Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year | Hacker News Reader

Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year

9to5mac.com

793 pointsdm709 comments

Excellent. The next step is for Google to release a free and open source way for Android developers to build apps that send RCS messages. Currently, the only messaging app on Android that fully supports RCS is Messages by Google, which is closed source and requires Google Play Services to activate RCS features.

Also, end-to-end encryption is not part of the RCS specification, but is a proprietary extension to RCS that Google has made exclusive to Messages by Google.[1] This feature should be made open and added to the actual RCS specification so that Apple and other vendors can make use of it.

(Notes: There is a proprietary RCS API which Google only allows Samsung apps to use to communicate with Messages by Google.[2] Verizon has an app called Verizon Messages or Message+ that uses RCS to some extent, but this is an incomplete implementation that only works on Samsung devices on the Verizon network with no cross-carrier compatibility.[3])

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/google-enables-end-t...

[2] https://www.xda-developers.com/google-messages-rcs-api-third...

[3] https://www.verizon.com/support/knowledge-base-222792/

This is why I don't buy Google's bad faith shaming of Apple for not adopting RCS. The current version of it that people are using on Android isn't even a "standard" by any normal usage of the term, it's just another Google messaging service. No one can make their own app, and there's barely any carrier adoption, so Google is basically running the whole network.

Does this mean that now if you send a message to someone from an iPhone that doesn't go through iMessage, it will instead go through Google's servers? Sure the service will hopefully be better than SMS but at the cost of giving Google the keys to pretending they're a "standard."

> This is why I don't buy Google's bad faith shaming of Apple for not adopting RCS.

Google is literally operating an RCS SaaS company for marketers and telcos, so I'd take any of their statements in support for RCS with a grain of salt: https://jibe.google.com/

Yup. The shaming campaigns are just a way to play the moral high ground in their effort to replace an actual messaging standard with their own proprietary service.

SMS is certainly long overdue to be replaced, but I don't want it replaced with a Google service. Hopefully the iPhone adoption will be some incentive for carriers to implement RCS properly.

I'm afraid that the only incentive for carriers to invest anything into RCS would be being able to charge for it or use it as a way to lock in their customers.

As antiquated as SMS is, at least all carriers support it, and people largely don't need to worry about their existing conversation threads being interrupted when they switch carriers.

I believe that that's not true for RCS at least for group conversations.

I don't really care if the shaming was done in good or bad faith. At the end of the day, I'm an Android user in a sea of iPhone users, and I'm tired of the fact that our default communication mode has to be SMS or MMS. If this fixes that problem, I don't quite care how we got here.

It's kind of bizarre that people here would rather have shitty experience talking to their friends just to defend the honor megacorporations.

Apple and Google ARE NOT PEOPLE. They do NOT HAVE FEELINGS you need to defend. Jesus.

Being able to send a rich message from iPhone to Android and back (including location, pictures, videos) is really not something that will cause you pain and Apple won't lash out and punish you for it.

> Apple and Google ARE NOT PEOPLE.

That's incorrect. Apple here refers to a group of people, not the fruit. Google here too refers to a group of people, not the software that provides search features.

> They do NOT HAVE FEELINGS you need to defend.

Their feelings need to be defended as much as any other person. Which, logically, is not at all, but as you are defending your own feelings here what is logical is already violated, so...

Let's use the term "corporate entity" instead of "group of people". Because corporate entities do not have human emotions or human properties and actively work on suppressing them to generate (or extract) value.

A 'corporate entity' is just a group of people. Those people absolutely have emotions.

Yes, but the corporate entity does not; the (possibly contradictory) emotions of the people who have some role in a corporation are not features of the corporate entity.

Yes, but the corporate entity is not a thing in and of itself. It is just a language device used in communication to identify the actual thing: People.

> Yes, but the corporate entity is just another way to say group of people

No, its not.

Its more like a grouping of a subset of the actions of a group of people in some contexts, and a shared subset of the interests of a different (narrower, but overlapping) group of people in others.

But its not generally simply a way of referencing a group of people.

Right. Like you say, a group of people. Now, why do you think those people are void of feelings?

> Like you say, a group of people.

No, that's exactly what I said it was not.

A subset of the actions of a group of people, or a subset of the shared interests of a group of people, is not a group of people.

You suggested that is what it is not, but then went on to say that is what it is. You just did it again.

No, I didn't, but if you can't understand language enough to recognize that there is no point in further discussion.

You mentioned there is a subset, but the subsets described is still a way to identify the group of people. You can try and twist language all you want, but there is no avoiding the fact that a corporation is just people. If people somehow magically disappeared, the corporate entity would disappear at the exact same time – it's the same thing.

> You mentioned there is a subset, but the subsets described is still a way to identify the group of people.

A subset of the actions or interests, not a subset of the group of people (the latter would, indeed, be just a different group of people, but isn't what I said.)

> If people somehow magically disappeared, the corporate entity would disappear at the exact same time – it's the same thing.

No, its not the same thing.

If North America disappeared, all the piles of dog feces in North America would also disappear, but the piles of dog feces are not the same thing as North America.

> A subset of the actions or interests

Direction is the word you are struggling to find, but it is the direction of the group of people. You have not added anything drawing attention to this so-called subset. It changes nothing about the discussion. It's just silly wordplay to divert our attention from your grievous error at the onset.

To be fair to Google, though, they did not intend to operate this as a SaaS. They fully expected carriers to run their own RCS servers but almost none did, so stepping in to fill the void was a follow-on decision from Google (which was honestly a very smart move - Messages w/RCS is hugely improved over vanilla SMS) only after realizing carriers didn't have the appetite to abandon SMS.

Nice website. Let's see if we can edit it for another Google product...

# Chrome

## Better Browsing for Everyone

Web browsing changed the way we communicate, but it’s out of date. Today we want a web browser that lets us do things like watch videos, edit documents in real time, notify us of breaking news, or make video calls.

Google Chromium and V8 makes all this possible, and now the browser industry is coming together to bring it to users everywhere.

## The universal Web application

While Web applications were designed to move Web browsing beyond reading documents, different approaches made it difficult and costly for websites to bring it to users.

By aligning on the W3C's universal Web standards - with the Google Chrome client app - websites can now provide Web applications across the browser ecosystem.

RCS is still standardized and maintained by the GSMA, of which Google is a member. Google acquired Jibe in 2015 in order to get their RCS server and client architecture (Jibe was a leader in shaping the RCS-Standard).

Everyone can make his own app, it's just that he would need to develop a whole RCS-client for it to interact with (Google's or carriers') RCS-Servers as well. So what is missing is Google offering their RCS-client with open API's for other apps (than Google Messages) to use.

To be fair, maintaining interoperability of those apps with the underlying client would then be a huge endeavour, Google Messages itself is already updating quite frequently...

The problem is that Google has a de facto monopoly on RCS.

The carriers (full members of GSMA) came up with RCS as a replacement for SMS/MMS at a network level and then didn't have the appetite to implement it.

Instead, they either A) adopted Google’s Messages as is, B) adopted Google’s Messages in white label form, slapping their logo on it, or C) made “their own thing” running on Google’s Jibe servers.

With very few exceptions, it all goes through Google. And Google uses this to pretend that their proprietary iMessage competitor is “the” RCS standard.

The actual RCS standard is dead for all intents and purposes because nobody uses it like that, except for Apple in the short term.

Monopoly is the wrong term here, the root-cause of this situation is that Google is now maintaining the largest OS-implementation of RCS by far, only followed by Samsung, and then some carriers who also use RCS for other platforms (web-apps, STB,...).

Apple adopting RCS means that there is another player to balance this field. A much-needed player, and the only one that's relevant (other than maybe WeChat and WhatsApp)-

> With very few exceptions, it all goes through Google.

Yeah, because the mobile end-device for RCS is currently always an Android device. If there would be support from Apple, an RCS-server of Apple could handle the communication to Apple-Devices.

The idea of every carrier owning his own RCS-server was anyway already dead before the first client was released. The number of carriers never increased after the initial rollout of the major working-group members, simply because there is no way to charge for the service and monetization of such a small userbase with other services was not sustainable.

It's worth to put this into time-context here: When work on RCS (or "RCS-e") was initiated, WhatsApp was already well-established and leading the European market.

> Monopoly is the wrong term here, the root-cause of this situation is that Google is now maintaining the largest OS-implementation of RCS by far, only followed by Samsung, and then some carriers who also use RCS for other platforms (web-apps, STB,...).

Clarification - many of the carriers are using Google-hosted RCS servers as well. I don't think Apple especially likes the idea of iPhone user metadata (and message contents) going through Google-hosted chat servers every time they message an Android user.

> If there would be support from Apple, an RCS-server of Apple could handle the communication to Apple-Devices.

The issue there is you need something that authoritatively resolves a phone number as being routable via a particular server, and (ideally) to a public key for encryption.

This is the hard problem for chat services - knowing how to route and how to protect data. If there is a problem, then you have some other party monitoring your communications or even manipulating them.

If the same phone number could be authoritative to either Google or Apple RCS servers, then some other component has to make that call.

> I don't think Apple especially likes the idea of iPhone user metadata (and message contents) going through Google-hosted chat servers every time they message an Android user.

Every time an iPhone user sends an SMS or MMS to an Android user, it ends up on an Android phone, which Google could snoop on if they so desired.

And, regardless, if Apple implements Google's E2EE extension to RCS, it doesn't really matter whose servers they go through.

>The actual RCS standard is dead for all intents and purposes because nobody uses it like that, except for Apple in the short term.

Maybe that will change now that Apple is adding support.

I wonder if Apple might run its own RCS servers

  RCS is still standardized and maintained by the GSMA

Yeah. And that version of RCS is prone to wild incompatibilities and still lacks E2EE. The only way carriers have figured out how to interoperate with each other is to adopt Google's server and client.

https://www.engadget.com/att-starts-using-googles-jibe-platf...

The only way for carriers to interoperate with each other is by having an intermediary party which limits their freedom of customizing any given specification.

This is applicable ESPECIALLY to large-scale carriers of US, which are big enough to customize every spec and force their suppliers to adopt it.

The only reason why Google's RCS works better than any attempt before that, is that Google is forced to unify the implementation. It's not their spec, they are part of the RCS working-group like everyone else, but by stepping in they instantly reached a cross-carrier rollout-scale where they can't comply to every custom requirement of ATT, Verizon, Vodafone, T-Mobile unless they all agree to make it part of the standard.

The way it works is ugly for the privacy oriented folks. Turning it off and block by the firewall is a must. Just like "Private" DNS. Both are unfortunately forced.

That's the trap door in this. Apple is going to implement RCS exactly as the specification says it should be implemented, no more or no less. Any incompatibilities with Android will be laid at Google's door to resolve.

Having beaten Apple with the RCS stick for the last year, Google might find themselves now getting beaten back.

I am okay with this.

Apple also stated they would work to add encryption to the RCS spec, poking Google in the eye with their proprietary model. Of course this might not ever happen, but it's still fun to see big companies taking jabs at each other.

When elephants fight, the grass suffers.

When companies compete, consumers win.

Unless they conspire in $20B/year search agreements.

That's not competition.

And there’s no true Scotsman. This sort of thing is - in practice - what capitalism looks like in the 21st century.

I believe Peter Thiel would say that capitalism and competition are opposites, and the goal of capitalism is monopoly.

https://morfene.com/021.pdf

I'm not sure why people always attribute this observation to Thiel, as if it was something fringe, given how obvious and apparent it is.

The goal of a profit-seeking entity is to maximize profit. That is achieved by becoming a monopoly. Competition is just the consequence of multiple entities trying to become a monopoly - there can be only one. This is the motive part of market economy. The energy source.

Now, monopolies are obviously bad for society. Therefore, markets are regulated to prevent monopolies. This turns the market into an engine. You have constant inflow of upstarts dreaming of riches, fighting each other out to reach the throne of a monopolist, only to be denied it by regulation, and eventually become broken and/or pushed out by the younger followers.

Or, via another analogy: the market economy is designed like a donkey chasing a carrot on a stick attached to the animal, while standing on a treadmill. Being surprised that monopoly is the goal of companies is like being surprised the donkey would chase the carrot.

> Therefore, markets are regulated to prevent monopolies.

Markets are regulated to enable monopolies. Bell would have never become a monopoly if there wasn't the regulation involved in laying copper and Microsoft would have never become a monopoly if there wasn't intellectual property regulation.

For Bell, presumably the goal was to provide a monopoly to achieve an otherwise difficult goal: universal service. That's certainly the case with the post office in the UK (although now being eroded).

For Microsoft: I think that's a weird argument. Plus I think there would have been lots of things pushing towards a single big player for desktop computing in the early-middle days (network effects).

No matter what the goal was, it remains that other players would have jumped in if there wasn't the legal impediments. But such regulation provided a moat in which they were able to build their monopoly.

Same goes for Microsoft. Everyone and their brother would have released their own 'Windows' if regulation weren't there to disallow it. Again, that regulation offered a moat which allowed them to establish their monopoly.

From a long perspective I think the bell monopoly probably served an important purpose and may have been worth it. Not having universal service would have been socially divisive and culturally a problem. I think we need to stop judging things only on (presumed/assumed) economic efficiency. Non monetary values mean regulation is often important. We accept this with environmental and health/safety rules to some degree - I wish we could develop a language to argue for it more in other spheres.

On the Ms point.. is your argument that we should have no intellectual property rights for software at all? It seems odd to single out only this example. I’m broadly not in favour of software patents but I’m not clear that they were relevant to MS success anyway. I think you need to make a clearer argument about what regulations we would have forgone for others to really evaluate your case.

> is your argument that we should have no intellectual property rights for software at all?

Obviously not. That would require opinion, and sharing opinion is in bad faith. Discussion is merely for talking about how the world is. And as the way the world is, a monopoly needs some kind of moat to emerge. Intellectual property regulation exists to enable such moats.

> It seems odd to single out only this example.

Why? One example is all that is necessary to convey the idea.

But also, it is the only convicted monopolist in that respect that I could think off off the top of my head. Google was recently charged, but not yet convicted, so I could not include them. I am not about to suggest that other companies are monopolies based on my opinion. That, again, would be in bad faith. But, theoretically, the same could apply to other companies. It is not something that needs to be strictly limited to Microsoft.

> I'm not sure why people always attribute this observation to Thiel, as if it was something fringe, given how obvious and apparent it is.

Indeed. It's so obvious and apparent that even Adam Smith himself made this exact point.

If you think capitalism like whe have today, using the government as regulation platforms, sure. If you think capitalism as a system where you free to pursue your capital, not so sure its sustainable to keep a monopoly.

I agree. The goal of capitalism is to crush all competition and become a monopoly - and that's ok. The problem is, we should treat the monopoly as the winning end state and then restart the game.

Or conspire to cap engineer pay and get a slap on the wrist not equivalent to the money they saved, and then continued the collusion.

In that case Apple and Google are the consumer, though. It is the workers offering the service, who are competing for those capped positions, even while being aware of the situation. The consumer wins.

Why did consumer loose here? This would have definitely had effect on iPhone's cost.

Not in the race to the bottom, they don’t

Up to a point. Afterwards, consumers suffer from garbage products, enshittified services, and under-reported inflation, while companies compete themselves to oblivion.

You really only see that in tech, and do so because of lack of meaningful competition. You get some sideline competition, yes, but never direct competition. The law doesn't allow you to directly compete. As soon as you try you will be slapped with a patent/copyright/whatever lawsuit that will kill you off before you ever had a chance.

Industries where direct competition is allowable do not suffer from these problems.

> Industries where direct competition is allowable do not suffer from these problems.

No, they suffer much worse. Haven't you noticed how all goods and services go to shit over the years? This is not an accident, this is competition optimizing out any quality it can get away with removing.

> Haven't you noticed how all goods and services go to shit over the years?

No. I can't think of anything I buy that I would want to go back in time with. The quality in my experience has only improved, often dramatically. Those who try to skimp on quality get destroyed by the competition. What are you referring to?

The only thing I can think of that you might be referring to – based on what I hear other say, not based on my own buying habits – is things like appliances where manufacturers have really dug deep into computerization so that they can enjoy the same legal moats other tech companies do. But what you are experiencing there is the lack of competition we spoke of earlier.

Maybe small companies. But this isn't going to make any major difference to consumers; two bulls can lock horns and yet not budge a millimeter.

As an Android user with a healthy distaste of Google things, this + parent makes me smile.

(Discontinuing their old magazine features, with nary a month to back up my purchased collection, as a one by one download was the latest thing).

This is such an interesting thread to follow, I didn’t think about the traps Google had!

If RCS doesn’t get E2E encryption added to the public spec, they should highlight unencrypted messages with an even more offensive yellow bubble.

or vomit green moving gradient with the vomit emoji tap backed on it

will RCS still break most imessage group chat capabilities?

I dont really think “at least my videos will send at full resolution to android users” is really that much of a difference

multiple generations of people use phone chats for all the capabilities they offer, which is way more than higher resolution picture and video attachments alongside text

RCS supports read status, emoji reactions, etc. I use Beeper on Android to have support Messages group chats, and in my experience it's functionally the same as group chats over rcs.

Unencrypted RCS messages will be rendered in Comic Sans.

I like this suggestion better!

RCS messages outside of Google’s Jibe uses HTTPS/TLS so there is encryption. What Google has done is add E2E on top.

> Any incompatibilities with Android will be laid at Google's door

Where it belongs. Google's fork of the open RCS standard is closed source and proprietary.

> 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.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/new-google-site-begs...

Not sure why people thinks it’s a fork. RCS is only a standard, there is no open source implementation. Even to use it commercially you need to license it from GSMA. So every implementation of RCS is proprietary for the server side. On client side, Google has published the code in Android 12 sources. But most clients are all proprietary too.

So all Apple has to do is to change bubble color to indicate your messages, though no longer through SMS, is insecure.

I think Apple will not build a server and only build support for RCS only in their app. Actual service will be left as carriers’ responsibility and as only a few carriers actually have their own server, RCS on iPhone will be dead on arrival.

> No one can make their own app

Google did, Apple will, what stops other companies from doing it aside from effort and money ?

> and there's barely any carrier adoption

Expecting carriers to do adopt new technologies is usually a losing bet.

See the parent comment.

Parent comments is positing that only Google can do it with no specific argument on why it would be so. For instance, why would Samsung be barred from doing it ? What about Nothing ? Xiaomi ?

The "monopoly" argument feels like vague hand waiving to me. It's probably a complex and costly situation, but nothing close to why we don't have different browser engines on iOS for instance.

The recent revelations about Google paying 36% of revenue from iOS to Apple made me wonder if that had something to do with the browser-engine lockdown. I guess it depends on what the terms of the deal are and whether it depends on the user agents conveyed by the browsers. Apple might want to make damned sure that there's no mistaking or misrepresenting traffic from their platform.

> This is why I don't buy Google's bad faith shaming of Apple for not adopting RCS.

But the point to me is that I don't care whether it's "bad faith" or not, just that (again, to me) it's actually the correct point of view. Messaging integration between iOS and Android, in the US at least, is not just fundamentally broken, but the presence of a single Android user in an iMessage group chat can break the experience for everyone (e.g. potato quality video), and if you are the "odd man out" on the Android people start resenting your presence in the chat (and, to be clear, I'm middle aged, not in middle school). For an example, see https://www.instagram.com/p/CwLKeGRLieb/

There is no reason for there to be such messaging incompatibility between iOS and Android. My feeling is that Apple knows the regulatory winds are shifting very much against anticompetitive behavior, and their iMessage incompatibility was just looking like the blatant protectionism that it is.

> There is no reason for there to be such messaging incompatibility between iOS and Android. My feeling is that Apple knows the regulatory winds are shifting very much against anticompetitive behavior, and their iMessage incompatibility was just looking like the blatant protectionism that it is.

iMessage is and always was for iPhone users to communicate with other iPhone users. It will send messages over SMS as a fallback but it was only ever for use in communicating with other iOS devices in the same way iOS is only for Apple devices.

I see all arguments to force Apple to open up iMessage as punishing them for building a platform that people want that the majority of the US has bought into.

And android is bigger everywhere outside the US.

Also Europe has already solved this. If you want to talk to iPhone and android users in Europe you just use WhatsApp or another third-party service.

Why must Apple dilute the experience to communicate with folks not on its platform?

In electric car charging Tesla built out the super charger network investing billions in service of making their cars more useful. (iMessage is this to iPhone users.) there’s another standard out there or handfuls of other methods of charging cars but the market leader is the super charger network. And wouldn’t you know? Folks are adopting it because Tesla is licensing it but it was their choice.

To force Apple to open up iMessage as a protocol to other devices by fiat seems wholly totalitarian and invasive.

>I see all arguments to force Apple to open up iMessage as punishing them for building a platform that people want that the majority of the US has bought into.

I see all arguments that Apple shouldn't be forced to open up iMessage (or implement RCS) as forcing me to have a worse phone experience because I didn't buy an iPhone from the company that said "if you want to sideload apps, buy an Android".

"Just use a third-party app" is not a solution for people who text with the normal messaging app, and I sure as hell would never beg them to migrate to Whatsapp of all things.

>To force Apple to open up iMessage as a protocol to other devices by fiat seems wholly totalitarian and invasive.

You have this backwards. The totalitarian and invasive part is when I have to beg Apple for permission to use software they wrote, to sell apps to people using devices they sold, etc. This bootlicker mentality of "it's Apple's devices and software" needs to die. Apple is the totalitarian, the EU is trying to stop tyranny.

> I sure as hell would never beg them to migrate to Whatsapp of all things.

In many places, most people wouldn't. But Europeans (and some others) seem eager to BCC all their texts to Mark Zuckerberg for some reason.

> In many places, most people wouldn't. But Europeans (and some others) seem eager to BCC all their texts to Mark Zuckerberg for some reason.

There is zero evidence that Facebook is engaging in passive mass surveillance of WhatsApp messages.

Does that mean your prior for whether it’s happening is strongly against? That seems irrational given the history of both meta and the tech industry and govt generally.

Absolutely hilarious to see the willingness for folks on this platform to advocate the opening up of something a company built by fiat.

Because YOU don't want to adapt you're asking nay advocating the forceful opening up of another platform to do it for you. That's just lazy.

Think about it like this:

You create a super successful bit of software -- let's call it an operating system -- that runs on a very popular and well designed piece of hardware referred to as an internet phone -- let's call it an iPhone. :-)

It takes off. Market share is just above 50% in the country of it's birth. w00t.

Now folks that haven't licensed your software by buying the hardware you built it for are out with pitch forks to force you to support other internet connected phones when you already do support them just not in the same way. Messages are still able to be sent to these devices but they don't share the same richness.

Why would anyone advocate that something a person with autonomy or a company for that matter be forced by fiat to open up a messaging system or any other bit of kit because the mob wants them to?

People are just frustrated and entitled. This isn't open source software. You can't just go and fork it. There are entire companies that have cropped up that are trying to bridge this blue bubble green bubble divide and that's the solution to take. Until, and unless Apple caves and opens up iMessage it seems wholly un-American to force them to do so when there are alternatives be it something like WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, normal SMS and the green bubbles that come with it or moving to an iPhone. I'll never buy the "waaa because I use the built-in app on my Android phone and I want to have blue bubbles when I talk to my friends on iPhones ... waaaaaa!"

There are solutions, I've already outlined them. Pick one.

> Apple is the totalitarian, the EU is trying to stop tyranny.

The EU tends to do this. A successful platform is created and to give shortcuts to other companies to build on that success they force that platform to open to competitors. This is exactly why the EU doesn't have companies that innovate like the US does.

> Absolutely hilarious to see the willingness for folks on this platform to advocate the opening up of something a company built by fiat.

Yes, it's called creating standards and fostering free market competition. This has happened REPETEDLY and time and time again.

Pretty much every standard, cable and tech you're using that works on multiple manufacturers was "something a company built by fiat".

If I'm facetious as you - I'm surprised just how deep corporate bootlicking goes here that outright hurts your ability to vote with the wallet and make modern market capitalism work for you as a user.

Standards come out of standards bodies. There's nothing other than a law or a lawsuit or the threat thereof that would compel to open iMessage as a standard. It's a competitive value-add to adopting the platform.

Free markets are I create something awesome and profit from it not am then forced to allow you and everyone else to build off of my hard work unless I choose to or am forced to.

If Apple was approached by governments or other institutions to use iMessage as the basis of some standard which iirc hasn't been done that'd be one thing. What we do know is that RCS is inferior to iMessage in many ways.

So Apple will adopt standards compliant RCS but it likely won't be the same and lazy Android users who want to stick to the stock app will get to enjoy the spoils of a half-baked solution.

My issue is with this mob mentality of forcing the hand by fiat, lawsuit, or otherwise to coerce a company to open up a tech/product/platform when they built it with no intentions of opening it -- it's proprietary by design.

The free-market works when someone else builds something -- in this case a better phone experience -- that would cause folks to move to that and abandon iMessage. But no -- let's keep our pitchforks and keep insisting some wierd collective ownership bias that means you or I or anyone else has some say over the property and tech of another person or company. Because, sure that makes sense.

> The free-market works when someone else builds something -- in this case a better phone experience -- that would cause folks to move to that and abandon iMessage

The free market fails when the cost for anyone else to enter the market is completely out of reach to anyone else.

That argument fails evidenced by all the various smartphone companies that have emerged. It’s not Apple’s fault that they failed to gain traction. They haven’t provided a marginally better experience or value add enough to make anyone move platforms.

> "Just use a third-party app" is not a solution for people who text with the normal messaging app, and I sure as hell would never beg them to migrate to Whatsapp of all things.

But there's no reason to move. Your messages still get to iPhone users via SMS with a different color. What's the beef with the blue v. green anyway? The messages get there. Don't like it? There's plenty of iPhones or other iOS devices that can be had for cheap. They'll last a long time, they'll get tons of updates, they're secure. What's not to love?

Or there are third-party services that you can pay for like Beeper that will act as a bridge.

Try texting an iPhone user a picture or video and look at the garbage they receive from you.

> In electric car charging Tesla built out the super charger network investing billions in service of making their cars more useful.

And if they hadn't done so by choice, they should absolutely have been required to open up that network to all cars.

Can you imagine a world (for ICE cars) where you'd have to find a car-manufacturer-specific gas station to refuel? That's ridiculous.

No. A market winner for gas stations would have emerged and cars would adopt that. Just like is happening with Tesla and their chargers and connectors.

> My feeling is that Apple knows the regulatory winds are shifting very much against anticompetitive behavior, and their iMessage incompatibility was just looking like the blatant protectionism that it is.

I think that point would be stronger if anyone else was open. Google used to run an open messaging service but shut it down as part of their failed attempt to compete with Facebook, and their current professed love of open RCS hasn’t extended to allowing anyone else to use their implementation. Android developers aren’t given access the way they were to SMS, and nobody except Samsung is allowed to use their proprietary E2EE servers.

I think this is basically Apple calling their bluff and telling them that they need to actually release their proprietary work as open standards. I’m sure that will be their argument to regulators.

> and their current professed love of open RCS hasn’t extended to allowing anyone else to use their implementation

Google wanted the carriers to all host their own servers. They refused, so Google took it on. Agreed that there are going to be interop issues with Google's RCS implementation, but let's not place all the blame at Google's feet, here.

> I think this is basically Apple calling their bluff and telling them that they need to actually release their proprietary work as open standards. I’m sure that will be their argument to regulators.

Which would be a great outcome!

Correction: The CARRIERS intended to all host a own RCS server, before Google was even part of the picture.

The idea was for every carrier to be the gatekeeper of his subscribers, so no one was giving up anything and everyone wins. The strongest carriers in the working group rolled out their own servers in the initial stage of development, a total of five only IIRC. No one else followed because there was no visibility on return of investment.

At that time, major device vendors maintained their own SMS-app to navigate all the custom requirements of the carriers in the world. Google aimed to standardise the client and include all these carrier-specific customizations, but RCS was about to fragment this space even further, as every vendor was expected to integrate his own client.

Google then stepped in in 2015 by acquiring Jibe, a main supplier of RCS servers and the developer of a vendor-agnostic RCS-client. At this point only ONE carrier still considered to buy a own server.

Google continues maintaining the existing servers and also offers to host RCS as a service for carriers. Overall goal was to defragment both the server and the client area, as this was the only way to scale.

It's time for others to step in and balance the playing field again, Apple is the best candidate for that.

> Agreed that there are going to be interop issues with Google's RCS implementation, but let's not place all the blame at Google's feet, here.

I have no love for the carriers but to me open would sound like things Google could do unilaterally:

* Android developers can now use the RCS APIs, not just our own app

* Our extensions are released as an open standard waiving any IP litigation except in self-defense

* Our E2EE key server is open to users of other apps and/or supports this federation protocol

> Google used to run an open messaging service but shut it down as part of their failed attempt to compete with Facebook, and their current professed love of open RCS hasn’t extended to allowing anyone else to use their implementation.

It's funny to read this criticism, when comments in another thread are criticizing Google for running an RCS implementation as a service for carriers.

RCS is an open standard, and Google does let others use it. However, other carriers didn't adopt it themselves, so Google set up a service that carriers can use and is running it themselves to ensure compatibility. There is no API for Android apps to use, yes, and that is a problem they should fix, but it's not exactly a self-serving decision, especially because it hampers Google's own products as well. The reason for the lack of the app API is likely because RCS hasn't been widely adopted enough to warrant it.

Fully agree.

Android also has APIs to register another RCS client to the OS.

What's missing are open APIs for apps to control Google's RCS-client. Indeed this would be convenient, but considering the potential for misuse there, Google would probably need a separate certification process for each app, which is quite a scale for something that didn't scale yet...

A own RCS-client still requires accreditation to ensure interoperability with the RCS-service. API-access to Google's client would either require accreditation of the app using the client, or would need to be limited so dramatically that it's probably of no use...

I was mostly referring to the way their E2EE key server is client locked. RCS is open but you’ll have a poor experience unless you only use Google’s own app.

> I think that point would be stronger if anyone else was open.

Nah gov doesn't give a shit they just see the incapable outcome and the rest of Apple's behavior.

> but the presence of a single Android user in an iMessage group chat can break the experience for everyone

It is still such a laughable issue from the POV of any other country.. SMS is there for text-only, it’s a legacy tech that didn’t ever get popular in different places due to it having shit support for non-ascii letters (writing a single ü would almost halve the remaining chars I can write), and not having unlimited SMS sends, so internet-based messaging spread like wide-fire. iMessage is the latter, the normal SMS is not. But there are also Telegram, Whatsapp, Facebook, a million other solutions.

It’s a made-up issue.

> It’s a made-up issue.

My biggest pet peeve is when people have an issue that doesn't affect them so they need to declare it as "fake". Just because you don't feel the problem doesn't mean "it's a made up issue".

The following are simply facts:

1. In the US, among iPhone users, iMessage is by far the dominant messaging service.

2. Among certain socioeconomic groups in the US, iPhone is by far the dominant mobile phone. I have been in several friend groups where there was at most 1 other Android user.

3. In group chats, not only does the limited functionality for Android users make it harder to converse, but the presence of a single Android user can break the experience for everyone (I've had messages randomly not show up, abysmal video quality, etc.)

So while I would absolutely love it if other people would switch to Telegram or WhatsApp or whatever, you try telling a group of 10 people "Hey, can you all switch the messaging app you are familiar with and use all the time so I don't feel left out?" If you think that's viable you just don't understand human nature.

The other option is for Apple to simply make an Android version of iMessage (like all the other messaging apps you mentioned), but they don't seem too keen on that.

Feel free to replace made-up with self-inflicted, that might be more correct, fair enough.

I do experience the human aspect, and have 4-5 different chat programs installed, which is not ideal, but it is just simply can’t be expected that everyone uses the same stuff. I just remember to use Telegram with friends X, Y and Signal with W.

We can certainly expect the 4-5 different programs to work with each other though. It's even happened before. For a brief period of time, AIM, MSN, and Yahoo all had some kind of interoperability with each other.

The sad thing for me is that even though almost all my contacts have iPhones, the lowest common denominator effect means everyone ends up using WhatsApp to allow everyone to join. That’s definitely a worse outcome

Why is that worse? Isn't WhatsApp a better alternative?

Meta owns whatsapp.

When you set up a new phone on Google Fi, the first thing Messages tells you to do is turn RCS off, because for whatever reason Google can't make Fi's native cross-device SMS[0] work with RCS. It's a damned shame.

[0] Google Fi integrates with Messages for Web to allow you to use your phone number even if your phone is damaged or destroyed. It's absolutely amazing. I've used this (back when it was Hangouts integration) to use my number on an iPod touch and it worked surprisingly well when I was waiting for a replacement on my Nexus 6P that I had shattered. I also have Messages for Web pinned to my iPad dock for similar reasons.

This is the one thing that makes me comfortable about continuing to use Google Voice for voice-mail and as a spare phone number for less important services. Otherwise, I'd expect Google to discontinue this service and tell me to fuck off by now.

Google Messages app sends a lot of spam here in India if RCS is enabled. I confirmed this with some of friends who experienced the same thing.

Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has an app called DND which lets you register your phone number to opt out of marketing and promotional SMSes. It works really well and in case someone sends you a promotional SMS despite opting out, you can report them to your SIM provider (or carrier) and they are legally required to take an action.

But as soon as RCS is enabled, you will magically start receiving a lot of spam messages with rich text and link previews. Unfortunately, the DND app cannot see or detect those messages which means you cannot report them.

> there's barely any carrier adoption

That might be country dependent, in the UK the four largest networks do officially support RCS I believe (combined market share of around 85-90%).

> the only messaging app on Android that fully supports RCS is Messages by Google

Plus, unless they fixed it, if you enable RCS and then regret it and disable it again, anybody who texted with you via RCS will no longer be able to text you at all. Things won't revert to SMS.

This bit me pretty hard, but I finally fixed it by changing my phone number.

I'm sure the next person that gets your number's gonna just laugh and laugh when they figure out why someone can't text them but everyone else can.

Frankly, I expect Google to fix their mistake before the telecom support people figure it out. It'll be a nightmarish headache for all involved.

> Plus, unless they fixed it, if you enable RCS and then regret it and disable it again, anybody who texted with you via RCS will no longer be able to text you at all.

On a relative's phone, the messages app simply enabled RCS automatically without asking (and displayed a screen proudly saying it did so). Does that means that this phone will never receive SMS again from RCS users, even though we have carefully always answered "no" when it asked whether it should enable RCS (and quickly disabled it again once it enabled automatically)?

For me, it only affected phone numbers that I had exchanged texts with that also had RCS enabled. Phones that didn't have it enabled, or numbers I had not exchanged texts with, were unaffected.

This was quite a while ago. They may very well have fixed the issue since then.

And yes, I noticed they enable RCS by default. Since then, the first thing I have done with new phones is to disable RCS. If you do that before sending/receiving any texts, then there is no issue.

You can deregister your phone number from Messages by Google here:

https://messages.google.com/disable-chat

This is similar to Apple's iMessage deregistration page.[1]

Google has been funneling RCS messages through its own servers to bypass wireless carriers, which were slow or unwilling to directly support RCS.[2] Unfortunately, this has centralized RCS communications through Google and allowed Google to make end-to-end encryption available to RCS users as a proprietary extension that Google never contributed back to the RCS Universal Profile specification.[3]

For RCS on Android to be decentralized again, your wireless carrier would need to support RCS on the network level and Android would also need to implement RCS in a way that does not require interaction with Google servers. This would make deregistration unnecessary.

[1] https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage/

[2] https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/302020-google-will-bypass...

[3] https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/11/16/apples-flavor-of-...

That's interesting! I wonder why the phone didn't automatically deregister when I disabled RCS, or why there wasn't at least an informative popup telling me this was necessary.

That's the dumb thing. When you disable RCS on your phone, why doesn't the phone just send that same API call that gets called when you visit that web page and deregister?

(Ditto for Apple, if that's still an issue over there with iMessage as well.)

The web page says it does?

It only happens for Apple if the phone is destroyed or similar.

whoa really ? i did NOT know that. deregistering immediately.

> Plus, unless they fixed it, if you enable RCS and then regret it and disable it again, anybody who texted with you via RCS will no longer be able to text you at all. Things won't revert to SMS.

That same "bug" existed for years with iMessage, for anyone switching from an iPhone to a non-iPhone.

It still exists in some form, albeit less severely, because Apple finally implemented a timeout and a way to manually deregister a number, but it took years.

I have no insider knowledge here, but Google tried to go the high route of working with carriers for years before giving up on their intransigence.

I suspect that Google's RCS is proprietary as a blunt instrument to prevent carriers from trying to either (a) undermine e2ee in some weasely way or (b) have the ability to pick and choose the pieces of the implementation they want to support. You either get the whole thing, with e2ee that you don't control, or nothing.

Sadly the lesson from Google, Apple, and Whatsapp here appears to be "cooperating with telecom carriers is a fool's errand".

A corollary to that lesson is to not support RCS.

I'd have much rather iMessage only open up interoperability with E2EE platforms like signal or even Whatsapp (because Facebook is somehow the lesser evil in this corner of the privacy world).

iPhone messages app - where iMessage appears - is already interoperable with every other phone. SMS!

Sms is not end to end encrypted

And?

RCS isn't either - it is a proprietary feature when using Google's client with Google's server.

Sure, but in practice, everyone's RCS is currently E2EE since everyone uses Google's client and Google's server.

This should change, certainly! Hopefully Apple will force Google to open up their implementation and protocol for E2EE so they can build a compatible implementation.

Maybe. The challenge with E2EE is how to resolve an email address or phone number to the authoritative public key and networking route, securely. If we wind up with multiple authoritative sources of that mapping, each one has the potential to lie and become an avenue for surveillance. Thats ignoring for the moment lesser issues, such as privacy issues with leaked metadata in querying these sources.

Things like Key Transparency in the IETF are tackling some of this, in the sense that they'll provide public evidence of tampering.

I don't suspect what Google has implemented for their own client/server setup gets us close to a multi-party solution within RCS Universal profile.

Neither is RCS without Google’s proprietary additions.

In theory, E2EE is good until someone you are messaging turns on iCloud backup of messages you sent and now law enforcement can force Apple to give them your iCloud backup - with iMessage

Also solvable: encrypt messages (and everything else) in iCloud backups (by default and not as a hidden special mode with scary warnings).

They are encrypted, but (by default) the key is escrowed for recovery by Apple support, which LE can request just as well as the account owner (or other parties with judge decree, such as surviving relatives)

And this is, honestly, a pretty reasonable default. For the average person, the failure mode is "I lost my phone, and I can't remember my iCloud password", not "I really need the cops to not be able to get into my backup", and they'd be super pissed off if Apple couldn't get them their data back. Having good security be available, but not the default, and requiring you to acknowledge the risks is a sensible trade-off for the customer service problems it might cause.

I kinda agree with you, but I think there's also a reasonable argument to be made around the idea that a user might be super pissed off that Apple made the default be not secure against state actors.

Also, how many people actually care all that much about their message history? I know I do (and I have 1GB of SMS/MMS/RCS message history dating back to 2010 that I back up to GDrive nightly), but it seems to me that most people don't care about their message history that much?

I'll grant that what people really care about is their backed up photos, and there's nothing stopping Apple from having separate security strategies there.

That said, I suspect that there's more people out there who're going to lose their text history with their dead parent and be distraught over that, than who're going to be actively upset that the state can subpoena their messages.

The nice thing is that there is now an advertised set of features to protect against state actors in the form of Advanced Data Protection, Lockdown mode and (soon) iMessage Contact Key Verification.

These all have significant usability impacts; I think Apple still has the correct defaults.

Finally, my understanding is that recovery keys are escrowed in a HSM separate from cloud hosting, and releasing an escrowed key is an audited event. My concern is mostly about actors accessing my data or surveilling me without transparency, as that gives no chance for accountability.

So e2ee is good until there's a situation where it won't work and then it's no worse than the status quo? What's the problem?

Unless they enable E2EE there: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212520

There’s always a risk that someone you’re sending a message to has been compromised but most of us are never at risk from that, as opposed to things like dragnet data collection or server breaches. E2EE is solving the problems it’s designed to solve, so it’s not a problem that things out of scope are more complicated.

As opposed to the same someone just going to the police and showing them your messaging? Or getting caught and forced to open it? Or being an idiot and sending a screenshot to it to Facebook?

The issue you describe is just not an attack vector that is in anyway relevant, if you can’t trust the other side, every hope is already lost.

This is just me but I’m less bothered by Big Brother than I am by little brother.

I don’t worry (very much) that law enforcement will read my messages but I do worry that advertisers, insurance cartels, spam marketeers, bookmakers or price gougers will.

more and more, both drink from the same tap.

It’s not the high road. They sell more expensive ads into it. I hope there’s a way to turn it off on my iPhone.

Google had the opportunity to own this space a decade ago when they made Hangouts the default SMS client on Android. It's exactly what Apple did with iMessage, but Hangouts was cross-platform.

It's absolutely bizarre to me they didn't iterate on that. I'm kind of glad they didn't.

On the flipside, Hangouts being sunset is the main reason I eventually left the Android ecosystem. Hangouts on a Pixel phone on Google Fi service was excellent for an SMS app. Feeling snubbed by the life getting choked out of Hangouts, I'm no longer a user of all 3.

Yeah, it really is the post child for Google not being able to innovate in it's modern form.

What's really changed about their core products in the last 10 years? (maps, mail, ads, YouTube, docs/gsuite) some of them have gotten some nice QoL improvements but nothing has really been added to that list because they keep killing products off.

> […] to prevent carriers from trying to either (a) undermine e2ee in some weasely way […]

Reminder that carriers have lawful intercept mandates through legal statutes: it may actually be illegal for them to implement E2EE.

Yeah, they can read what you send. If what you send is encrypted, they can read that too, just not in decrypted form.

So. What exactly is the "RCS" that Apple is supposedly going to support? RSC for Android? RCS for Pixel? RCS for Samsung? RCS for Verion?

What's the point of a standard that has 5 different ways it's fragmented on the same base platform?

RCS for iOS. 6 different ways it’s fragmented. :p

Or maybe Apple will just implement it exactly as the spec says with no frills.

That is exactly what Apple will do: implement it by the spec. Then they can turn around to regulators and say they have done what they needed to do to be interoperable and, if compatibility problems arise, can point the finger right back at their competitors.

Why so cynical? Does Apple have previous experience doing such a thing? Typically everything they do they try to do well, and therefore I would expect them to make sure interoperability is good. The problem with Apple is that they only do what they want.

From the article: "Later next year, we will be adding support for RCS Universal Profile, the standard as currently published by the GSM Association."

So in other words, RCS without E2EE.

The point is that they interoperate.

I wish RCS could somehow be merged with IETF MLS specs but I know that is apples and oranges and not so possible.

The RCS proprietary encryption bit is very sad. Oh well.

Google's RCS encryption scheme isn't really proprietary, it's the Signal e2ee scheme. Granted, it's bolted into RCS and not part of the standard, but it's not 100% closed either. It's like a standard added to another standard in a nonstandard way.

The key management is proprietary, for some reason. Can't build an interoperable impl without that.

Google already announced that Messages will support MLS. One can only hope that Apple does as well with whatever this announcement brings, and that MLS becomes the defacto E2EE standard for RCS.

> the only messaging app on Android that fully supports RCS is Messages by Google

Why would you want to use another messaging app? Your data is more safe with some randos than Google?

Yes, generally. Especially if those randos are, for instance, me. RCS needs server coordination, and I don't want to use it if I can't bring that on-prem.

Ironically but unsurprisingly, Google Voice doesn't even support RCS.

Been a user since 2009ish, Google Voice also still exists because Google doesn't really fully run it (Bandwidth.com does).

I really do think it was living on life support for years and around 2014[1] or so it really seemed like any day it would get shut down or merged into one of their halfassed messaging apps but they couldn't do it since the underlying infra was outside their own. It seemed like at some point around 2018 a manager woke up and decided they'd have the interface rewritten 80% and the legacy interface stuck around like the old Windows 'add font' menu until earlier this year.

[1] https://9to5google.com/2014/03/18/google-plans-kill-google-v...

Spam

The reason why 3rd party native SMS/RCS don’t exist is mobile platform wanting to prevent spam.

Imagine a rogue 3rd party SMS app blasting all your friends unauthorized texts, from your device.

Third-party SMS and MMS messaging apps already exist on Android, such as the free and open source QKSMS[1] and Simple SMS Messenger.[2] Signal also used to support SMS and MMS on Android until last year.[3] There isn't a shred of evidence that these non-default SMS/MMS apps increase spam to any measurable extent compared to SMS/MMS apps that are preinstalled on Android phones.

[1] QKSMS: https://github.com/moezbhatti/qksms

[2] Simple SMS Messenger: https://github.com/SimpleMobileTools/Simple-SMS-Messenger

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33179047

I personally trust more Google and apple than a spider web of random developers and potential malwares that might cause just security issues in the long run and reduce the overall security of the platform and ecosystem

Nothing is stopping you from using Messages by Google or Apple's Messages app if you prefer. Fear, uncertainty, and doubt over unnamed "security issues" is not a good reason to prevent other developers from creating clients for RCS, which is intended to be an open protocol to replace SMS and MMS, and not a closed "ecosystem" consisting of 2 apps from 2 of the largest tech companies.

>Also, end-to-end encryption is not part of the RCS specification, but is a proprietary extension to RCS that Google has made exclusive to Messages by Google.[1] This feature should be made open and added to the actual RCS specification so that Apple and other vendors can make use of it.

I thought it is based on Signal protocol? Maybe some commercial wrapper around it.

It’s based on Signal but the key management is completely proprietary. If you read their white paper it directly says that both parties have to be using Google Messages to use E2EE RCS.

> Currently, the only messaging app on Android that fully supports RCS is Messages by Google, which is closed source and requires Google Play Services to activate RCS features.

And which prompts you every bloody time you open it to enable RCS, ignoring the last thousand times you clicked the tiny 'skip for now' font.

I also skipped that, but we won't have to worry about it anymore. They started enabling it by default. Recently got a toast notification that I barely got to read. Soon they'll probably make it mandatory. :o)

IMHO RCS should have not being adopted unless it has encryption built in, or else it is just Google's iMessenger.

At this point, anything messaging platform or financial transaction platform that doesn't implement post-quantum encryption + classic computer encryption ECC (such as superdilithium) should NOT be consider as a standard for messaging for the public. All that ought to be part of the messaging protocol, so we don't end up with GSM 64 bit encryption mess.

Don't use the Verizon Messages app. The privacy policy was terrible three years ago.

This is something I never thought I'd see. I hope the GSM association moves fast to make robust E2EE a standard required for proper implementation for carriers. That would go a long way in making a huge improvement over SMS/MMS.

This is a win for RCS, ultimately. Maybe this will kick carriers into high gear to up their messaging standard support game and have standard interop.

I don't think this will lead to a decline in iMessage usage, nor do I think it will be catalyst enough to get people to move to Android, because there are still things RCS won't be able to support[0] but its a big step forward for a more pleasant experience between iOS and Android.

[0]: Memojis, reactions (tapbacks I think their called) and I'm curious about threaded messages. Also, at this time the actual RCS standard does not specificy that messages must be end to end encrypted. iMessage on the other hand has robust E2EE encryption (and you can get even more robust encryption by enabling Advanced Data Protection)

The only reason they'd move to E2EE would be if Apple forced them.

Looking at / selling message contents is a large potential revenue source for all the other major players.

Lets hope they will. Apple is a bit of a forcing function in the cellular industry, especially in the US.

I am fairly certain that it's illegal to sell the content of SMS messages in the United States at least. The metadata like who is messaging who and timestamps and best guess locations maybe is sold though. But the contents can be obtained by law enforcement. However, I think the contents are purged after some expiration time.

> … fairly certain that it's illegal to sell the content of SMS messages in the United States at least

There will be some ridiculous loophole like leasing will be allowed of all vowels on Mondays, and all consonants on Tuesdays.

Well, here's Verizon's privacy policy:

https://www.verizon.com/about/privacy/full-privacy-policy

They definitely sell things like your real-time location (you can opt out by turning your phone off, or if they're legally obligated to let you), who you contact, what websites you visit, what DNS entries your phone looks up, your subscriber information (assuming they can link it to an advertising ID that other apps are using), and what TV shows you watch, joined with all the stuff you use your broadband and phone for.

As for communications content, it's fuzzy.

My reading of it says that they can aggregate that all together in a way that is only personally identifiable to their internal marketing team and their partners (i.e., anyone that pays them and also signs a contract), so I guess it's not "for sale"? So, for instance, they could take all the RCS messages in the US, cluster them, and sell the cluster to, say, meta. Then, meta could use it for ad targeting of third party ads, but they wouldn't be able to resell the raw data unless they first de-anonymized it.

I could be wrong though. The privacy policy is very long and incredibly vague. Maybe they don't share the contents of your private communications with their "trusted partners" or internal advertising division yet.

The only way this sort of crap will get better is if the US passes a right to privacy constitutional amendment. (Of course, congress is more likely to pass laws that somehow make it worse.)

They don’t need to sell the content: imagine if they ran a classifier on everything and added it to the information they send to advertisers? They’d be able to say they sold the actual messages, just the profile they’d built of your interests.

> I hope the GSM association moves fast to make robust E2EE a standard required for proper implementation for carriers. That would go a long way in making a huge improvement over SMS/MMS.

Can telcos actually offer E2EE given the various lawful intercept statutes that they are usually subject to?

I mean, they're doing it right now.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/google-messa...

The telcos don’t actually provide E2EE. That layer is offered by Google itself, and RCS carries encrypted data, last I checked. Not sure if Apple is going to interoperate with it.

> That layer is offered by Google itself > Not sure if Apple is going to interoperate with it.

Only if both users in a 1:1 chat are using Google Messages. E2EE is not possible even with Samsung Messages, so I highly doubt it.

Wait so google doesn’t support e2ee for more than two devices in a chat?

The last time I checked was in 2021 when they launched the feature, and it was only for 1:1 chats. Google might have extended e2ee to group chats (I would hope so).

Pretty sure everyone would still have to use Google Messages.

Yes, it does, as long as everyone is using RCS via Google Messages.

Ok, it's still absurd to me that RCS or Google Messages weren't E2EE from day 1 given even iMessage was doing E2EE group chats almost 5 years before the RCS "universal" profile was released so its not like they didn't have time. Similarly even when google's message platform did add encryption the fact that it wasn't always on is unconscionable.

How does google messages (gMessage?) indicate which messages aren't secure?

Google finished rolling out RCS group chat E2EE in August.

Can’t they support RCS but still have iPhone users blue ?

Yup. That's exactly what I predict Apple will do. RCS messaging will still have green bubbles. And it will continue to have the same psychological effect as SMS green bubbles do today. I think that's also why GP said there won't be a decline in iMessage usage.

So weird reading this from the transatlantic sidelines, where noone cares one little bit what device a message was sent from.

Nobody does, it’s a bitchy trope.

Green bubbles matter in group chats. You can’t easily change participants and stuff like reactions generate junk messages.

Very much not a trope. I personally know multiple people who refuse to text green bubbles, to the point of refusing dates from people who have Android.

That sounds like a people problem, not a tech problem.

It sort of becomes a people problem as people use messaging to communicate and organize events and exclude you because you'll break group chats.

Probably not a big issue if you already have a solid social circle of old tight friends who don't care about you breaking chats as they can also call you, but it can be huge issue when you move to a new city and trying to make new friend, as any extra friction you add to groups lessens your chances of being accepted and invited further.

Yeah, people can be quite lazy and petty even about such trivial things, when they don't know you and don't have any attachment to you yet, and you breaking group chats won't improve your first impressions and chances of being accepted. Hence the ever increasing loneliness crisis we're facing.

Thank fuck I live in Europe where nobody uses iMessage for group chats. Honestly fuck Apple for creating that unnecessary friction, it's not like they couldn't have accommodated blue bubbles to not break group chats but it's more profitable to emotionally extort people to buy your iJunk by making them feel outsiders.

> it can be huge issue when you move to a new city and trying to make new friend

Meh. I'm not interested in being part of a social circle that is as petty as that.

There's 40 million American teenagers who are very interested in being a part of petty social circles.

Pretty much. Peer pressure is an insanely powerful thing when you're young and trying to fit in and Apple knows teens aren't gonna die on the "stick to an Android to stick it to them" hill.

I was assuming this discussion was about adults, not children. Teenagers have always found petty reasons to reject others, but they usually grow up and learn better. This seems no different, so that part doesn't concern me much. If adults are doing it, though, that's entirely different.

Is the argument you're making that the people complaining about this on HN are American teenagers?

Seems like a completely different situation.... and really, again, a people problem.

People rightly criticise social media companies for the behaviour their platforms encourage, and iMessage encourages this behaviour as much as twitter encourages outrage.

I still believe that's a people problem.

On Twitter you can easily curate Twitter lists of people to follow without being forced to use the generated feed. I'm rarely if ever outraged or otherwise emotionally charged when I'm using it. (Maybe except when I come across reply-bots)

And as I said elsewhere in the thread, I've never experienced that problem with any friend groups when it comes to iMessage.

And I know multiple people who refuse dates from those who have a zodiac sign that is “incompatible” with theirs. I think we can safely disregard that as a factor, despite how relatively not-that-rare it could be.

Yeah but bubbles sound like a class difference, astrology is just pseudoscience. People seldom get mocked for being a libra, but they often get prejudiced for having less money.

Given that there are Android phones on the market as or more expensive than iPhones, how can these people tell which Android users are poor?

Sure, but there are no dirt cheap iPhones, unlike Android phones. There doesn't have to be 100% correlation before people start making assumptions.

There’s literally no difference in price. The only difference is that people more receptive to retail sales pitch buy androids as the reps get spiffs to move them.

Only for top of the line android phones. There exists a huge lower-tier android market that iPhone doesn't compete in.

I mean, the argument isn't that they should accept the date (on the contrary, these signs are actually beneficial for staying the fuck away from these people), the argument, or rather statement is that this sort of "tech jewelry" is very embedded in modern society, with Apple being the frontrunner.

And this has real effects. For example, Im forced to use a piece of shit Macbook at work, where literally everything else in our cloud runs on linux, because the company issues Macs as a way of attracting talent since "tech" people also want tech jewelry.

> the company issues Macs as a way of attracting talent since "tech" people also want tech jewelry.

Only a very specific demographic, though. Such companies are missing out on a lot of talented tech people.

This is not even among the top five weirdest things I have heard some base a dating decision on. People are complicated.

> I personally know multiple people who refuse to text green bubbles, to the point of refusing dates from people who have Android.

Those people don't sound like people worth knowing. Ignorant and judgy to say the least.

Life isn't so simple. What if that person is your boss or your client, or someone you love?

I mean the comment I replied to mentioned refusing dates from people with green text bubbles.

If it's a boss or someone I love and they want to ignore my messages that's on them. If it's a work issue possibly HR could be involved as discrimination or outright ignoring messages based on device wouldn't really fly.

> Those people don't sound like people worth knowing.

My boss could be refusing dates from people that have green bubbles, but not ignoring my messages. Same with a family member for example. Your comment says they aren't worth knowing either way.

I mean, sure if they are not ignoring your messages and you need or want to know them that's fine, but if they are still being that judgy for something so petty they seem like shitty people regardless.

Someone you love? If the affection is mutual they're not going to cut off communication with you because your phone doesn't run their favorite chat app.

A good friend doesn't have phone number for reasons that important to her.

She's not "cut off", but it requires a conscious effort to contact her. So while I may be keeping a group of people up to date or inviting folks for a bbq, open house, etc casually, I need to specifically invite her via some other channel.

Sometimes I forget. Feelings are hurt. I'm a single parent with a demanding job. Low friction rules the roost for me, and our group of friends all sort of support each other with these types of things and do alot of ad-hoc stuff.

Not having a phone number is much more unusual than having a phone that can do SMS but not iMessage. It adds considerably more friction; e.g. it makes some of the most popular third-party messaging apps like Signal and WhatsApp difficult or impossible to access as well.

If your boss refuses to talk to you because of something as petty as imessage bubbles, they're petty enough to fire you for any number of reasons. That person is a horrible boss no matter what you do.

> to the point of refusing dates from people who have Android.

The people who were refused dates dodged bullets, then.

Some mental illnesses can't be cured I guess.

> I personally know multiple people who refuse to text green bubbles, to the point of refusing dates from people who have Android.

Sounds like not dating them is dodging a real bullet if they're that shallow.

It’s more than that. Videos and pictures sent via SMS absolutely suck because they were designed for 2004 era quality standards.

I agree RCS will stay green. It will have text, good quality media, maybe read receipts.

And that’s it. No E2EE or other extensions. Apple is fixing one issue (bad media quality) and taking away a disingenuous Google talking point. Perhaps this is also an argument to legislators that they don’t need to open iMessage.

They’re never going to go out of their way to make it preferable in any way.

Media quality would be a start, at least. The only other thing I'd love for them to "fix" is the inability to add non-iPhone users to existing group chats. With those two things I -- and probably most Android users -- would be at a "don't care, this is good enough for me" state.

You can “add” SMS users to iMessage groups, if the group consists entirely of phone numbers and you’re on a device that supports SMS.

The newly created SMS group doesn’t replace the thread associated with the original group, though, so it’s easy for the group to fork when this happens.

Unlikely this will change with RCS.

I live in America and literally nobody I know cares about this.

Unfortunately I think it's just the typical remnant of the old Mac vs Windows haters who come out of the woodwork online to make it sound like a problem.

I care, actually a fair bit, but only because I work in a building that has two areas that are complete dead zones for cellular reception, and our IT department blocks WiFi calling (but not iMessage data). Blue bubbles can message me in those areas; green cannot.

It's not at all unusual for my phone to explode in dinging when I leave one of those areas.

I wish they didn't block WiFi calling, because my cellular reception at home isn't great, and I'd use it there. We have an internal WiFi network separate from the public one, with per-user authentication, so you don't have to worry about visitors overloading the infrastructure (it's a hospital, lots of families and patients in addition to the staff).

> Blue bubbles can message me in those areas; green cannot.

They can, but one or both parties is refusing to use any of the numerous alternative messaging options like WhatsApp.

I'm one guy. Six years ago, there were two of us out of ~30 that used Android. Both of us switched in the next year or so because nobody else would use a different app just to talk to us. So we were missing out on fairly critical information, and forget anything time-sensitive.

On Android, it wasn't an issue to use Signal, because it will communicate securely if it can and by SMS if it can't. So you can still text anyone from the app. On iOS, not so much.

I'd stay away from Whatsapp just to keep away from Meta.

> I'd stay away from Whatsapp just to keep away from Meta.

This seems prejudiced. If one company supports end-to-end encrypted chats with everyone, and the other only with people who buy their devices, I think it's clear who cares more about privacy.

It is prejudiced. I assume Meta is going to make me the product.

Signal does E2EE. They have not yet done anything to jeopardize the trust they have earned. Some do not like them, and that’s fine. I have a different view.

Apple is right now making you the product in a way that limits your privacy, telling other people that they have to buy an apple device if they want encrypted communications with you.

Is using Signal on iOS not as secure as using it on Android?

No, they just have to use something other than iMessage. But they won’t.

1. Kids care about it. Why? Because you can use iMessage via iPad without needing a phone number, and this is how lots of tweens get started with messaging.

2. Any Android users with iPhone friends trying to use iMessage for group chat cares about it. It's impossible to add Android users to an existing group chat... and any time you have a mixed iPhone + Android group chat it degrades a number of the iMessage group chat features normally accessible to iPhone users.

3. Any Android users receiving media over SMS/MMS from an iPhone user cares. They'll be receiving images & videos that look like they were shot with a potato.

The blue vs green color doesn't matter, but the effects mixed platform chatting has on both iPhone & Android users is significant.

These are fantastic points, all of which I have personally experienced as an Android user with many iPhone family members.

Apple adopting RCS won't solve #1, and is unlikely to solve #2, but solving #3 is a great start, and if the Apple faithful continue to give feedback to Apple that they care about fixing #2, we might see it one day.

I agree. Solving #3 is terrific (because it frequently bites you when the sender is someone you don't know particularly well... certainly not well enough to ask them to resend using a third party messaging app). I don't really care about #1, although I guess Google's answer would be "use Chat", which is absolutely ridiculous since it no longer has an interface to SMS/RCS like Hangouts did. This is a gaping hole in their product strategy, imho. #2 could be solved by Apple if they want to, or else we'll just continue to struggle along with a need for several different messaging apps for different social contexts. It's not like Whatsapp, Telegram, Signal, etc don't work.

Another solution Google could perhaps pursue would be to license one or multiple of those to include in the default Android install, but I don't see that happening without regulatory interference.

I have a feeling with the EU's DMA this will just become more prevalent with every messaging platform forced to "open up"

FB Messenger will have a "green bubble" for messages to people using whatever other app they're forced to integrate. Same with Whatsapp, Telegram, etc...

I care. It's fucking annoying when someone joins a group chat on Android and all of a sudden I can no longer access it from my computer, iPad or over WiFi.

Yes. In Europe it's common to use superior text messages like Signal. Even Whatsapp is better than iMessage.

Because everyone uses WhatsApp, because Apple did not reach enough market share early enough to push iMessage. That's lucky, I don't think europeans would be less susceptible to this kind of psychological manipulation.

To be frank, a lot of my WhatsApp-using friends were very upset that it was bought by Facebook. Fortunately they generally transitioned to Signal or Telegram, not iMessage due to significant Android market share.

I suspect Apple will still allow fallback to SMS and green bubbles, iMessage will be blue ansd RCS will be a new colour

The important thing (to me) isn't the bubble color, but that conversations between Android and iOS users with RCS won't degrade media down to Game Boy Color quality. At least, that's what I hope the outcome of this move is.

Yeah, I assume SMS, RCS and iMessage messages will have different colors, like green, red, and blue.

RCS is such carrier-dependent crap.

> I hope the GSM association moves fast to make robust E2EE a standard required for proper implementation for carriers.

This is pretty moot now. Google has effectively turned RCS into a proprietary protocol, they fully control the only relevant server implementation, carriers that want to interconnect have no choice but to deploy Jibe or use Jibe as a service.

This could possibly open an avenue for another party to show up around this. Google de facto having reign on this is because they're the only company in this space that cared enough about it to get it moving.

Apple supporting RCS could create enough interest that it breaks their de facto control of the standard

Yes maybe. While I understand Google's frustration, the number of carriers that implemented Universal Profile independently was not zero though, and in the end it was for nothing.

I know from a friend that Facebook was looking into integrating RCS to Messenger (not Whatsapp somehow) and willing to be part of the Google federated RCS network, that also fell through, but I don't why.

What would that look like? Do you mean having Messenger be the default SMS app for your phone, and having it able to receive RCS? If so, these restrictions in Android would stop it: https://source.android.com/docs/core/connect/ims-single-regi...

I've been trying to gain some insight on why Google is not making it easy (possible?) to implement a third-party RCS app for Android and was reading about these APIs (clearly intended for OEMs).

> This means that third party apps aren't allowed to access RCS single registration APIs as they require carrier certification on the device.

Could just be Google passing the buck here, but this does sound like something the carriers would do, if given the chance.

Apple implementing RCS will surely be a major change to that.

I doubt it. I see no reason for Apple to get involved in the self-inflicted mess between carriers and Google.

Working against a single server implementation with a standardized client provisioning mechanism is much easier too.

> the only relevant server implementation

That's not true. Mavenir offers an RCS platform that T-Mobile has been using up until recently. A renewed interest in RCS due to Apple supporting it might end up with their platform being more sellable.

https://www.lightreading.com/mobile-core/mavenir-t-mobile-co...

You're proving my point. T-Mobile had to switch to Jibe.

I work at a carrier that deployed a solution provided by WIT. Then around 2019-2020 Google decided they weren't interested in an open and interconnected RCS backend anymore.

Reactions aren't in RCS? I thought that was one of the main motivators for it.

I thought the primary motivation for RCS was E2EE and secondary motivations were niceties like read receipts, reactions and HQ media. So far this thread has been very illuminating and shocking to me. Especially E2EE being an extension to a standard not a core part of it in 2023.

Hopefully vendors start putting better fallback into their messaging clients when RCS isn't available.

It's been terrible for all the poor people I know who rarely have working data on their phones, but RCS enabled by default. They can't figure out why they're not sending or receiving any messages and I have to keep disabling it for them.

If you turn off RCS, Google Messages shows you a full screen prompt once a week to turn it back on. Indefinitely.

And of course the prompt has a large blue button to enable, and a very small text underneath to dismiss, making it easy to accidentally enable it. It happened to me a few times already.

It also tells you nothing about the downsides (that you need a data connection, mainly) that would make RCS unusable to certain people... So they trick users into subscribing then users begin experiencing difficulties receiving or sending texts and they don't understand why.

Thank you, Google.

> If you turn off RCS, Google Messages shows you a full screen prompt once a week to turn it back on. Indefinitely.

It doesn't do this on my phones.

Indeed. Currently using an Android 13 Motorola until my Sony is fixed. It's not labeled RCS, but one of the first things I did was disable Messages Settings -> Chat Features -> Enable chat features - Use WiFi or data for messaging when available ...which disabled a bunch of other things. While I don't recall what appeared originally, the Send button for messages is labeled either SMS or MMS, so I suppose that did the trick. No nagging.

I did just find and disable the RCS Config Service, too, and testing that everything still works.

The problem with developers is that we are often isolated from whole sections of the world. The people on the Android team, probably working in SF, have perhaps never been into the hood. Out here there are guys on every street corner stood next to the drug dealers (often it's the same guy) trying to get you to take a free smartphone or a tablet. They get paid some sort of kickback if they can get you to take it -- it comes from this free federal plan:

https://www.fcc.gov/general/lifeline-program-low-income-cons...

The problem is that the phones generally only come with 15GB of data a month, and an average web page can easily run to 200MB now, so usually by the third day of the month they are all out of data.

There is a better federal plan for poor people called ACP which allows you to get your own phone and plan, but it isn't as well-known.

Huh? I rarely use more than 2GB/month...

> and an average web page can easily run to 200MB now

Wait, what? How did it come to that? I thought it was more like 50 MB if not even less. Thank God we have ad blockers.

> guys on every street corner trying to get you to take a free smartphone or a tablet with 15GB of data a month

Would it be possible to get it as a tourist?

As a tourist? No. You need to give your national ID (Social Security Number) to the salespeople so they can check you are receiving some sort of government assistance already.

I'm curious how you can have a phone connection but not a data connection in 2023. I don't think that's happened to me since the days of Edge. Is this a weird American thing? Do you guys still have 2G?

I was working on RCS systems back in 2012. It was the future back them - incredible low latency for messaging and gaming, rich messaging, and a decent SDK.

How did carriers fuck it up so badly that, a decade later, it's barely a blip on the messaging landscape? The were so desperate to stop OTT (over the top) services that they... locked everything down in the hope that customers wouldn't churn. It backfired spectacularly.

It wasn't the carriers, it was Apple mostly winning the race in creating their walled garden, and everyone else being disinterested in an alternative in the phone race wars.

It's now some badge of shame Apple users discriminate against the blue vs green windows if a friend or relative doesn't have an i-thing, and Apple loves it all the way to the bank.

Apple only has dominant marketshare in the US. Everywhere else in the world people use Whatsapp. Why didn't they all hop on the RCS train? Because it sucks to implement and is a black box to use. Google was stuck with SMS because of their inability to implement a cohesive messaging app, despite owning and distributing an operating system. So what did they do? Pitched sob stories and got the europeans to threaten to regulate. Shitty move. They should have just built something good.

> They should have just built something good.

This, but with Apple. Whether or not Google whined about it, iMessage was never going to last. It was never a matter of if iMessage would be forced to reconcile itself with the interoperable protocol it replaced, but when.

So... Apple should have been ready. They should have been drafting absurd standards centered around their own servers, and taunting Google into adopting it. They could have even charged a license fee for the software. But instead they played high and mighty, and now they have to contend with the law. Frankly, I'm glad Google summoned Shai Hulud.

> They should have been drafting absurd standards centered around their own servers, and taunting Google into adopting it.

It's hard to imaging you sincerely think this would have been better. It seems like you want them to engage in dishonesty.

> But instead they played high and mighty, and now they have to contend with the law.

iMessage isn't going anywhere. They're just going to add RCS support in the same way that SMS is supported, because now there is momementum for carrier support. This is really a storm in a teacup.

> They should have been drafting absurd standards centered around their own servers, and taunting Google into adopting it. They could have even charged a license fee for the software. But instead they played high and mighty, and now they have to contend with the law.

Isn't the situation in the EU that they're looking to force Apple to allow others to use the iMessage protocol? So why would Apple work on getting Google to support iMessage, when Google is putting in work to get access to it?

Well... let's say also that the telco investment were not light. That Google was pushing for RCS, and SMS, and their messenger of the moment. Apple refused to implement RCS, because why do so, since there was no carrier at the time proposing it. So yeah, no.

As Google demonstrated, carrier support for RCS is not necessary.

Google absolutely had a cohesive messaging app (Google Chat, later called Hangouts), they just threw it away and tried to rebuild it several times and under various other names and paradigms rather than iterating on it.

If they'd simply added a "WhatsApp/iMessage mode" to Google Chat in 2015 (i.e. allow Google account based users to seamlessly communicate with phone number based users), I think we might be seeing a very different messaging landscape today.

Google Chat was great back in its day (standard XMPP) and had a somewhat "loyal" and large user base. Rebranding it into Hangouts, rebuilding it, and generally sabotaging themselves was, well, their own doing.

We wouldn't because the issue always was iphone users never willing to use an app outside of imessage. What good is a messaging platform if more than 1/2 your network won't use it?

WhatsApp succeeded. Google misfiring 10 times giving people zero reason to invest was the problem.

> If they'd simply added a "WhatsApp/iMessage mode" to Google Chat...

They'd have been sued by WhapsApp and Apple if they did that since they're proprietary protocols.

I think iMessage doesn't have the most dominant marketshare outside the US (and possibly Canada)

iOS /iPadOS (and by extension, iPhone and iPad) however, has slim-to-major majorities in most lucrative markets[0] and even in markets where iOS is not a majority, its well known in the mobile industry that iOS / iPadOS customers are far more lucrative

[0]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ios-vs-android-market-share-1...

This more money on apple thing is a selection effect caused by Apple phones being more expensive, such that the distribution of revenue is truncated.

> Apple only has dominant marketshare in the US.

Japan: 65.88%

Denmark: 64.04%

Norway: 61.94%

Canada: 57.84%

Australia: 57.47%

United States: 56.74%

Switzerland: 55.92%

Sweden: 55.33%

United Kingdom: 51.63%

Taiwan: 51.32%

from: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/iphone-ma...

I think the parent comment was referring to messaging, ie iMessage vs the others. Ie, in Taiwan and Japan the dominant solution is Line, not iMessage or SMS.

That's kind of depressing honestly.

Also surprising as I always thought Android was more popular because there is more variety and cheaper options.

I mean with the iPhone SE starting at $429 new Apple has a lot of price brackets covered.

With every princelet or otherwise rich folk in the world using Apple, does it matter?

It's still a race war, apple (rich folk) vs. everyone else. Some middle ground probably, but not much - apple folks are obviously the richer targets.

I know who to target with spyware and otherwise get rich quick schemes, ransomware, kidnapping, almost any other major crimes. The best demographic with 1200 to spend on a phone.

> It's still a race war, apple (rich folk)

It's not a "race war" if you need to clarify that apple <=> "rich folk". I might give you "class war", except there is no "war" part and no need to include it.

In the UK at least in practice it means you text (whether iMessage or not) with companies/builders, but otherwise use WhatsApp. Especially with groups.

> Everywhere else in the world people use Whatsapp.

Not really. It's dominant in some regions but definitely not a huge chunk of Asia.

What do you mean it wasn't the carriers?

SMS revenues to hit $67B - 2007

https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/metric-sms-revenues-...

They used to love using SMS to take as much money as possible from their customers. Imagine texting "Hey" to a friend and getting charged $0.20 for it.

I remember those days. You didn’t text ‘Hey’, you did your best to cram a whole conversation into 160 characters.

Bingo. The cartel was so focused on trying to save their existing money printing machine they took their eye off the ball and refused to disrupt themselves.

The cable television industry did the exact same thing. If they’d been willing to go OTT a decade ago and not force agreements based on geolocation, a lot of the streaming services that exist wouldn’t even need to exist today.

> The cable industry did the exact same thing.

Kinda but not really. The cable providers were and continue to be hamstrung by the networks who force the cable providers to buy channel packages. Cable never had the leverage to, say, tell Disney that they only want to offer ESPN but not the 10 other Disney branded networks being offered. It was often all or nothing.

Exactly right. A lot of people have tendency to simplistically choose heroes and villains. SO Disney is hero, cable TV bringing disney to home via their Coax cable is villain. Top artists are heroes, but ticket booking service which ultimately are reason for enormous payout to these artists are villains gouging fans.

I get your point but how is Ticketmaster not a parasitic price-gouger?

The artist is their customer, not you. If Ticketmaster didn't gouge you, give most of the gouging proceeds to the artist, and take the flak like a lightning-rod, they would quickly be replaced by a service that did.

What if there was more competition in the space, and there were operators of that didn’t gouge quite so much.

There is. But the nature of popular media is that it is desired by the populous. Lots of cheap places and venues have no name bars with no name musicians and singers playing all the time.

But if you want to see someone that appeals to the whole populace, then you will have to compete with the whole populace.

Nope. Pearl Jam basically proved that TicketMaster is a monopoly.

TicketMaster is a textbook example of a consumer-harming monopoly, and yet they have gone unprosecuted for decades. No excuse.

Ha ha ha, some TicketMaster/LiveNation shill actually down-modded that.

Pathetic.

Then came back for more. Sad.

A significant amount of Ticketmaster's fees go to the artist. It lets the artist make more money while fans get mad at Ticketmaster instead of the artist.

Ticketmaster could take a smaller cut… or maybe just make their overall UX better for the end user.

>I get your point but how is Ticketmaster not a parasitic price-gouger?

Ticketmaster isn't the true price-gouger. It's actually the artist + promotor + venue that collectively set the high prices. Ticketmaster is just the administrative computer system to implement the high prices that the artist/promoter/venue want to charge.

For example, top artists can negotiate to get 105% of ticket's face value from the concert promoter. Indeed, people have speculated that Taylor Swift had so much leverage in negotiating the terms of the Eras tour that she got 110% of the ticket's face price.[1]

If Taylor gets 110% of the ticket money, how does that leave anything left for the promoter and the venue?!? With those artists' financial demands, you now have a math problem: where to get the extra +5% or +10% and also pay the promoter+venue without taking a loss? By charging extra fees.

It's a very clever bit of financial sleight-of-hand. The artist/promoter/venue can all charge more money but hide the blame by embedding it in Ticketmaster's "convenience fees", "service fees", "order processing fees", etc, etc. In this way, Ticketmaster is perceived as the parasite.

Your question where Ticketmaster is already assumed to be the "bad guy" means Ticketmaster's deliberate manipulation of public perception is working exactly as designed.

[1] https://archive.is/J5Eg3

Ticketmaster merged with LiveMaster, a promoter and venue owner/operator. They are the promoter + venue in your equation and have a global monopoly.

>Ticketmaster merged with LiveMaster, a promoter and venue owner/operator.

Yes, but when other promoters (not Live Nation) book artists at non-LN venues and use Tickemaster as the ticketing agent, all the extra convenience fees are still there.

E.g. Taylor Swift's promoter for Eras Tour was AEG, not Live Nation. And in Dallas, she performed at AT&T Stadium which is a venue owned by City of Arlington, not Live Nation. Ticketmaster was only the agent selling tickets for that Dallas show and it still had all the extra TM service fees padding out the price. In that case, Taylor Swift + AEG + AT&T Stadium got their slices of the pie by using Ticketmaster fees as the "bad guy".

Live Nation acquiring Ticketmaster in 2010 doesn't fundamentally change what Ticketmaster is designed to do: take the public relations blame for artists, etc charging the higher prices.

They don't have any global monopoly.

The networks and the cable companies are both complicit with their demise. No one is arguing otherwise. I mentioned cable companies specially because they have the same legal monopoly that telephone companies had even post AT&T breakup in terms of location-based authority (it took widespread nationwide wireless for that to change in the U.S., which was like the early 2000s in terms of not having to get a regional wireless plan that could roam on a friendly network spectrum) and because like wireless carriers, cable companies have refused to acknowledge they are just a dumb pipe offering data and that they can’t continue to print money off of things that cost them nothing anymore. Oh, and because in the US, ISPs and cable companies are overwhelmingly the same companies.

The networks ruined their own businesses too — even if some were smarter than others (HBO being the smartest and also why it was the most valuable asset of the AT&T acquisition and the Discovery acquisition) — but I chose to focus on the cable companies b/c they are dumb pipes the same way wireless carriers are and they refused to disrupt themselves.

That was true until the cable companies themselves bought networks. Comcast owning NBC Universal, the various cable associations with the artists formerly known as Time Warner, the various local station and sports station roll ups for the various providers, all make them entwined.

And the networks were already offering online access to their content via TV Everywhere. They didn’t want to do the geolocation thing, that was all requirements of the cable companies (the issues with the network broadcasters like ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox are much more complex).

In fact, you could (and I would) argue that it was the cable companies insistence on maintaining their defacto monopolies on who could get what service where (because there was never consumer choice in who your cable provider is, unless you count satellite, which I do not) that pushed the networks hands into creating their own competing OTT services based on the content they owned. Because as people cut the cord, the networks weren’t going to watch their businesses completely go up in flames. Now, should they have done that sooner and more aggressively (HBO did it best and earliest with HBO Now as a companion to HBO Go — a move that earned them the ire of the cable industry, the same industry who often refused to let HBO Go subscribers who paid the cable companies directly for HBO, do things like access the service on an Xbox b.c they didn’t like the idea of people not paying a $5 a month fee for an extra box), yes. 1000%

But let’s not pretend like the cable companies were without leverage. If they’d acted decisively and disrupted themselves early enough, they were the ones with the direct relationship with the customer, not the networks. They were the ones who could have created their own bundles of OTT content. But no, they refused until it was too late and got to see the whole industry bleed itself and for live content to essentially die.

And carriage fees are not at all related to the cable companies refusal to adopt or accept OTT solutions. They could have still offered the same shit they offered coax but you know, over a web browser, without requiring you be on a home network from an ISP also your cable producer (Comcast), or on whatever device you want (Comcast, Charter) all to save the stupid extra box fees that they lost anyway.

People didn’t quit cable because of price. They did it because of price to perceived value. As has been shown with the current state of streaming services, it isn’t actually cheaper to cut the cord. But what you do get is a lot more flexibility.

Imagine if Comcast had offered its own YouTube TV style service in 2012 (something Intel tried to do in late 2013 before it was summarily canceled — I almost took a job on that team and dodged a bullet), rather than hoping against hope that cord cutting wouldn’t take off? You’d probably have a bunch of Comcast subscribers to this day who were satisfied that they could watch all their TV live and on demand whenever they wanted.

"It isn’t actually cheaper to cut the cord"

No idea what kind of poor purchasing decisions would lead to that. You can't get any form of cable package for less than $150 a month last time I checked. I don't pay anywhere near that for Internet + a couple of streaming services.

Oh, and the $30 a year or whatever for a VPN.

Reminder to everyone who wonders why WhatsApp and iMessage won: US phone carriers used to charge $0.10 to $0.25 per message.

Yes, it was as ridiculous as it sounds. There used to be news articles about kids racking up hundreds of dollars on their phone bill.

Here's one from the same year the iphone was released:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/0...

Was that really a concern in the US? WhatsApp and iMessage require data plans, and as far as I can remember these have largely included unlimited SMS as well.

It was definitely a factor in the EU, though: SMS still aren't free on many prepaid plans there. WhatsApp was the first popular application supporting unlimited messaging on mobile phones for many.

I'm 39 and SMS not being unlimited was a huge thing. I never thought it would be unlimited, when that happened (Suncom? I forget who started it) it was huge. This was a LONG time ago though, long before WhatsApp. Probably 15-18 for me.

I remember a lot of conversations in high school going "My plans maxed out can you text $friend?" IIRC you had to specifically turn off receiving texts or they'd charge you for each one and we were broke HS kids.

edit: Oh that article posted above is 2007. I guess it lasted way longer than I thought.

Yes, I think I got my first iPhone around 2010, and at the time I was still on limited text message plan. I don't think I got unlimited texts until 2014 or something.

Damn 2014?? My years are all skewed nowadays.

I think he's in the minority because everyone I knew had unlimited SMS by the mid-00s before the iPhone was released.

The unlimited plans existed, but it was more expensive than the limited plan I used, since I didn't go over the limit.

There were big variations by carriers - that certainly wasn’t ubiquitous by the time the iPhone was released, because iMessage sidestepping it was important to enough people that everyone mentioned it in their reviews. For example:

> Besides ease of use, there's another side benefit to this seamless integration. If you send messages regularly to iOS 5 users, you may be able to switch to a cheaper texting plan from your carrier. Assuming you send messages exclusively to iOS 5 users, you may one day be able to ditch a texting plan altogether.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/06/more-upcoming-ios-5-...

I don't doubt that SMS were not always unlimited in the US.

But the question here is: Were there any (reasonably popular) plans that provided data for smartphones, but not unlimited texting? If not, that couldn't have been a factor in the adoption of iMessage in the US.

If you had wifi at home/work/school, you could send and receive without incurring any data usage at all.

True, but at least in the case of iMessage, that would also mean not being able to text all while not within Wi-Fi coverage (since Apple absolutely refuses to let people actually send an SMS to a number it considers to be participating in iMessage).

No; the iPhone launched with data plans. It just wasn't unlimited, nor were the texts. Sending an iMessage cost a lot less than ten cents of data; you could send/receive a lot more of them within your plan without overages.

(IIRC, my plan with Cingular didn't have any texts built-in, so they were 10¢ a pop, in each direction. I could send many thousands within the data plan's couple of gigabytes.)

> since Apple absolutely refuses to let people actually send an SMS to a number it considers to be participating in iMessage

Are you sure? I remember iMessage falling back to SMS if for some reason it can’t get through on iMessage.

I had a work blackberry on verizon that had unlimited data and no free sms texts. We used BBM and Google Voice to avoid paying sms fees

It’s not a factor at all. By the time smartphones and data plans came out, they all included unlimited texts. I’m sure there was a small carrier here and there but AT&T didn’t offer it with the first iPhone. This is US specific.

I'm 21 and from Germany, I absolutely remember paying for sms in the first years of my highschool time.

I can also remember killing my data plan browsing Instagram while skipping my French class ... So about 7 years ago?

Back in my day, you used to pay per minute for calls. Then they moved to a few hundred minutes free and the new SMS system cost a few cents per text. Then it was like 1500min/100sms free. Eventually it became unlimited minutes and texts but data cost some cents per kb or mb, then eventually that ratcheted up to “unlimited” everything with some “reasonable limits”.

As a kid I used to make a collect call to my mom and when they asked who was calling I’d say, “pick me up” and hang up. Free short messages even in the 90’s!

Ah, good ol’ Bob Wehadababyitsaboy.

> Back in my day, you used to pay per minute for calls.

Hello, fellow graybeard!

This is something I pull out every once in a while to let kids these days know how rough we had it: we had to pay 10-25 cents per minute for any in-state phone calls that weren't "local", where "local" was an arbitrary boundary on the map not even related to area code.

If we had to call out of state, charges started at $1 per minute. Every year at Christmas, we'd have an event where the local family would gather to make phone calls to out-of-state family. Because the cost was so high, we had to strictly ration time. Each kid (I was a kid then) got 3 minutes talk time.

This was late '70s/early '80s, and the figures are not adjusted for inflation.

And early 'unlimited' cell plans required the user to be 'local' usually in a city. Leave the city and boom, back to charge per minute because of 'roaming'.

RCS requires a data plan, and certainly Google's Messages app doesn't handle it well when there is no data. I know a lot of people who are too poor to afford data on their phones and they are regularly losing all their messages because of RCS.

> WhatsApp and iMessage require data plans, and as far as I can remember these have largely included unlimited SMS as well.

The reason why WhatsApp was huge internationally (like, 10^8 users huge) was because many teclos in developing countries included data usage in their plans but SMS was extra (and talking minutes were finite), so people used WhatsApp for all comms.

WhatsApp's had a free tier, but their basic plan was (IIRC) $1/month, and they many (tens/hundreds) of millions of users that paid it.

Facebook bought WhatsApp for $20B:

* https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-whatsapp-idUSKCN...

> Evidently, Zuckerberg lied to the European and American trade commissions. It was in fact possible to interface Facebook and WhatsApp platforms to mine data. Facebook has been doing it since day one of its acquisition. As always, Zuckerberg admitted to the misdeed, apologized and paid the fine. He got away scot-free.

> Months later, co-founder Jan Koum discovered that Facebook’s management weakened WhatsApp encryption system to make it easier for them to mine data. Koum resigned too.

> Fast forward to today and Zuckerberg continues to mine our data through Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram (which he acquired in 2012). Facebook has become a surveillance behemoth – arguably the biggest surveillance organization in the world.

* https://www.philstar.com/opinion/2023/04/05/2256935/real-rea...

I don't think that's true. I think the fees are why Whatsapp won outside of the US.

US users quickly had access to unlimited SMS and calling on most phone plans, which is why Whatsapp never took root.

While its true that SMS used to cost per message (and outrageously at that) unlimited SMS/MMS (AKA, unlimited text) plans were cheaper (and on some carriers, predate) than unlimited data, often being only $10 a month or so as an add-on. Unlimited talk & text plans were relatively common as well.

In the EU for instance, the reverse was true. Particularly, unlimited data was cheap and affordable, where as SMS was quite costly (even more than in the US in some cases) so data heavy apps were easier to adopt. Hence, WhatsApp, Telegram etc. gaining so much popularity. iMessage was introduced much later to the rich messaging market than these apps in those countries (because mobile messaging apps were cheap to adopt in markets where mobile data is cheap).

There is much more competition in those countries with cheap mobile data in the rich messaging services space. In the US, unlimited data has had a more sordid history, and SMS / MMS had a much bigger adoption rate early on

The days when each vendor of mobile phone were different from all the rest. Now all of them are Android and just unappealing.

Sure it was $10/line.

iMessage was free once you had a smartphone plan.

And no, smartphone plans didn’t automatically come with unlimited SMS. I had to “upgrade” for that.

>iMessage was free once you had a smartphone plan.

Unless you went over your data limit.

Good point. If you stick to text (like SMS was) that would be extremely difficult.

Start sending any kind of media and all bets are off.

If your phone spent most of its time on WiFi that was never a problem.

My recollection is that unlimited text plans became the standard around 2008ish, well before iMessage came out.

iMessage "won" because it was the default for iPhone users in the US. Similarly, Whatsapp is the default nowhere and I don't know anyone who uses it, but that might be a generational thing. Whatsapp has always struck me as common in Europe, but rare in the US. We just use text and FB Messenger.

I disagree, unlimited domestic SMS/MMS was common by iPhone 3G (summer 2008) I specifically remember getting an unlimited plan from ATT, which was novel.

However, international SMS/MMS was extremely expensive, and that was the main impetus for WhatsApp. It required no password or making accounts or remembering all of that, hence all non tech savvy people could easily use it. And it worked flawlessly, with zero exorbitant international charges, because you knew everything was going via data.

By the time I message became big it was a non issue. SMS is a garbage standard in comparison. I send full pictures and movies via I message if there is a Android phone on the chat they all turn to garbage tiny images

The answer is that the carriers worked out a specification and both infra-vendors and device-vendors were left to develop the server/client based on that spec.

So each major device-vendor developed his client-app, and ended up with interoperability issues not only with the RCS-servers used by a given carrier, but also with devices of OTHER vendors. And that doesn't even begin to cover the issues on inter-carrier messaging...

The situation was only resolved after Google acquired Jibe Mobile (the biggest player in developing RCS server/client applications for carriers) and basically created a single RCS-client/server implementation using their Android Messages app and a Google-owned server.

But when you were working on RCS back in 2012, you may remember that at that time, RCS didn't even support store&forward (!!).

So if the receiving device was not available when a message was delivered (because it had no network or client wasn't running on a device, which happened alot especially on iOS because the client was in a constant fight with the OS), the message wasn't queued anywhere.

Apart from the obvious issue of missing messages, it caused the even worse UX-impact that the entire conversation looked different on sender/receiver.

Ah yes, and: RCS was originally designed with per-message billing in mind (of course). At the time it was launched it was finally clear to the carriers that those times are over, but the whole architecture had quite a chunk of billing architecture in it as well...

> The situation was only resolved after Google acquired Jibe Mobile (the biggest player in developing RCS server/client applications for carriers) and basically created a single RCS-client/server implementation using their Android Messages app and a Google-owned server.

Thank you for highlighting this. This important piece of information often gets lost in the "green bubble" discussion.

Google has significant incentives for pushing RCS for more than one reason.

The situation was resolved by Google taking effort to unify the Android landscape and maintain a single client for that OS, instead of carriers (like Orange Group) developing one client, Samsung, LG, Sony, Huawei, ZTE each developing other clients

Google doesn't own the RCS-specification, the spec is still defined and maintained by GSMA, with Google just having one of the seats at the table (along with carriers and device manufacturers).

Apple is also a member of GSMA, them adopting RCS means that they just take another seat at the table of the RCS working group.

> Google has significant incentives for pushing RCS for more than one reason.

I don't know if you mean to imply some hidden Agenda. The incentive is to standardize "rich communication" across mobile platforms. "Green bubble" is one manifestation of the bigger issue that 27 years after the creation of SMS there is still no other universal method for me to send a text to your phone number today.

The main reason for that is, that several players still hope to own this communication channel to the user with their proprietary app, become the "Western WeChat" and sell access to the users.

RCS could be an universal non-proprietary method, open to be adopted by Apple, Facebook, WhatsApp and whoever wants to build a Message ecosystem. It has the potential to end this hassle and allow me to send a text to your number and reach you regardless of your OS and application of preference.

Agreed. I hate that we pretend Google is somehow altruistic with their support of RCS. They have many, many incentives and pretending otherwise is naive and obtuse.

> They have many, many incentives and pretending otherwise is naive and obtuse.

Okay. The main incentive is to create a competitive method for messaging which allows rich communication with everyone, regardless of platform or ecosystem just via their phone number.

Name five more.

Running a messaging gateway means Google gets all that sweet metadata at the very least and message content in the many cases where E2EE isn't enabled. That's a lot of data to build advertising derivatives all linked to a specific identity.

In best case for Google they can operate the RCS-server for Android devices. Google already owns the Messaging CLIENT for SMS/MMS/RCS on nearly all Android devices as well as the underlying OS itself.

There is little new information to gain for them, no matter how Android users communicate with Apple users right now.

There is however a lot to gain for them if a unified rich communication standard is established in the market, because apart from finally being able to replace SMS, it would drive platform-agnostic innovation in this area.

Google and Apple agreeing on a standard could disrupt the ecosystems of Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Vibr, Zoom, MS Teams etc.

> There is little new information to gain for them, no matter how Android users communicate with Apple users right now.

The client and the OS don't really give them any metadata or message content. Operating the server infrastructure would.

SMS doesn't touch their servers (except possibly for people that use Google's Messages app and/or backup service); RCS does.

> There is however a lot to gain for them if a unified rich communication standard is established in the market, because apart from finally being able to replace SMS, it would drive platform-agnostic innovation in this area.

Absolutely, but that open standard will hopefully not be RCS. It's way too coupled to the 3GPP/ITU model of doing things.

I trust the organizations in charge of the web and Internet (who brought us email and XMPP/Jabber!) a bit more than those who still somewhat yearn for the days in which OTT players did not exist and telecommunication was charged by the mile and minute or message.

> The client and the OS don't really give them any metadata or message content.

The client includes a spam protection service which allows them to send message data to a server for scanning. Every other messaging app uses the Notification service to send the message and its relevant metadata to the OS. So as far as conspiracy goes, Google has all the means to get the data already today.

Carriers supported it. Just Apple didn't, for a long time. The reason is obvious: To increase their market dominance in the US, where iMessage is common. Especially among US teens this was apparently successful. Teens didn't want to be the lame green bubble kids with reduced messaging features. They flocked to iPhones.

RCS is (was) the prime example of Apple's anticompetitive behavior, after the App Store exclusivity, preventing side loading, and disallowing alternative browsers.

Google could have released a rcs messenger app on iOS this whole time. Not sure what they were doing

Doubly so considering releasing chat apps is #2 on the list of things they are the most well known for after their search engine.

I'm pretty sure it's literally impossible? I suspect RCS, just like SMS needs some special telecom interaction.

An RCS app for iOS wouldn't make iMessage Android compatible.

Even when they adopt RCS I bet they still punish non Apple users with green bubbles.

the green buble is not for the Android users, it's for the iOS users to know that there may be some taxes for sending the message. even on iOS you get a green bubble if you disable imessage. i don't understand what's in it for you guys for repeating that rethoric about the punishment.

There's a huge financial incentive for them to punish competitors this way and it's been hugely effective in the US market. Why wouldn't they?

> Breaking: Apple will support RCS - the green bubble shame set to end

Note that the green bubble could be kept for other reasons: RCS is a major improvement over SMS/MMS, but there could still be functionality that isn't on par with a completely in-house system like 'iMessage'.

The green/blue distinction may still be useful for setting certain expectations on how things work.

Yeah definetly would not expect it to be blue as 9 to 5 noted how Apple mentioned it won't be as secure as iMessage and iMessage will be separate. So presumably people texting will still want to know if they see blue they get full privacy where is if they see green or a new color it means yes they get lots of new features like iMessage, but not as secure as iMessage. But the green bubble (or whatever new color) will be less shameful, if users in general can group chat and chat easily without worrying about not being able to do most all the standard features they can with other iPhone users. Time will tell.

"Privacy" is not the reason a lot of people comment on green text bubbles. It's status. That's it.

If they truly cared about sec, they would use something like Signal.

Both Signal and iMessage are E2EE, SMS is not.

Why do you feel Signal is better security wise?

iMessage, in practice, is not e2ee as devices escrow their “Messages in iCloud” cross-device sync keys to Apple in the non-e2ee iCloud Backup.

Even if you turn on e2ee for iCloud (“Advanced Data Protection”), your endpoint keys will stop being escrowed in a way readable to Apple in your backup, but the endpoint keys for everyone you message with will still be escrowed because they have not enabled Advanced Data Protection (because it’s off by default), so Apple will still be able to read all of your iMessage traffic.

99.9%+ of iMessages pass through Apple servers encrypted with keys that Apple has copies of (thanks to the insecure non-e2ee default nature of iCloud Backup). If the middle transit service has the private keys, it’s not e2ee.

I think it’s become status, but there are genuine reasons as to why people don’t like “green bubbles” in their chats. SMS breaks a lot of functionality that iMessage provides in group chats.

I don’t expect Apple to graduate RCS to a blue bubble, as it’s advantageous to keep the blue bubble “special”. I’ll be interested to see if society adapts and starts treating whatever RCS gets categorized as as “acceptable” or if we’re too far down the classism path for that to happen.

Unfortunately Signal makes it hard to backup photos people send you, and I know a few people who lost all their Signal chats and photos after switching phones (including myself).

If carriers can charge per RCS message like they do with SMS/MMS, usually after X amount used a month, Apple needs to make it a different color from iMessages which they provide for free.

People have to know if they are using free iMessages when talking to other people or if they are using up their SMS/MMS/RCS quota.

Edit: Maybe charging for SMSs is not a thing in your country but it is in mine. If I see a green bubble I would be mindful of the number of messages I send because after 200 SMSs I going to get charged per SMS.

Or if you frequently message people in other countries where they charge you who knows what

Charging for SMS is a thing on some plans here in Brazil, but I don't know in other countries, RCS works completely for free as it works even on Wifi. You don't need mobile data or SMS plans.

If you are on mobile data, it just doesn't use your quota...

Here in India the plans do include free SMS, but there was a government imposed limit of 200 SMSes per day from a single SIM (this applied to retail consumers, not institutions that may want to send transactional or marketing messages). [1][2] Beyond that, the per SMS charge gets expensive. Though that limit seems to have been removed in 2020, [3] I’ve only seen plans that allow 100 SMSes per day.

Almost everyone in India with a smartphone uses WhatsApp. SMS is for receiving OTPs, transaction messages, marketing messages, spam, phishing messages, etc.

[1]: https://trai.gov.in/notifications/press-release/trai-extends...

[2]: https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/200-sms-per-day...

[3]: https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-techn...

What a surprise! I'm quite sure RCS bubbles will be green though, and that's still going to be enough of a difference when it comes to teen groups and even adult dating.

The EU may mandate interoperability, but I don't see them mandating bubble color...

> but I don't see them mandating bubble color

I personally see no limit to what arbitrary nonsense regulation the EU is willing to push.

The EU is interested in fair competition. Apple has managed to provide a terrible cross-platform messaging experience to their own customers for years while successfully convincing everyone that the problem is due to every other phone besides theirs. I agree it's almost comical, but it certainly affects competition in a negative way.

I don't buy this. Customers needed no convincing from Apple. Even where iOS isn't dominant they saw their dropped and expensive SMS/RCS messages and picked up whatsapp.

I'm mostly just talking about the noxious white-on-green color they chose for cross-platform chat bubbles. It's a great example of hostile architecture. RCS fixes the cost / reliability problems of SMS, so that annoying color choice will be the only thing they have left to make imessage users feel superior.

Historically, SMS messages have had green bubbles since the iPhone was introduced in 2007. When Apple introduced iMessage in 2011, the showed iMessages in blue, and maintained the green for SMS messages. They are not “cross-platform” messages, Messages only does SMS and iMessage. If you did some reading, instead of getting upset over the longstanding colour of a chat message, you’d know this and not be so angry. Or, like th rest of the world, you would already be using an alternative.

https://css-tricks.com/apple-messages-color-contrast/

> RCS fixes the cost / reliability problems of SMS,

It doesn’t fix the end to end encryption problem unless google opens up their system.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/11/16/apples-flavor-of-...

Huh, pleasantly surprised Apple is taking up the mantle on something cross-platform. Nice.

You are misunderstanding the function of RCS as making different message services compatible. iMessage doesn't exist on Android, hence the necessity of an open protocol.

The problem is that RCS has completely failed at making even different RCS servers compatible.

Carriers like AT&T and Vodafone that were early to adopt RCS never even managed to interoperate with other RCS carriers - you could only send RCS to other AT&T subscribers, or other Vodafone subscribers. Then they all gave up and just adopted Google's servers. So now RCS just means "Google Jibe".

It's a failed standard. It never worked.

I think the system should delineate between messages sent through different services. Maybe we'll end up with three colors (green == sms/mms, blue = iMessage, purple == rcs)

Sms will be green, RCS a different shade of puke green.

I don’t know, that seems overly complicated and I don’t think Apple would want to do that.

I think they’re quite happy with “iMessage“ and “everything else“.

RCS will stay in the second bucket with the same green color.

Agreed. They wouldn’t give RCS the attention by making it a special color. They want people to use iMessage.

They don't need to. Almost nobody uses iMessage in the EU, since everybody is on WhatsApp.

More than 10% of europeans use iMessage, enough for EU Digital Market Act to force Apple to adopt RCS and thereby trying to circumvent opening iMessage itself

If iMessage gets declared a gatekeeper, RCS wouldn't be enough. Not all iMessage users can send/receive RCS or SMS.

> Not all iMessage users can send/receive RCS or SMS.

What do you mean? If Apple includes RCS like they did SMS then it would operate as follows:

Is target an iPhone with iMessage enabled? Yes? Use iMessage. No? Fallback to RCS. RCS doesn’t work? Fallback to SMS.

I'm not sure it would follow. as part of the act is to allow other apps to request interop in these services like iMessage or WhatsApp.

But I guess it was worth to try this instead of directly opening iMessage for interop, for business reasons.

Your carrier would have to support RCS, right? Do any EU carriers do that?

Even carriers that supported RCS, like Vodafone, have shut it down https://9to5google.com/2023/03/27/vodafone-rcs-messages-andr...

Apple won't make the iPhone fall back to sending RCS though Google servers (like Android does) if there isn't carrier support for it, they'll just say "there is no RCS support on your carrier" and go for SMS.

iPads can do iMessage. iPhones with no phone plan can do iMessage. iPod Touches, used to be the cheap messaging devices for kids before phone plans became more widespread. Macbooks. Those cannot send or recieve SMS/RCS.

And last but not least iMacs, Mac minis, Mac Studios and Mac Pros.

The word "Mac" encompasses all of those, just fyi.

Apple’s own argument is this isn’t true. A “major number of users” have iMessage turned on automatically, but aren’t active users.

If even Apple says iMessage isn’t used by at least 45 million EU citizens… (to qualify for gatekeeper status)

It will be interesting to see what color they choose for RCS. Right now, blue indicates an end-to-end encrypted message and green indicates not encrypted. Even when messaging between two Apple devices you can get a green bubble if, for some reason, the message is routed over SMS.

If it were up to me, encrypted RCS would be blue and not-encrypted RCS would be green.

Why do you think that blue represents E2EE and not simply iMessage? If data isn't available and the iPhone sends an SMS, like you mentioned, the bubble is green, but this doesn't necessarily have anything to do with encryption. For example, the satellite SOS messages are represented as gray. It seems more like the color represents the transport.

Because blue means iMessage and iMessage means E2EE.

Grey and Green means not encrypted. Simple.

Gray is encrypted to Apple, and then the information is (of course) shared with third parties. Would you consider that to be a private communication? Kind of. It's a gray area...

C'mon...

That's your own interpretation of it.

You could say "blue means it supports link embedding; green means it doesn't" and it would be just as true.

Personally, I strongly suspect that Apple views it as "blue means Apple; green means NIH."

Green means cellular, blue means internet. This same color distinction is used in other places in the UI, such as control center and settings.

Nope, it means SMS vs iMessage specifically.

> If you see a green message bubble instead of a blue one, then that message was sent using MMS/SMS instead of iMessage.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/105087

> iMessages are texts, photos, or videos that you send to another iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or Mac over Wi-Fi or cellular-data networks. These messages are always encrypted and appear in blue text bubbles.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207006

MMS is email-style MIME messages retrieved over HTTP on a data connection. Push notifications for MMS are delivered as a special SMS, but otherwise it's far far closer to internet than cellular, and it's green.

Years ago iMessage was not E2EE and it was already blue...

Does E2EE RCS even exist, or is that just Google bolting E2EE over RCS for users of their specific Messages app?

Google added it.

I can’t imagine all of the carriers cooperating on key management. That’s probably why some carriers have opted to use Google’s solution instead of their own. I would guess encryption isn’t an option if your carrier isn’t in this group.

FWIW, the 350+ page standard is here: https://www.gsma.com/futurenetworks/wp-content/uploads/2019/...

AFAICT Google Messages is simply encrypting the data sent over RCS, i.e. RCS is dumb pipes for the encrypted data, and the carries don't explicitly cooperate one way or another. The consequence would be that only users of Google Messages are able to send and receive encrypted messages to/from Google Messages, not other RCS compatible messaging apps. Pretty ironic given the context.

If a customer of carrier A wants to send a message to a customer of carrier B and the carriers aren't cooperating with key management, then I think the message is not encrypted because customer A needs to know B's public key and when B gets the message, they need A's public key to verify the sender.

That's my understanding as well. My original reply was in response to your suggestion that iMessage differentiate RCS encrypted vs RCS unencrypted using colors, and it appears that wouldn't even be possible because Google is applying proprietary encryption on top of RCS using their app.

I find this absolutely hilarious and almost beautiful: Google has been harassing Apple to implement RCS because it's an open standard and because its users feel green bubbles on iMessage are exclusionary. Now Google has implemented a proprietary protocol on top of RCS that only works with its messaging app, and only messages sent between users of that app appear in a darker blue color with a special lock icon.

So Apple will ship the RCS standard in iMessage, and communication between Android users and iMessage will be sent using RCS, but iMessage users will appear to Android users in the lesser light blue bubbles alongside the dark blue bubbles only given to Android users with Google's proprietary app! Huzzah!

I’ve had a couple girlfriends in their 40s mildly judge me negatively for having an Android phone, but someone who would take that seriously enough for it to affect their relationship decisions is someone I’d rather not be involved with. Maybe it would be better to text people with a “beater” Android phone as a test for how shallow they may be, like the semi-cliche of a financially well-off person driving an old truck to a first date vs their fancy car.

It has nothing to do with finances. You can buy a perfectly good used iPhone for less than $100. It has to do with taste. Not wanting to date a guy with an Android phone is like not wanting to date a guy because he's a Weaboo.

Based on what I’ve read on reddit/lemmy lately, some people still have the impression iPhones have an air of exclusivity from being more expensive. I agree that of course this isn’t true, though perhaps it was 12 years ago.

As far as your second point, well… I guess that’s precisely the attitude I was addressing. I definitely don’t agree that a phone brand is as strong an indicator of personality traits as the example you offer. If I was say, hiring a UI designer, I’d perhaps care about their choice of OS. For relationships, I don’t really care if they’re passionate about mobile phones. I understand that most of us on HN are keyed in to tech and UI. The average person, though, sees a phone as a utilitarian item, and owns one as a means to accomplish specific tasks. That way of thinking is like, if someone was a mechanic and thought poorly of a someone they met because they drove a Ford instead of a Mazda and the mechanic believed Mazda had more elegant engine designs.

I think you should read the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson

What would that change my mind about? Would you mind explaining why you think I need to read it or what that’s related to?

Steve Jobs invented the iPhone

Oh, okay... thanks for pointing that out.

I highly recommend that book. It's a classic. It will answer your questions better than anyone on reddit.

> . . . some people still have the impression iPhones have an air of exclusivity from being more expensive.

iPhones: so exclusive that hordes of unemployed teenagers have them.

Honestly, if I were a girl, and a guy was mansplaining to me why Android was better than iOS, I wouldn't want to date them either.

>> The EU may mandate interoperability, but I don't see them mandating bubble color...

> I’ve had a couple girlfriends in their 40s mildly judge me negatively for having an Android phone […]

I have an iPhone but don't tie it into Apple services so every fellow iPhone users have green-bubble interactions with me. :)

Over the years/decades I've lived through ICQ, MSN Messenger, BBM, and probably some other proprietary systems. I've managed to avoid tying into any of them so far.

> I’ve had a couple girlfriends in their 40s mildly judge me negatively for having an Android phone

That’s ridiculous!

I thought this bubble color thing was a joke but is it seriously something women look at? Why?

photos/videos get highly compressed, you can't share live location, don't share the typing status, don't have reactions, stickers, the list goes on

Clearly Apple intentionally resisted RCS for ten years for exactly this reason. Anticompetitive behavior.

It's not something anyone worth your time looks at, nor something most people look at.

In the EU people use WhatsApp (not SMS) anyways.

The lede is quite cleverly buried here. Key sentence is "We will be adding support for RCS Universal Profile, the standard as currently published by the GSM Association"

So no end to end encryption and the bubbles will most still likely be green.

Even with the mutterings about improving security etc it's unlikely that the GSM Association will ever sign off on any encryption scheme that isn't weak or backdoored.

To be clear, based on what I've read: "no end-to-end encryption" simply means that Apple is not going to either a) develop their own, proprietary E2EE system for RCS, or b) pay Google for theirs.

And good grief, get over the bubble color thing. Of course RCS isn't going to have blue bubbles; those specifically indicate an iMessage message. Maybe they'll be green, or maybe they'll be purple, orange, or red, to differentiate them from SMS. That's all the different colors are for: a useful indication of what messaging system that user is currently using.

If Apple didn't color the bubbles differently, you'd see people moaning and complaining that there's no way to tell who you can and can't make a group chat with, or whether you can send them stickers and reactions.

> And good grief, get over the bubble color thing

I agree it is stupid, but there most definitely is a "status thing" going on with the whole green vs. blue as well.

This will probably go away over time as everyone supports most the same features.

Personally, I have no experience with it—but I don't doubt that it exists for some people.

What I object to is people insisting that the "status thing" some people have going on with it is Apple's responsibility to fix by removing useful indicators of who's using what messaging services, or that Apple is deliberately and maliciously making people not using iMessage somehow look worse.

(On the other hand, I think there's a perfectly legitimate argument that Apple could and should open iMessage, and is choosing not to do so for relatively selfish reasons. I don't have a strong opinion on that one either way.)

> This is not Apple opening up iMessage to other platforms. Instead, it’s the company adopting RCS separately from iMessage.

Very important.

I don't mind Apple adopting RCS the same way that SMS is implemented. I like that iMessage can add features at whatever pace Apple wants. RCS will at least fix the annoying group message problems that Android/iOS have.

Agreed. I don't mind them having their messaging platform. I don't mind it being technically superior to RCS.

I DO have an issue with them intentionally doing a shit job of integrating with a telecommunications standard and then slapping a green bubble on it to get their oblivious users to ostracize people's kids.

Apple doesn't put a green bubble on SMS "to ostracize people's kids". Kids are ostracized just for having a default skin in Fortnite--because kids can be little shitheads. Apple differentiates because what you can do with SMS is different from what you can do with iMessage and that's a clear way to demonstrate it (and also to indicate if there's something weird going on when it changes from iMessage to SMS).

RCS is a suboptimal standard, and while it's good that Apple will support it to try to de-jank mixed-platform group messaging, I'd expect it also to be a different color because RCS in turn introduces its own jank that iMessage doesn't have. So people who want to make up an Apple to get mad at will still have their chance, I guess.

> what you can do is different

Can you talk a bit more about how iMessage is fundamentally diferent than SMS on the functionality level? Is it like "Signal" different or is it like "different" different?

Edit: bonus points if you can offer why iMessage is able to be the skeleton key into your iPhone, as often it and WebKit seem to be behind most of the serious 0-days...

I can edit an iMessage after sending it, I can use threads and it doesn’t require a cell carrier - just an Internet connection. It’s also e2e encrypted and I can optionally let people know I have do not disturb on.

It integrates with sharing my location and I can tell when someone is actually typing

> Can you talk a bit more about how iMessage is fundamentally diferent than SMS on the functionality level

It's different in the same way every messaging app is different from SMS:

* Group chats, with custom group names and icons

* High quality images/videos

* Reactions

* Stickers

* Rich link previews

* Threads

* etc. etc.

> why iMessage is able to be the skeleton key into your iPhone

I don't think a lot (any?) of the vulnerabilities are unique to iMessage. It's more about the fact that SMS/iMessage is a means for someone to send you data that's then parsed/decoded immediately by the system.

Isnt that the reason sandboxes exist? I just feel like these thins happen way less often with Signal and [shudder] Whatsapp...

iMessage is a much juicier potential attack vector. over 50% of the US market (trends towards the richer half, too).

Some carriers charge per SMS - after X SMSs per month. iMessage is completely free.

Kind of important to be able to tell if you are burning up your SMS quota.

Both iMessage and Webkit have to accept requests from unknown sources that can contain a wide variety of content type. some other content types, like EPS are themselves programming languages that could contain infiltration scripts. That is why Apple has dropped EPS support. Similar situation can happen for other kinds of image and video content.

I don't know much about how iMessage communication is implemented but it does offer end to end encryption and supports richer interaction and content than plain SMS does. that was one of the reasons that Apple marked SMS clients with the green bubbles to indicate not to expect the same interaction with them. It was some little shits that turned that into an anti-status symbol.

I just laugh because Signal is way better than all of this and—wouldn't ya know—the default is "blue bubbles". They are the ultimate blue bubble to me because its almost all yours and gives you way more control than anything else like iMessage and its all audited and open for examination (theoretically)

Sorry in which way is Signal better?

Signal can be better in all ways except the one that matters most. Not a single person I communicate with uses it. So it's useless.

You gotta find a way to make it clear you dont consent to be sharing your stuff with anyone but you , case closed. It has all the same toys and whistles so theres just no excuse.

Its a boundary and we all need to get real better at understanding and being respectful thereto.

Only issue is if you want them more than they you, there's a bit of a dance to navigate . If the like Musk, send them to all his endorsementz. At the end of the day, it will have to be a negotiation at play and its more of a toughlove ultimatun purely for the area of which messenging platforms to engage with.

> You gotta find a way to make it clear you dont consent to be sharing your stuff with anyone but you , case closed. It has all the same toys and whistles so theres just no excuse.

"It's not what we all already use."

There's exactly one person I know who uses Signal on a consistent basis. I don't turn on notifications for anything, so I don't see their messages on a consistent basis, but Signal offers me no incentive to use limited social credibility to try to encourage others to use its awkward affordances and non-native interface over either a native interface with reasonable security (iMessage) or a much better non-native interface without (Discord, Slack).

"There's no excuse not to use the one I like" is Linux-on-the-desktopping and is not responsive to how normal human beings actually operate in life and society. You might put picky conditions on your interactions, but most people meet others where they are--because network effects are real and humans matter more than technology.

If you actually use Signal and you have notifs you would not be saying any of this. Signal is beyond smooth in the UI/UX departments and the only difficulty is someone 1)install app 2) open app 3) enter number or username 4) basically done? That's literally every damn app. So tired of this FUD.

Has all the features of anything else without the bullshit and lack of credibillity/hazard to their own users.

If people respect themselves and their data enough, they will find a way. I've had zero problem with my closest friends cuz they trust I don't assign them random bullshit for shiggles. Maybe you need to reevaluate your relationships and the extent to which you place primacy on being able to communicate freely and without crap that works against you (or at least isnt built to work with you rather than rat you out about everything controversial you privately express)

Just don't get it man, maybe they're more the Telegram type. Nothing's more advanced or private than a Telegram for sure. Stop.

There was a point where I did try to use Signal in anger. It petered out almost immediately because nobody I talk to uses it except to turn on disappearing messages, shit-talk somebody else, and then go back to Slack or Discord. Because it does do disappearing messages well! But nobody I know wants to deal with it past that because contrary to your "it's just like everything else", its affordances are at best not distinguishing and certainly not good.

At some point, perhaps it will enter your consideration that talking about things like "people respect[ing] themselves and their data enough" is alienating to anybody who has a job and a mortgage and things they care about more than your minority choice of a messaging platform. Normal people don't care because normal people don't have governments, etc. in their threat models because normal people are boring. If you want to interest normal people, you have to be better than the BATNA--better than non-use. And saying "privacy" or "just get your friends to use it too" is a fail state.

Linux-on-the-desktop failed, too, when the only tool in the box was hectoring. (He said, from a Linux desktop.)

Sounds like you got everything figured out, thanks for chiming in =)

I can picture teens or younger acting snobby about phone choice. Not really clear why, if it’s a financial thing, as it’s been years since iPhones were priced at a premium relative to competitors. But well, they’re kids. However, I’ve experienced critical attitudes from adults well into their 40s when I had an Android phone. Personally I prefer iOS, but to judge someone based on their phone choice seems fairly ridiculous for an adult.

Phone/platform arguments are the worst, I do my best to avoid or extinguish them in whatever politik means is available. People can be such egotistical jerks about this foolishness.

I went through a phase like that and got over it early. As a kid, I thought that Amigas and then Linux were so far superior to Nintendo and Windows that I felt like I was at war with anyone using the other platforms. Later on I realized that this just made me miss out on the joy of using those systems and I would have done better to try to get all of them, rather than fixate on ones I thought were superior.

> Both iMessage and Webkit have to accept requests from unknown sources that can contain a wide variety of content type.

Lockdown mode rejects unknown sources, and doesn't autoplay content types.

So they don't have to any more, it's up to the user.

Its weird how much they deemphasize it and every time there's a zero-day, the solution is to upgrade. Let us add more to the pile while taking away a single point of entry.

Actuvate LockDown, and its all gone. Indefinitely cuz it blocks the original sin. And there's basicaly 0-downsides.

Different like … totally. SMS was part of the very early GSM design work in the mid ‘80s and is built into the network at a fundamental level (this is why the particular character limit etc etc)- it was designed in the GSM/SS7/ telco world and has been used for over thirty years. iMessage was designed and built by Apple as a single operator with virtually total control of the backend and user devices. They achieve similar results in completely different ways, the best analogy I can think of is how octopus’s and jellyfish can see too, but evolved eyes very different to our own.

But they pick an ugly shade of green though.

I currently have an iPhone 15 Pro Max and have also used Android devices in the past. I like to switch each time I get a new phone.

Apple definitely picks an ugly color to make you feel uncomfortable texting with a non iPhone user. They should at least let users choose the color (which will never happen).

All texts were green for years before iMessage (and blue texts) existed, so I highly doubt it was picked to be ugly on purpose.

The green predates the existence of iMessage. That green is the color that was used from the beginning of the iPhone in 2007; iMessage was only added in 2011. iMessage was given a different color than the preexisting one.

Trying to claim that Apple picked an "ugly color to make you feel uncomfortable" is simply false.

The original green bubbles used a different shade but more importantly they used black text. iOS 7 switched to white text and a shade of green that means the contrast for SMS failed Apple's own guidelines. Even for people with decent eye sight it can cause additional eye strain and be perceived as ugly even if the green on its own would be fine.

To be fair the blue they choose is also not ideal, but it is a lot better than the green.

https://medium.com/@krvoller/how-iphone-violates-apples-acce...

iOS 4 : https://i.imgur.com/3LIpvX9.png

iOS 5 (introduction of iMessage) : https://i.imgur.com/v2Wths4.png

iOS 7: https://i.imgur.com/7k8QL3z.png

Yes, it was green before, but it didn't look so vile. Since the redesign of iOS in 7 the difference of green vs blue is a difference in legibility.

They didn't pick it for that:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/277597847631822848/11...

> They should at least let users choose the color (which will never happen).

You can turn on high contrast mode in Messages settings which gives you a forest green color that's imo pretty nice to look at.

It’s the system “green” color. It’s used anytime there is a UI element that’s supposed to be green, same as system “blue” is used for iMessage and everything else in the OS.

> Apple definitely picks an ugly color to make you feel uncomfortable texting with a non iPhone user.

But what's Apple's motivation? Making me feel uncomfortable reading an Android user's messages does little to influence that Android user into buying an iPhone.

That said, I don't know why Apple thinks the transport protocol (iMessage vs SMS) is so important that users want to see a color indicator for every message.

SMS can also cost money. There are plans that charge per SMS after X amount per month.

It’s important users can tell if they are using SMS so they don’t get a giant phone bill at the end of the month.

White on green is one of the hardest color pairings to read due to how cone cells are distributed in the retina (this image isn't completely representative, in the fovea green gets even higher as a proportion):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoreceptor_cell#/media/File...

That's RGB lit up contrasted with just G lit up. One of the only worse pairings would be white on yellow, which would be RGB vs RG lit up, with the only distinguishing signal coming through blue, which we have the lowest resolution of.

White on blue is RGB vs B, all the visual difference in RG which we have the highest resolution of.

This is why you generally want different color schemes for light vs dark terminals, if the color saturation is high (saturated blue text on black is bad, saturated blue text on white is fine and vice versa for green and yellow).

> I DO have an issue with them intentionally doing a shit job of integrating with a telecommunications standard and then slapping a green bubble on it to get their oblivious users to ostracize people's kids.

The green bubble is there because in the past, when telcos charged money for individual SMS messages, green meant money. I.e., greenbacks, US dollars.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenback

* https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/263943/meaning-o...

Blue meant no charge for the message, since it went over the data plan and through Apple's servers.

The tribal/clan split of iPhone/no-iPhone came later.

Speaking of opening up to other platforms due to Digital Markets Act: maybe we'll finally get FaceTime as an open industry standard at some point?

I thought Apple intended to do that but found out the a lot of the tech was patent-encumbered.

The story is Steve Jobs just announced that without consulting any engineers first. It was a total surprise to them.

They actually seemed to be working on it, but Apple was quickly hit with a patent suit from some company over FaceTime. I believe they had to re-architect how it worked to get around the patent.

They haven’t done anything about it since then. I wonder if they simply can’t because of patents. Either way by now I think they’ve decided it’s a strategic advantage and they wouldn’t do it by choice.

That would be an interesting chance: buy an iPhone and get it with the hardware, or download and app and pay Apple a subscription. I wonder how many Android users would be willing to pay the subscription?

AIUI FaceTime is already made from 3GPP and IETF standards, just apple holds the encryption keys and the auth servers.

As an Android user, it'd be nice if replying "No" to "Do you want RCS?" meant "Never ask me again" and wasn't just interpreted as "ask me again in next week and every week thereafter".

Pssst... you sure you don't want RCS? All your cool blue bubble friends are using it now!

What? Are you saying this in jest? Then I'm missing the humor because this is completely false...

Yes :/ Like Android might soon use ios compatibility as a reason to further annoy you about changing protocols

> and wasn't just interpreted as "ask me again in next week and every week thereafter".

It gets even worse; last week, on a relative's phone, after weeks of clicking "not now" it just force-enabled RCS, and displayed something like a "we automatically enabled RCS for you, here's what you should do if you want to disable it again" (completely confusing said non-technical relative). Needless to say, I quickly went into the settings and disabled it again; I just hope that it having been enabled for a few minutes doesn't mean it will no longer be able to receive messages from RCS users (like the rumors I heard many years ago of people who enabled iMessage and later changed back to Android no longer receiving any SMS from iMessage users).

why don't you want RCS?

A lot of people I know can't afford a data plan for their phones, so when RCS becomes enabled it just bounces all their incoming/outgoing messages and it is sometimes days or weeks before they realize.

And even for those who can afford a data plan for their phones, they might have gone over their data allowance for the current month, so the data won't work until it refreshes at the start of the next monthly cycle. And obviously, having one more thing using data makes it even easier to go over the limit.

For me, SMS is solely for receiving 2FA codes and sending message to my provider to check how much data allowance I have left for the month. I use Whatsapp for messages to people.

Companies have already begun using RCS as an opportunity to flood my phone with ads that take up way too much space in the notification shade. Also not from the US, so I can just use a 3rd party app

Yup it's completely disingenuous on Google's part.

Some people don't have data but Google doesn't care, they force clueless users to enable RCS anyway and then they're on their own to figure out why they don't receive messages anymore!

There's no feedback that a message was undeliverable?

Interestingly enough the person who wrote the white paper for the signal protocol implementation in Googles RCS, Emad Omara, now works for Apple

https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf

Is there E2EE in the actual RCS specification? Can there be, given that telcos are usually subject to lawful intercept laws?

AIUI, what Google/Android does is have their own extension, with the Content-Type of the message being "application/vnd.google.rcs.encrypted":

* https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf

This is kind of like, with (E)SMTP/IMAP, having your own capability of "X-GOOG-ENCRYPT" if the standards-based "STARTTLS" was not around.

So while RCS gives many other improvement over SMS/MMS, encryption is not one of them.

(Personally I have an iPhone, but don't conect 'iMessage', and generally stick with SMS/MMS.)

The MLS protocol proposed by Google provides a cross platform path to E2EE.

https://thehackernews.com/2023/07/google-messages-getting-cr...

There isn't E2EE in the RCS spec, but there's in-transit TLS encryption

STARTTLS is client-to-server (or at least node-to-node). RCS node-to-node is already always encrypted.

E2EE is like both sending and receiving parties agreeing to use PGP. The servers aren't involved with the details; they just move the opaque bytes.

> This will work alongside iMessage, which will continue to be the best and most secure messaging experience for Apple users," said an Apple spokesperson.

I could be wrong but I don’t see anything here to suggest non-iMessages will no longer have the “green bubble” like the author assumes.

agreed, in fact I suspect it'll remain a green bubble for "insecure" but at least more features will be supported.

it will remain green, which means the signaling effect will also remain. the funny thing is everyone claims it's down to quality but guessing it won't matter, plus no 8ball/facetime will still push people towards iphones.

especially w young ppl, where i think like 90% have iphones. if i had a nickel for every time a gal mentioned green bubbles give her the ick, i wouldn't be rich but could probably buy a solid steak dinner off it.

> green bubbles give her the ick

I mean, I guess I would be grateful to have such an earlier indicator that someone is not worth pursuing. Truly, who cares.

It’s not that they would reject you if they already had some sort of a connection formed with you or that they consider having “green bubbles”to be an absolute dealbreaker. But if you have 5 similarly good on paper dating candidates, you are in the very initial stage of the process with them, and you need to narrow down the list, I don’t think it is that unreasonable to do so based on “the ease of texting.” You gotta narrow down somehow, and if doing so based on “green bubbles” eliminates 1-2 max out of 5 in the very initial stage, it is kind of a not that terrible of a metric. If it was eliminating half or more, it would be a bit more questionable.

Of course, eliminating someone for “green bubbles” after you had already developed some interest in is way too much and is indeed a trait that would make one not worth pursuing.

Are you serious? You think that the brand of mobile device a potential suitor uses is a good metric to eliminate candidates?

this is a very real and powerful force that apple has shrewdly monetized

Unfortunately you'd be eating that dinner by yourself....

Jesus right for the throat

i didn't say they were directed at me

Green: iMessage

Blue: RCS

<blink>Red</blink>: SMS/MMS

There is zero chance they’re going to change iMessage to green. RCS will be green because anything other than iMessage is “other”.

I wonder if there will be a third color, maybe purple?

I suspect “work alongside“ is in that sentence to make it clear they are not replacing iMessage.

I agree with you that they’re likely to have green bubbles. Green equals not iMessage, blue equals iMessage. It seems unlikely they would introduce a third color and it would never be blue because it doesn’t support all the same features.

Despite the usual "I want Apple to be a walled garden" sentiment that is prevalent on HN, I'm glad that the EU, DoJ and all the various corporate lawsuits are finally forcing Apple to open up their ecosystem, even if it is still far from where it should be. The smartphone is now the primary personal computer for most of the planet, and deserves to be treated as such.

iOS though is still very much a walled garden when it comes to installing apps.

I would assume that if you buy an iPhone you are (at least nowadays) aware that you are not going to be side loading applications or getting a device with third party bloatware installed that you can’t remove without a level of technical skill. How is it that they can be forced to open up their ecosystem if nobody is forced to purchase their devices, and when there are so many alternatives available. Especially when it seems (to me) that the only real beneficiaries from that move would be advertisers or companies like epic, spotify, google.

> even if it is still far from where it should be.

Where do you reckon it should be? Do you think they should let developers do/access whatever they want, or do you mean something else? Do you personally use an android or ios device (or maybe some niche os)?

Users are allowed to criticize devices they use. Do you think your phone is perfect and nothing can be improved? I think being able to install other app stores is an improvement on my device. "If you don't like it, leave" doesn't actually address the criticism. It's an informal fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergo_decedo . "If Apple don't like the EU's laws, they can just leave, but they don't so therefore they must be okay with the laws". You see how the "therefore" isn't true?

That's why it being actual free market competition where consumers have a choice is the real test. If 100% of people on iOS want to stick exclusively with the Apple App Store, then it being forced open won't matter because all other stores will fail when no user installs them.

On the other hand, if users are willing to use those other stores, maybe iOS users don't actually care about using exclusively Apple's App Store. Then the only one who benefits from blocking that is Apple to charge their extra fees. Look at their reasoning for removing Fortnite from the store: because Epic added an additional payment processor that wasn't Apple. It's not like they removed Apple payment as an option either. So users had the benefit of more choices!

Aware or not, "you can go somewhere else" is not a valid excuse from being regulated - that rests solely on whether what is being done is deemed fair play by people. E.g. hanging the price of gas mid pump is not considered fair play and is regulated regardless if people can go to the other gas station in town and deal with whatever weird operations they have instead.

Whether there are more beneficiaries than advertisers or other mega companies is another easy one to answer: sure, people benefit more than advertisers/epic/etc by being able to use RCS (or hopefully iMessage) across platforms, as do other areas of opening up the Apple ecosystem. Does this hold in every case of opening up anything? Probably not, e.g. requiring the permissions model be allowed to have alternatives would very likely benefit shady actors a lot but the users extremely little.

Your last point is, in my opinion, the much more lively and core debate: at which point is the ecosystem opened the right amount? For me, still a bit farther than this, but not infinitely open.

As for which brand ecosystem for me: all the above. Windows for home, Linux+macOS for work, iPhone for phone, Android for tablet.

> the green bubble shame set to end

I'm betting the non-Apple bubbles will remain green... and remain a bit stigmatized.

It was never about the resolution of pictures and even technical limitations around group chat was just part of it. It's a social thing and the technical protocol is incidental.

Dr. Seuss probably explained it best in The Sneetches.

> It was never about the resolution of pictures and even technical limitations around group chat was just part of it.

It can be about both. It’s really nice to know when the images you sent are gonna be potato-quality and you need to find some other channel to send them, or that message reliability and capabilities in general are being limited to SMS (or RCS!) levels. I don’t give a shit about the social aspects, it’s valuable as a UI affordance.

I love when people comment on the color of a text message. It makes it real easy to know who to block, because they worry about entirely the wrong things.

There's no one to block, you just won't be included when the groupchat is setup. Big problem for teens.

I dunno. Sounds like being left out of those groups is a net positive.

Yeah it kinda makes me want to get my kids Android phones.

Personally, I'm happy to be left out of those, groupchat via MMS is awful. But then I'm not a teen, and when I was a teen, I was happy to be left out of a lot of things too.

> I'm happy to be left out of those, groupchat via MMS is awful

So are most people who prefer iMessage over MMS (aka “green bubbles”), which is kind of the point.

That may be the difference. I'm far removed from my teenage years.

If you socially exclude someone because they care about the color of text message bubbles, don't you care at least as much as they do?

More, probably, because if they just mention it and you block them, that's disproportionate.

> If you socially exclude someone because they care about the color of text message bubbles, don't you care at least as much as they do?

The grandparent comment is talking about excluding people for wasting their time going on rants about message bubble colors, not about excluding those with a “wrong” message bubble color.

And no, caring about not having to waste time on listening to someone who cares entirely too much about message bubble colors doesn’t mean that you care as much as they do about it.

I hate racists and hating racists doesnt make me a bad person.

I hate people who judge others based on $1000 dollar Veblen goods. Also I make more money than them, so I'm very aware that the person who cares about bubbles is being exploited by Apple's psychology and marketing department. So... maybe I don't hate them, maybe we should feel sorry for them.

Or maybe we need to hate them because its a deterrent against corporations exploiting insecurities.

First, just an aside: you don't have to hate anyone. It doesn't make you a bad person to hate others, but you could be living better, that's for sure. The thing is, it usually mainly impacts the hater, making them unhappy and angry.

But your analogy doesn't fit here... the issue with blue and green bubbles is the social pressure to have the "better" bubble color, to show you're part of the "better" group. That is, the negative social pressure comes from the threat of social exclusion via lower social standing. But the previous poster is also threatening social exclusion, but a more complete exclusion, and based on nearly the same thing. So it would be more like showing your objection to racism by expressing racist ideas or taking racist actions. Doesn't make sense, of course. That's my point.

I have a hard time understanding if this actually matters.

Maybe because I'm good looking and make a lot of money, I don't have to care about green bubbles?

Maybe this is important if you are a poor person.

The previous poster made a decision to exclude based on the other party's actions, namely giving someone shit about the color of a text box.. lol

Why would I want to burden myself with clowns like that?

I wear clothes because they are comfortable and look nice. I don't wear clothes because of the branding and those that are overly concerned about the branding, would be the same.

Edit: also, I'm now apparently the same ilk as racists, since I choose not to deal with idiots that worry about the color of text boxes. That's cool.

> also, I'm now apparently the same ilk as racists

Where is that claim made?

Right here:

"So it would be more like showing your objection to racism by expressing racist ideas or taking racist actions"

This is stating that, for example, if you dislike racists and choose not to associate with them, you're acting like a racist. lol

That's not racism...at all. It's not even bigotry. The choice is based on actions, not class, religion, color, etc.

I don't think you're following the thread correctly. I guess re-read it, if you want to understand what is being said (probably a waste of time though).

I love the non-rebuttal, followed by immediate dismissal. lol

ok..

Your response doesn’t address the content of the thread coherently. What else can I say? We need to actually be talking about the same things to have a discussion.

No, because my action is based on their behavior, and shitty attitude, not the color of their text messages.

I do not care what color the message is. If I could read it, mission accomplished. People who worry about the color of an SMS are not folks I care to deal with. They are overly concerned about the wrong shit.

The moment you have a contact from any other country than your own, you'll quickly learn that green = huge carrier fees and blue = free texting that even works on wifi with data roaming off. Quadruply so for group chats.

Yes, there is no way they give up Green vs Blue. I'm sure they'll make up some excuse why it makes sense to keep the distinction.

But the reality is that the Millennial and Gen Z bubble culture has been a big driver behind their market share increase in the US. And if Gen Alpha adopts the same culture (and doesn't rebel against norms created by prior generations like young people tend to do) then Apple will have a near monopoly in in the US in 15 years.

"Nah, green bubble is a point of pride. You didn't fall for Apple's marketing tricks, you are the edgy person who Thinks Different." This concept alone will make it so it never reaches 100%.

Not to mention, Apple's security is so terrible, I imagine corporations are going to be banning iphones. Its never going to be a monopoly or a near monopoly.

Apple's positioning is targeted to people who buy Veblen goods. As long as there is a market for phones that are high quality, Apple will never get a 'near' monopoly.

>>It was never about the resolution of pictures and even technical limitations

Sure, to some degree, but I'm not convinced all or most of the shame is only the iphone cachet -- the quality is incredibly bad, like shockingly bad. It's unusable, particularly for videos. As those things change, I can't help but feel like the shame moderates.

But I don't have a teenager, so I don't have that perspective first hand.

I could see apple still downscaling and compressing videos and pictures that don't come from apple devices

They’re not doing it to be evil. They’re following the MMS standard that was designed for phones released in like 2004.

That’s just the quality of pictures/video MMS carries.

Imagine being an exec at Nothing and seeing your acquisition turn into dust

Edit: it was not an acquisition but a partnership

Context:

https://nothing.community/d/2968-introducing-nothing-chats

Wouldn't worry at all. It's a cool feature if it works. The value in that blue bubble is less about the features of iMessage and more about social capital, not that I personally care.

It is about the features though. Apple users snob Android users because group messaging doesn’t work well, media features are not supported, etc.

RCS offers such a rich environment that Apple could finally truly integrate most stuff transparently with iMessage. Send a video to the group chat? Everyone gets it at full quality. Make a poll? Everyone can vote.

You're both right. The features matter, but so does the social stigma of bubble color.

Nothing will still have a feature and an edge by offering a "blue bubble" on Android, but this announcement would reduce my excitement a little bit if I were them.

The features Apple could not integrate with RCS will be very few, like watching an AppleTV show together or create a FaceTime call without having visible links in the chat.

The social stigma stems from iMessage giving Apple users advanced and integrated messaging for free since the very beginning, which “spoiled” people into not wanting to deal with pure SMS chats.

Why do you say "acquisition"? I thought Nothing just partnered with Sunbird.

But I do wonder if the timing is completely coincidental.

There is almost no chance Apple would tolerate an unofficial iMessage client for long, anyway.

The next significant step would be opening up iMessage and I'm pretty sure that Apple already has implemented most of it. Otherwise, they cannot realistically follow the DMA timeline in the worst case where EU designate iMessage as a gatekeeper.

Yeah this sounds like they consider that outcome is at least possible, if not outright expecting it.

That's never going to happen for two main reasons.

The first one is that, despite the EU’s blatant attempt to carve the rules around the likes of Apple while simultaneously trying to shield EU companies, they've overestimated the amount of iMessage users, excluding iMessage from the DMA rules.

The other one, which is more important in this discussion, is that the EU kept the definitions of services rather broad to the degree that Apple’s adoption of RCS will automatically fulfill the interoperability requirement.

> That's never going to happen for two main reasons.

I wouldn't say "never". DMA is inherently political at its heart and designed to target US big techs precisely. Apple is not immune and EU gave the regulation board enough flexibility to target all of US big techs. Apple knows this and they decided to support RCS for this exact reason to gain public supports.

> The other one, which is more important in this discussion, is that the EU kept the definitions of services rather broad to the degree that Apple’s adoption of RCS will automatically fulfill the interoperability requirement.

EU already has defined iMessage as a separate core platform service from iOS and Apple hasn't argued against it because it would give them a chance to exclude iMessage from the scope of the regulation. Hence, OS level support for RCS won't cover iMessage if it's also designated as a gatekeeper.

Apple wouldn't need to be blatantly targeted if they hadn't been engaging in significant anti consumer practices for years.

iMessage is not really a gatekeeper in the EU, because the number of friend groups that are close enough to iPhone exclusive isn't that big. Instead we use any combination of Whatchapp, FB messenger, Snapchat and Signal.

I'm pretty happy about this, I don't think Apple should be forced to open up iMessage, but not adopting the RCS standard always seemed a bit underhanded to me. Even if it sucks, better cross-platform messaging is a win for everyone.

I'm curious if this means Apple will run their own RCS service for their customers or will rely on a telco provided one.

I tried to find info for example about RCS in Australia, and saw a piece about Telstra launching RCS in 2017... but now it's apparently turned off and customers are expected to use the Google RCS service?

I really hope Apple allows us to disable many of RCS's features like read receipts and previews.

I really don't want spammy users to start seeing read receipts, etc.

You can disable read receipts in RCS just like you can with iMessage: https://www.makeuseof.com/how-to-disable-read-receipts-rcs-a...

Previews are an app feature, not in the RCS protocol itself. I see message previews for SMS/MMS messages on Apple/Android devices despite the SMS/MMS protocol having no concept of previews. Most likely true for RCS as well.

I'm worried about the spam. I hope they provide the ability to turn RCS off altogether if that's going to be a problem.

I don't think they can turn it off altogether, because it's essentially replacing sms, but I hope they allow us to disable a ton of the features or put it into a separate app.

It's almost too late, at least here in Europe, WhatsApp is pretty ubiquitous, probably because the split between Android and iPhone is much more even.

Even my elderly relatives use WhatsApp, it's that popular. My local village has a chat group on it.

And eventually, we'll go through cvs, svn, and then _finally_ get git on the iPhone?

yeah but first you're going to have to deal with them putting ,v after all the names in your address book.

I know we're not supposed to use HN for throwaway jokes, but I came here for this comment and I love you.

Oddly related from yesterday:

Nothing Phone says it will hack into iMessage, bring blue bubbles to Android

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38271775

Interestingly enough the person who wrote the white paper for the signal protocol implementation in Googles RCS, Emad Omara, now works for Apple https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf

Google ran a clever “Time for SMS to exit the chat” campaign some time ago. Might have helped precipitate this decision. https://youtu.be/N_B0riy__rw?si=C-gDkNbmb3MFyWao

Telcos live in the Stone Age. A little disruption is well overdue.

Unlikely. This is most likely due to regulatory pressure of the EU. The Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act both hit Apple pretty hard.

Though the real losers here are potentially WhatsApp, Telegram and other third-party services (assuming that Apple will implement E2E encryption). Since iPhone is not as dominant in other countries as the US, WhatsApp and some other messaging services have become dominant outside the US. They are not really necessary anymore once there is a proper standard across platforms.

Right. They started investigating iMessage a couple of months back. https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/6/23861030/imessage-bing-eur...

Telcos should be utilities. They supply the pipes that deliver services and applications.

RCS is unfortunately a step backwards from that idea.

And regarding Google's motivations for that campaign: They have acquired a company offering RCS services to telcos and marketers... https://jibe.google.com/

> Telcos live in the Stone Age. A little disruption is well overdue.

I thought RCS was still a Telco-based service? Don't you have to have a telephone number to use it, at least? I keep hoping we go away from POTS, instead of continuing to invent reasons to be stuck with it.

It's funny that everyone says "green bubble shame". Green bubble never meant "Android". It just meant SMS. I get green bubbles with iPhones sometimes when my data isn't working but SMS is. The whole point was to tell you that you may be charged for the message because some carries charge per SMS.

What’s the story around e2e encryption on RCS these days? In the past there were a few countries that didn’t allow it, no idea if that has changed.

Also, will iMessage support for RCS include e2ee?

Apple will be pushing for RCS/Carriers to adopt e2e, but it'll probably just flag green/notify users that messages are not encrypted.

Anything that needs the participation of every carrier on the planet is doomed from the get-go.

As someone who has worked for two carriers Apple, Google etc have little clout.

Governments and their intelligence organisations are what matters.

And countries like UK will be pushing as hard as possible to make E2EE optional.

The current status iirc is that Google built its own e2e solutions in Android Messages, first for one-on-one conversations and as of August 2023 for group chats as well. They released technical papers but I don't think the implementations are part of the official spec. I think this section is basically Apple saying that they are going to push for that standardization:

> Finally, Apple says it will work with the GSMA members on ways to further improve the RCS protocol. This particularly includes improving the security and encryption of RCS messages.

I doubt anything has changed since 2020 in terms of China, Cuba, Iran or Russia but I couldn't find any news one way or the other

The good news is that Google's E2E solution is the Signal protocol:

https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf?sj...

There's a new IETF standard Google has been implementing. It's up to Apple to adopt it.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9420/

> RFC - Proposed Standard (July 2023)

Proposed.

And it's both ridiculous and sad that in 2023 we are going to see a messaging standard without E2EE built into the spec.

Well it was submitted five years ago, that's the speed of standardization sometimes.

TLS and SSH are Proposed Standards also. The next step is Internet Standard. HTTP was promoted to Internet Standard last year.

Basically N/A

Hopefully I can turn it off.

I do not know anyone who uses RCS who didn't end up on WhatsApp or Telegram pretty quickly afterwards.

Why would you turn it off? What if you hire a contractor for some work and they need to send you pictures/video from an Android? Or a realtor, mechanic, craigslist seller, or just someone you don't have/want a personal relationship with. You're not adding these people to WhatsApp/Telegram.. I have probably hundreds more phone contacts than people I have on whatsapp.

Funnily it’s vice versa for me. I don’t give out my phone number to random people, but instead give them my telegram handle of a throwaway account.

It's just so bloody unreliable. UK here. Literally everyone is on WhatsApp. I haven't found anyone who isn't!

All the carriers in the UK use Googles service. Perhaps you don’t want to send all your messages via the worlds biggest advertising company.

Google's service uses end to end encryption. Of course, Apple can choose not to implement it (seems that they'll only implement it if it's standardized).

Metadata

As an Android user I've asked a very similar question before to my iPhone friends, and most of them are just apathetic and don't care either way, but some of them will actually say some variation of: "if somebody is on Android, I don't want to talk to them anyway. It's a useful filter." The first time I heard that it was a little shocking, but especially with Gen Z, it's a minority but not unusual opinion.

I feel like this is something way more talked about online than actually occurs IRL. I didn't get an iPhone until the 13 (2 years ago?) and I'm still on it. Nobody stopped talking to me because I had green bubbles throughout my, I dunno, 10-15 years of Android phones. They would make fun of me for how reactions (Bob laughs at $reply) looked on my screen but just friendly jabs.

I am a millennial though.

I think the age does make a big difference. I'm about 40, and I've rarely heard this IRL among people near or older either. The people I've heard it from were mostly in their teens or early 20s. Some 30s and 40s have admitted to leaving friends or family out of group chats because they were on Android though.

But that said, how do you know nobody stopped talking to you because of it? One of my friends (who is early 40s) said his family started leaving one of their family members out of the group chats because it "degraded the whole experience" and I doubt he ever told the person he was being left out, let alone why. I would imagine it's kind of like telling somebody that you aren't going to date them anymore because they're not attractive enough. Not something you want to admit, and even though it obviously happens, I've never heard of somebody actually being told this.

Maybe I've been kept out of group chats, it is annoying group chatting an imessage thread with android in it. I forget what it does but something is strange about it, but I'd definitely remember if someone I remotely cared about talking to just ghosted my SMS one day. I can't think of that ever happening. I had tons of friends in my 20s and almost none of them ever used Android. It was mostly tech people I knew that used Android.

But, yeah, who knows. Probably nothing lost.

Most of my friends are in their 40s/50s. No one knows what iMessage or RCS even is if they have an Android or iPhone. WhatsApp spread like wildfire here because no one gives a shit :)

> You're not adding these people to WhatsApp

So far, yeah I have been. Android users don't seem to use RCS for anything advanced, they use WhatsApp. Anyway, iPhones already let you toggle MMS, so RCS might be togglable too.

Then, they can text me over SMS/MMS like they already do.

Besides, some of the examples you mention I'd rather have via email instead of text for record-keeping purposes.

I had a mechanic send me a video about a problem with my car. He just SMSed me a link to their systems, where I could also approve the additional work after reviewing the video.

It worked just fine.

If you can't afford a data plan then it just essentially blocks all your incoming/outgoing messages when it enables itself.

>If you can't afford a data plan

or if you're like my parents, and pay for a plan with plenty of data but leave it switched off at all times just because you don't want to accidentally go over your cap.

you can still send photos over MMS.

and you can also add your plumber or realtor on whatsapp. there's no reason not to. it's just a messaging app, i've got all kinds of customers and vendors on my whatsapp.

The reason I'd turn off is because of spam. Everytime RCS was enabled on my phone, I was bombarded with all kinds of nauseating spam. I'd like an option to avoid this infliction.

> What if you hire a contractor for some work and they need to send you pictures/video from an Android?

I would absolutely not want to do business with a contractor that uses an android phone. That's a serious red flag for someone doing work on a (usually very expensive) home to be using cheap tools.

Wow. I mean, I'd never buy an Android device myself but I find such a strong opinion very surprising.

Do you also exclude contractors that don't have a fully decked out Ford F-350? What if they carry a cheap $1 pen instead of a $50 pen to write some quotes for you?

Also, you realize there are android phones that are plenty expensive right?

Please let users be able to disable RCS support. One nice thing about iMessage is that lacks spam. It is the only platform where i don't get spammed by bots.

I still get plenty of iMessage spam. From this morning:

"Your USPS package could not be delivered. please check this link for more information: https://...."

So does this mean we can run our own RCS servers, just like email?

Probably a pain to set up, but should be possible. Since it's based on IMS which in turn is based on SIP, Open Source SIP servers could be the used, e.g. https://www.opensips.org/Documentation/Tutorials-RCS-Managin....

Also, will they allow using URI's instead of phone numbers for contacts?

This is great to hear. Apple should be selling phones because their phones are better, or iMessage is, not because of social pressure, which is crazy.

What if the social pressure, is in part, a result of the better experience one gets with iMessage?

Photos, videos, group messaging are all a significantly better experience with iMessage in my experience. This is not to say that other apps don't offer a similar experience, you can achieve much of the same functionality on Telegram or WhatsApp. It's just that it's built into the phone.

Google might have achieved similar success with their own messaging platform had they'd not constantly thrown it under the bus and created a new one every month. Allo, Duo, Meet, Google+, Google Chat etc....

Mobile messaging should be either be interoperable or cross platform. And any messaging platform that is tied to one mobile operating system is user hostile.

I received my first piece of spam on iMessage last week (used it since 2011) and it was deleted instantly by Apple. I presume because they identified and removed the account's iMessage privileges.

Any messaging app that permits spam is user hostile. Spam takes up more of my time than I would ever want to give on Whatsapp/Messenger/Text. iMessage has prevented me from contacting precisely zero people. If I were to walk away from my iPhone I would lose nothing after exporting some messages.

The barrier to entry to other potential users of $100s is well worth it for me.

Should we expect that delivery status notification will work and be surfaced in the UI? I end up encouraging those who are on SMS to go to WhatsApp just because I can never be sure that the message was delivered. Working across many countries and providers, SMS is still very unreliable. There is no way in iOS to know if a green bubble got the message or not.

Hopefully this'll mean better Google Fi support for the iPhone. It's a little janky, but $20/line is hard to pass up.

I use Google Fi for my iPhone. What am I missing out on? (asides from using more than 1 carrier's network simultanously)

I can't add cellular service for my Apple Watch, at all.

Enabling MMS requires a somewhat convoluted set of changes to the phone's cellular settings, and despite having done them correctly I periodically get a "we couldn't send you all your texts, fix your settings" warning SMS from Google.

Oh right. I have a cellular apple watch too but I've just forgotten about that.

Is RCS a thing in Europe? I don’t think I’ve ever seen this mentioned anywhere. Does the carrier sell you an RCS package? Does it apply to messages to other countries? If that’s the case, I don’t see how it could compete with any internet message service that exists today in any capacity.

> Is RCS a thing in Europe? I don’t think I’ve ever seen this mentioned anywhere.

Yes. Most Android users with either the Google or Samsung Messages app are already using RCS without noticing when they message each other.

> Does the carrier sell you an RCS package?

No, it's yet another OTT service, even if your messaging app is provisioned by your carrier to use its own RCS infrastructure (which is Google Jibe in all cases).

PSA: While Google's Messages app previously always asked if you want to enable RCS (which I always declined), their latest October update enabled it without asking.

It also enabled read messages notification to the sender as well as realtime typing notification to the peer.

Anyone have an idea what features the "RCS Universal Profile, the standard as currently published by the GSM Association" actually entails for users in terms of feature support?

I know E2E encryption isn't a part of it, but was having trouble finding information about whether the Universal Profile includes other features like replies, read receipts, typing indicators, reactions, voice messages, etc.

As an aside, this is huge but the media is really milking the clickbait when reporting "the end of green bubble shame" - even if Apple were to support all of the above features in their RCS implementation, I'm sure they'll keep the bubbles green. They've always been adept at designing for user psychology.

this is meant to hold back regulators, just for a couple more years, so, for a couple more years it will be green bubbles android, blue bubbles iOS.

The teenage market share is 87% currently. just a couple more years is all they need.

There isn't enough discussion about the impending Apple phone monopoly in the US. It's inevitable at this point.

I wonder what's the play here. They seem to make noise about RCS recently and give it attention, even though it seems they'll be forced by the EU to open up the iMessage system soon. Apple is not known for Google's "let's have 5 different communication apps at the same time", so... what's happening here?

Probably the angle is to find some way to tell the EU to get stuffed as far as opening iMessage up goes.

Apple only has to comply with the law. The issue is that the EC is on a high right now trying to see how far they can enforce control over US tech companies, so they might just go back and double down with more legislation if Apple finds a way to comply with the law without complying with the outcome the EC actually wanted.

There’s probably a few things at play.

First, not every iPhone user can be iMessage-only and SMS is a shitty experience. In most non-US countries, they’re not winning the iMessage shame battle, they’re driving people to WhatsApp. They’d probably rather people use the built in messaging app, which will incentivize you to use iMessage.

Secondly, getting more involved gives them opportunities to embrace/extinguish rcs (they said they won’t extend it). If they can use their market to force encryption on everyone, for example, that makes them look like the good guys against android makers. I could also see them trying to genuinely push UX improvements (eg stickers) on RCS and exiting iMessage from European Markets entirely.

Finally, If the EU forces open iMessage, it’ll probably force open other messaging services, which gives RCS an opportunity to grow. See point 1 about them losing already in Europe. Or gives Apple a horse in the race even if they simply withdraw iMessage instead of opening it up.

Frankly, the color distinction was never about shame. iOS needs a way to let the user know that they are talking to someone without iMessage and that they are using SMS to do so because many carriers charge for SMS use.

RCS is already End to End decrypted by default on Pixel Phones

From the article:

> Finally, Apple says it will work with the GSMA members on ways to further improve the RCS protocol. This particularly includes improving the security and encryption of RCS messages. Apple also told 9to5Mac that it will not use any sort of proprietary end-to-end encryption on top of RCS. Its focus is on improving the RCS standard itself.

> For comparison’s sake, Google’s implementation of end-to-end encryption is part of the Messages app on Android rather than the RCS spec itself.

Probably related to https://www.engadget.com/nothing-phone-2-is-getting-imessage... Or at least they may have moved the announcement forward

I doubt it.

Also I don’t know how they’re doing that, but I’m more than willing to bet Apple will make sure it doesn’t work very long at all.

Google has been trying thusfar unsuccessfully to get legislative forces involved. Really doubt Apple would decide to add any fuel to that fire by going after a small company trying to be compatible with their products. Would look terrible in court and they know it.

I think it depends on how they do it. If it’s some sort of utility that runs on your Mac, that exists and would likely be ok.

If they “broke in” somehow Apple will fix it and cut them off again.

It would be cool if They could add features to group chats like adding or removing participants.

I'm willing to bet the RCS bubble will still be green to indicate loss of p2p encryption.

The RCS bubble will at best be a color other than blue. The whole "blue bubble" class stratification is a competitive advantage for Apple, even if it's not truly earned. RCS provides a lot of the features that have made iMessage a preferable experience. And over time the collective consciousness may drift towards inclusiveness or indifference towards whatever bubble color RCS turns out to be, but I feel confident that unless it's mandated by some government body, Apple will keep blue bubbles to exclusively indicated iMessage.

Why? There is E2E available with RCS

From a german perspective that looks strange.

3 of at the time 4 carriers tried to adopt RCS and push it into the market a few years ago. They called it "joyn" but nobody ever used it. Everybody is using WhatsApp, except for some privacy conscious folks.

Im not sure this is much of a surprise-- as shocking as it may seem to Americans -- iMessages is not widely used outside of North America.

So Apple is just trying to bridge the technology gap here. iMessages is pretty dated.

I wonder if Apple will let you disable iMessage and use just RCS instead?

You can disable iMessage already and just use SMS/MMS... So should be possible.

You can also disable MMS.

Is there a sunset timeline for SMS? No service lasts forever and if Apple knows carriers will want to turn it off sometime they'd have to get on board with the RCS sooner rather than too late.

Apple is big enough that they could make the carriers keep SMS. If a carrier tried to remove it and break "compatibility" with the iPhone, Apple would block that carrier from having iPhones altogether, which would decimate that carriers business. So through a causative chain, Apple could force carriers to keep SMS.

a) Apple doesn't decide whether carriers keep SMS. Governments do.

b) Apple won't stop users from using a particular carrier because of commercial considerations. It would be a clear breach of anti-competition laws.

c) Many carriers don't have relationships with Apple to sell the iPhone. And in many places internationally the iPhone is not even that popular. What matters is whether you can buy a SIM and install it into your phone.

Probably never. At the very least, RCS itself needs SMS for account provisioning on a new device.

I also don't see every business relying on SMS for B2C messaging (and in particular for SMS-OTP) switching to RCS anytime soon.

Who would be in charge of sunsetting such a thing?

The GSM Association.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSMA

Can SMS ever be sunsetted? There’s a lot of infrastructure that depends on it at the edges of networks.

Maybe for consumer facing use but I think it’s here to stay for our lifetime

They can't sunset it until the networks include unlimited data for free in your plan, otherwise you would never be able to receive any messages.

Thumbs up (and other reaction responses)?

Does this mean giving an RCS message a "thumbs up" (or heart, or "haha") will now be supported from iOS and vice versa?

Note that this is "Rich Communication Services", not "Reaction Control System" from KSP which would have been a much more dramatic update.

I think that's a feature of the next XKCD Phone [1].

[1]: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Category:xkcd_Pho...

I can imagine a pretty great commercial where Craig Federighi throws an iPhone like a football, and a tracking shot zooms in to show it swiveling around to correct it's orientation mid-flight.

I think "Reaction Control System" is from more than just a simulator.

"Realtime... Control.. System?" was my 2nd guess.

It would be a pretty awesome feature of the next phone if it has RCS fall control.

Now if only they would open iMessage or at least release Windows/Linux/Web/Android clients so I can give up BlueBubbles. One can dream...

Would this allow texting without a phone?

My kid doesn’t want a phone but wants to text his friends. Are there any options or will there be after this?

So a phone without it being a phone?

It would be nice if Google would support RCS first!

Specifically in Google Voice which for some perplexing reason does not support it.

I wonder when Google will add proper RCS to their own Google Fi?

Currently one has to disable Fi cloud sync losing a lot of features.

So what was the deal with Android users complaining about iPhones not supporting RCS all this time, when it's not so universal among carriers to begin with? Not to mention how many people just use WhatsApp instead.

Most people aren’t technically savvy enough to understand the nuance, especially when team sports takes over

Sweet! Now Google can stop complaining.

Will Google drop their request for iMessage to be opened? Will that request become obsolete?

And there I was thinking that Apple would finally introduce a Revision Control System.

Did Nothing Phones chat app announcement influence Apple's surprise announcement?

Time for another color, blue for iMessages, green for SMS, light brown for RCS.

I love that this was but moments after Nothing was announcing iMessage support.

Looks like those Android iMessage guys had some information ahead of time.

How? Seems like they would’ve have gone through the effort if they knew.

I doubt they'll give the messages the same background color though.

I wonder why they didn't at least go with SCCS, maybe even CVS?

Can’t they fix the 0-day no-open message exploits first?

What is the over/under on RCS messages still being green?

Yay, more third world pressure to bring ios down to android's level.

What's next? My iphone coming preinstalled with whatsapp with 5 norton antivirus refund rooms already prejoined?

It's not "third world pressure", what the heck?

Besides, I think you mean UP to Android's level.

It's pressure to adhere to standards. Maybe you can't see it, but it's a good thing.

> Besides, I think you mean UP to Android's level.

Uh no, considering RCS is seriously flawed in design and implementation and doesn't encrypt messages end-to-end or even in flight.

> It's pressure to adhere to standards. Maybe you can't see it, but it's a good thing.

Calling RCS a standard is loaded. It was all but abandoned for years until google started forcing it on users and tacking proprietary extensions on top of it.

lol, Apple is so "innovative". It only takes them to be last to implement something like that. And USB-C too.

Using a compatible standard like this should be a requirement to be allowed to sell your phones anywhere or use any radio spectrum or be compatible with any carrier.

Bit late. They should at least support svn.

Still will have a green bubble though

I wonder what color the bubble will be?

Not blue, because that signals capabilities which are specific to iMessages (E2E encryption, message effects, stickers, etc.).

Maybe not green, but it should probably remain different so there’s an unmistakable visual indicator of which conversations are encrypted (assuming Apple implements carrier-flavor RCS, which to my knowledge is not encrypted unlike Google-flavor).

I think it'll remain green. Apple might feel pressure to implement RCS to ward off regulators, but keeping the chats green will likely still serve Apple's purpose. Even if RCS is 100% as good as iMessage, a decade of green bubbles has cemented the perception in people's minds. Even if people don't know why a green bubble is worse (and even if they aren't worse), it will still be their perception.

Apple has no reason to change the color from green and let users know that they shouldn't care as much as they used to.

I don't know many people with Android who don't use WhatsApp or Signal.

Keeping SMS green would be good for purely transactional type SMS messages, and using another color for RCS would be good.

It says they're going to support Universal Profile, which is the GSMA defined feature set, and it's not immediately obvious to me if that includes E2EE capacity (I highly doubt it's a requirement) - I recall seeing something saying that "standard" (non-Google) RCS group chat doesn't support it.

I would be very surprised if they integrated E2EE with Android phones. Being able to say "green bubbles aren't encrypted so everyone can read them" is a big competitive advantage and reason to justify why people need an iPhone. Plus there might be calls for doing away with stigmatized bubble colors if there aren't good reasons. Apple will want to maintain the bubble colors as long as they can, so it's win-win for them to not implement encryption.

I'm predicting either purple or a (light) gray.

I don't think Google would have even cared about RCS if Apple would just make the bubbles the same color. Kids these days.

Now give us the FaceTime app...

Hooray for regulation.

I hope they continue the green bubble shaming. Apparently RCS (at least as implemented in practice) still doesn't support end to end encryption.

In particular, they should color messages green if they can be forged by intermediaries / collected for bulk surveillance / used for ad targeting / sold to third parties by your carrier / etc.

So now Apple users can finally receive video?

Yay! I can send gym memes to my iphone friend!

Oh wait they still cant open .webm without a half dozen steps. Oh well. Lols for us Androids only. Maybe iphones can open webms by 2028.

Thanks, I'm sticking to iMessage.

Someone please roll poor Steve back over.

Can we please get SD Card expandable storage back next?

iPhone never had this, so it wouldn't be "back".

Yeah, the thing to bring back would be headphone jack.

Do any mainstream phones ship with a headphone jack now?

Not any one I've heard of. Which will be an issue when my iPhone 6S eventually dies.

The market has spoken. People don't care about that feature.

Or at least, they don't care enough about it to vote with their wallet.

Supposing I did want to vote with my wallet, where would I have spent my money to make that vote heard? They seemed to disappear from everywhere at once, at least during the time I kept my last phone.

The latest 7nm phone from Huawei lets you choose between using the second sim card tray for a sim card or removable storage up to 256GB (albeit their proprietary storage medium). From my experience, plenty of Chinese phones offer what geeks in the US want (expandable storage and removable batteries).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei_Mate_60

Removable storage NM card 256GB

SIM

Card slot 1: NANO-SIM

Card slot 2: Choose one of the two NANO-SIM or NM memory card"

Motorola has been consistently producing Androids with SD card slots. Heck, they still even have headphone jacks.

Though AFAIK, it's only on the Moto G family, which isn't a flagship series, so it won't be as capable as a Galaxy, Pixel, or iPhone.

There's plenty of options on the market for phones with headphone jacks. You won't find an apple or samsung flagship with one because it directly impedes waterproofing and isn't desired by the vast majority of people buying those devices. It's common to see on low and midrange phones.

Why? Do you have an edge case where you need > 1TB storage on your phone?

brah, cat videos.

I have only used Android phones and I strongly dislike RCS. RCS in theory is a standard but in practice it is == "Google Messages" the app. I don't know of a single telco that supports it (hosting their own infra of it), nor does any other SMS app (maybe 1 or 2 being exception that proves the rule). RCS(Google Messages) is just another messaging app like Whatsapp/Signal just that it pretends being a standard. AFAIK AOSP has no RCS APIs like it has for SMS. Not to mention the amount of SPAM one gets on RCS is comparable only to traditional SMS, and blocking has no effect unlike Whatsapp. It exists mainly because Google got tired of making messaging apps that weren't dominating the world (Hangouts/Allo) and thought that forcing a standard might be the only option available to them. E2E is optional and there is no switch that says only do E2E.

There might be some solution needed to let iMessage interoperate with Android, but pretending RCS is a standard just like SMS that Apple was not supporting is wishful thinking.

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