Hacker News Reader

Comment by no_wizard | Hacker News Reader

RIM could have had a second act, potentially, by being SMS 2.0 (as mentioned in this article[0] they tried to sell BBM to carriers as SMS 2.0), and I'm not sure how they lost out on this, as Google did this with RCS many years later. I think if they had done it, it would have forced better interop with Apple (iMessage was still newish and they may have been in a situation to be further pressured longer to support standard communication protocols).

There was a longform article about RIM's attempt to become the "BBM" company but I can't for the life of me find it, it was by a major tech publication (The Verge I think, but I tried searching their archives and no dice)

[0]: https://www.inverse.com/tech/how-blackberry-bbm-changed-mess...

View on HN

I was at Windows Phone (WP7/8 days) when “RCS was just a couple of years away”. Good thing I didn’t hold my breath - it didn’t seem to me then that there was any path to success and I was on my first job as a 20 year old.

Google hasn’t managed anything with RCS other than deploy it for their own messaging app that talks to their own infrastructure. The fact that the app uses RCS is an implementation detail - could just as well be carrier pigeons. Doesn’t matter because it isn’t cross-carrier interoperable.

The carriers all moved from Circuit Switched SMS signaling to SMS over IMS (LTE onwards) for interoperable SMS. IMS is the layer under RCS (created originally for cable set top boxes - go figure).

This is basically SMS over IP which means your device is doing all the legacy stuff like 7bit ASCII encoding to pack messages into 160 characters etc. These requirements won’t go away because, the moment a carrier tries to do cross-carrier interop there is a whole sea of legacy translations that would have to be managed by the message originating carrier. This would require real-time figuring out the capabilities of a receiving carrier based on phone number homing. It’s a massive undertaking that’s $$$.

On top of this The carriers all fought including E2EE in the spec to avoid picking a fight with the government. So anything Google implemented is DOA.

RCS has failed.

The reason iMessage has been successful (and RCS has not) is because iMessage doesn't have any reliance on the carrier. Selling a messaging system to carriers doesn't make any sense, why cooperate with them when it's easier to route around them and handle all the messages through your own infra.

Is this the article?

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-insid...

I dont think that they had the reach to be SMS 2.0, Blackberry was only a major player in a few markets outside north america.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com