bother with another Google IM product (which, let's be clear, is 100% what RCS is).

PS: Apple preserves a backdoor in the end to end crypto of iMessage for government surveillance that allows Apple to read all iMessages. iMessage isn't good either.

> PS: Apple preserves a backdoor in the end to end crypto of iMessage for government surveillance that allows Apple to read all iMessages.

That’s configurable. By default a user can access them from other devices, but that feature can be disabled.

It's on by default, so everyone you iMessage with has it on, and is sending your plaintext to Apple in the unencrypted iCloud Backup.

Your turning it off has no effect. Most messages are backed up twice.

It's (iMessage) not a standard if it isn't open for adoption by anyone else.

It doesn't matter how much better it is, if the only way to use it is via Apple hardware. It's their prerogative to do that, and it makes good business sense assuming it doesn't bring them monopoly problems (and IMO it probably shouldn't due to the aforementioned stats re: worldwide usage at 27%, and even US usage is only at 55%).

But it in no way is a standard. It's just a proprietary piece of software. So literally any other standard proposal is "more of a standard" than iMessage.

> Apple built something better.

I want to against this. Even if the app is well made, messaging platform only for specific company's devices is completely broken idea. Tragedy is that US people adopted completely broken platform.

It does fallback to SMS though, so in practice it’s compatible with non Apple devices.

I text Android users all the time and besides the green bubble I don’t see much difference honestly

Lol RCS a standard. Because Google says so, just as with so-called "web standards"? In the real world, people use WhatsApp, SnapChat, Insta, Telegram, Signal, and, in fact, iMessage and SMS/MMS.

Iphone users on android devices are also subpar. When you "like" a text or whatever those interactions can get sent as a new text. One iphone user in a group text can spam the entire group with a flood of pointless interactions.

That was fixed last year. https://www.androidpolice.com/google-messages-might-soon-han...

That's only if you're using google's SMS app. Many phones ship with something else (like Samsung's) as the default.

No reason Samsung can’t do the same.

Doesn't really matter whether they could do the same if they don't.

Samsung has started to ship Google Messages as the default:

https://9to5google.com/2022/02/14/google-messages-samsung-ga...

Isn't this because they're trying to make RCS universal and Google has that API locked down from anyone else using it while claiming "RCS is a universal open standard" lol. Typical "do no good" stance from the goog

That finally explains why I saw so many articles about how "Google fixed iphone responses on Android", but I never saw any evidence for it on mine.

I don't want RCS. Keep iMessage for people and very very limited businesses please.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/04/google-disables-rcs-ads-in...

Show me an RSC server run by a carrier and I'd believe it.

Verizon: https://www.verizon.com/support/advanced-messaging-faqs/

AT&T: https://www.androidauthority.com/att-rcs-google-3121088/

Why would apple give up this advantage?

They do this on purpose. They know from focus groups this encourages lock-in.

Apple is the new Microsoft.

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