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Comment by throw0101a | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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...

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).

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