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Comment by issafram | Hacker News Reader

I can't understand why any person would actually side with Apple with this issue. At it's core, Apple's refusal to integrate with RCS is an anti-consumer practice. They fear it will drive customers to purchase Android phones but that would most likely be an incredibly small amount of people. People buy iPhones for many reasons. The color of the messages isn't the main one.

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If I were Tim Cook, Apple would implement RCS over my dead body. Google have been telling everybody that Apple are “using bullying as a way to sell products” as a part of Google’s RCS PR. That’s an incredibly sleazy road to go down. How are you supposed to collaborate with an organisation doing this? I think Apple should open up messaging more, but I also totally support Apple treating RCS in particular as untouchable toxic waste because of this. If Google genuinely valued interoperability and wanted Apple to coöperate instead of using this as something to attack Apple over, then they wouldn’t have burnt that bridge so thoroughly.

There’s no commandment from heaven anointing RCS as The One True Messaging Protocol. That’s just Google PR that wants you to think that. Even if Apple were to support something other than iMessage and SMS, it doesn’t necessarily follow that this must be RCS.

I side with Apple, because I feel that they protect my privacy and security. Google is just trying to force Apple users onto a messaging service that is largely hosted on their servers and run by them so they can collect information about users and target us with ads.

Do I really need Google knowing when I'm typing a message or my location or all the other information they will surely be able to extract when they are running the messaging platform that all my messages are going over?

The beauty of the iPhone is paying for the service instead of having your data be the service and getting it for free. It's a big reason why people are switching to iPhone away from Android.

Does Google actually care about our security or privacy, or are they just trying to force us onto their platform?

> The color of the messages isn't the main one.

maybe not HN readers, but this is actually a major factor for a huge number of ordinary people in the US, particularly teenagers and young people

How huge?

Green text bubbles cause one to be identified as uncool and limit your lifetime earing power as a result.

It’s not just the color of the bubble.

On iOS, green is a warning that at least two things are true:

1) The other side is subject to blanket surveillance (which is probably true of RCS, assuming Google implemented the client/backup).

2) The other endpoint cannot handle images or videos correctly. Based on their track record with the last dozen communications platforms Google has built, this is probably also true for Android RCS implementations. For example, the other day, someone attempted to use gmail to send me a locally stored image, and instead it sent a URL back to some server somewhere. This is neither SMTP nor SMS’s fault. Presumably Google’s RCS client will eventually pull crap like that too. Hell, they try to do it with HTML (remember AMP)?

Note that, following this convention, Signal messages are correctly colored blue, even when sent to android.

(I know that apple does not dictate these colors. Just explaining what “green bubble” means to people that are used to android’s bullshit.)

Google sells an ad platform atop RCS. No thanks.

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