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Comment by atonse | Hacker News Reader

> Right now, when people on iOS and Android message each other, the service falls back to SMS — photos and videos are sent at a lower quality, messages are shortened, and importantly, conversations are not end-to-end encrypted like they are in iMessage.

They will still not be end-to-end encrypted in RCS. They will just be encrypted in transit, but your carrier (or whoever is running whatever server in an RCS architecture) can read all your messages.

There is talk that Google's got some kind of extension that adds E2EE to RCS but others will be well informed on it and can add to my message.

I'm blissfully happy with iMessage. For the non-Apple people, we've been using WhatsApp for nearly a decade.

But what does this do for OTP messages, etc? I'll have to check if Twilio automatically uses RCS if you send a message to a supported number. I do like the idea of all messages being encrypted in transit at least (SMS is not).

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> There is talk that Google's got some kind of extension that adds E2EE to RCS but others will be well informed on it and can add to my message.

It’s not just talk, but it’s locked down. Google’s huge PR campaign backing RCS has been very impressive at getting people to conflate the two but basically they have an RCS extension implementing the Signal protocol which theoretically could be implemented by anyone but it depends on Google’s key exchange servers which are restricted to their own proprietary app – even third-party Android developers are blocked.

It’s a PR masterwork, really. They’re honest on the technical white paper:

> E2EE is implemented in the Messages client, so both clients in a conversation must use Messages, otherwise the conversation becomes unencrypted RCS. In rare situations where the conversation starts as E2EE, then one of the clients migrates to a different RCS client or an older Messages client that does not support E2EE, Messages might be unable to detect the change immediately. If the Messages user sends a new message, it’s still E2EE, however the recipient client may render the encrypted base64 payload directly as message content.

https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf

Meanwhile, the far more widely read marketing pages they actually advertise say things like this:

> SMS and MMS don’t support end-to-end encryption, which means your messages are not as secure.

https://www.android.com/get-the-message/

I simply can’t understand why Google is incapable of building a good quality alternative to iMessage over the past 15 years.

FB and WhatsApp have done it.

Signal has done it, slowly but surely.

They even had one of the most popular messaging apps 15 years ago - I remember when iMessage launched and people were predicting it’ll fail because GTalk was so popular. The mismanagement is just epic - so many botches trying to build something new (or make Google+ happen) because apparently nobody gets promoted for good stewardship of a product they didn’t start.

Google Talk supported XMPP so I could connect via Pidgin. I could also message myself on Facebook from my Gmail thanks to GTalk supporting this ;) which was fun. Then they locked it down (both FB and Google). Then there was Google Plus Huddle, Google Hangout, Duo, Google Allo, and Google Chat.

You also had Google Voice, Google Wave... and so on.

Google is where projects go to die.

There was a point where Google had a good quality alternative to iMessage. Hangouts was popular and had features comparable to iMessage. Google also allowed setting Hangouts as the default SMS app so you could have mixed Hangouts and SMS conversations, just like in iMessage. Unfortunately, they then killed the SMS functionality after a few years and decided to convert Hangouts into an enterprise communication app.

Everyone I knew was on Hangouts pretty much. I don't know how or why Google squandered that opportunity. They split it out into Alo and Duo, and Duo became pretty popular but no one touched Alo. Then they switched Duo to Google Meet and lost many people again. Now most people I know just use Facebook Messenger for WhatsApp for personal video calls

It's unfair to later teams of engineers to deny them promotion-fodder for launching a new messaging app.

They are capable, they have even arguably done it a few times over the last 15 years. They don't want to.

Google wants your messages to feed their ad serving, which is their actual business. Messaging is just the crap they give away to feed their ad serving revenue machine.

Technically Google Messages is E2E encrypted, provided you stay one the happy path, which is harder than it looks, since they don't allow anyone but themselves to play in the happy path.

They've had a few good messaging apps that were then left to rot and slowly break before being killed. GTalk was pretty solid and Hangouts was amazing at launch. But they all got worse over time instead of better.

They tried to push one years and years ago (combining SMS with one of their existing non-SMS messaging services) and I had to manually upgrade back to the prior version of their messaging app to get anything to work properly again, including SMS. Total disaster, broken as hell.

When I switched to iOS, that experience gave me a special appreciation for how smoothly iMessage/Messages works.

> When I switched to iOS, that experience gave me a special appreciation for how smoothly iMessage/Messages works.

But that's selective recall too - for YEARS iMessage was horrible. You had an iOS device but no longer? Good luck getting any of your friends messages who were still on iOS.

Apple ended up having to build a portal just to allow users to properly de-register their numbers from iMessage so they could receive messages from Apple users again.

It’s not. My actual experience was that basic, happy-path usage of Google’s effort failed at such a high rate that I couldn’t use it for anything. It was too unreliable.

Happy-path use of Messages, when I switched, was much smoother.

I haven’t tried to switch from iOS to Android so I don’t have that experience to recall.

To build something 1:1 with iMessage, there'd need to be a market the Pixel has a large share of. For something like FB, they tried with G+. And WhatsApp had first mover advantage.

They had other messaging apps that were maybe ok, but I've never known anyone who used them, and whoever did was thrown off when they made 999 other apps.

What's wrong with Google Messages?

Nobody uses it.

They already added e2ee. If I long-press a message right now and press "show more information" it says "Message with RCS with end-to-end encryption".

Their own documentation claims as much: https://support.google.com/messages/answer/10252671?hl=en

But it is the google-only RCS. If your provider have their own RCS implementation, tough luck.

The end-to-end encryption is a client feature. It will work with any RCS provider that implements Universal Profile, as long as both clients are using Google Messages.

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