It is why it is so critical to hire the right people in leadership to avoid squandering key, already successful, strategic positions.
You can’t send images/videos through a Short Messaging Service, period. That’s not apple being anticompetitive, this is literally the technology’s limitation. It is also terrible from an encoding point of view, and probably why the rest of the world had no problem ditching it for most things, as sending an Unicode message takes up plenty characters, making you have to send 2 messages even with moderately long text. (I remember removing ‘ö’s and spaces when I was a child and had stricter limits on the number of SMSs in my plan.
Don't worry that the only universally available RCS relay is operated by Google and encryption is a part of a non-standard Google extension. So Google wants Apple to hand all messages over to Google.
For fun, Apple should propose to implement RCS but only if Google agrees to use the Apple relay. No chance it would ever be accepted.
I used it for a bit, but learned that RCS is not something I want even a little.
If you actually care about e2ee you'd use Signal.
That said I don’t know what Google’s messenger actually does when it drops the encryption on RCS messages. Is there a visual distinction between encrypted RCS and unencrypted RCS on the sender end if it is just dropping the encryption on the receiving end as a fallback?
...and the not insignificant inconvenience of knowing which of these apps each of your contacts uses or prefers. There really is a network effect of most people in a particular circle just using one thing. For US iPhone users at least, that thing is iMessage.
I use SMS mostly because the only people I know who don't are using Facebook stuff and I'm not going to do that. But I am nervous about the say when people stop using SMS so much because I don't look forward to having to have multiple messaging apps and trying to remember who is using what.
> You can’t send images/videos through a Short Messaging Service, period.
I do that all the time.
I moved out of the US and most of my US friends I still have to use iMessage to talk to. Only a few are active on WhatsApp.
Only half kidding. The real issue is just SMS vs data. And a little bit of feature parity - it's changed a few times, but until recently, if I "liked" a message in an SMS thread, we'd all see something like "Alistair like 'something said by somebody'" instead of just applying the thumb-up icon. This only gets worse for media sharing, link shares/snapshots, etc.
From what I understand (I am European, so never met anyone using iMessage) the real issue is that Apple refuses to distribute its application on Android, forcing instead communication from and to Android to travel via SMS. It's not a problem of SMS (which nobody really uses anymore), it's a deliberate choice. The genius is to allow enough communication between iPhone and Android as to not force iPhone users to switch app, while making it as uncomfortable as possible for both sides.
If it were possible at all, the best solution would be for Android to just block SMS from iMessage, citing some bogus security reason. Then iPhone users would be forced to switch app to communicate and the spell would be broken.
I really like my current android device, but my wife and our friends have iphones and we are all constantly inconvenienced by the messaging and other poor sharing options between platforms.
They share things without having to think about it, and I have to come up with solutions that are acceptable to them.
Between this issue and the differences in performance in the last few years, it has me thinking of moving back to team blue after 10+ years on green.
I've switched largely to communicating over alternative platforms since text messages can be unreliable.
iOS users will tell you how terrible that is and effectively put pressure on people to switch to iOS "like everyone else".
Everyone uses Discord or Facebook Messenger. Or Slack for coworkers.
100% I blame Google though, they need to get their ass together and make their own. It needs to work with everbody who already have a google account and they need to commit to it for 10 year minimum.
Then it is reasonable for Apple to create a system so they can talk together.
This already exists. 10 years ago, Google Hangouts was separated from Google+. It is currently accessible through the Gmail web interface, Gmail app, and "Chat" app.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
None of these are a good substitute for messaging like SMS or iMessage.
I dismissed a notification with photos from my wife and then had a hard time figuring out where that conversation was, because it seemed like it would be chat but wasn't.
Even if they would, what's the incentive for Apple to become interoperable? They want a moat and people that buy what they sell inside the moat.
Ftfy. It's not just iOS and Android out there.
But support for it is tepid - even Google Voice doesn't support it.