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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/

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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%).

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.

> 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 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.

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.

>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.

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.

> 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...

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.

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

> 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)

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

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