This is not true -- messages from Android users show up as grey, the same as messages from iMessage. Messages from you *TO* Android users show up as green. I don't know why people keep getting this wrong.
That's why it's always a pain to figure out why a group chat is showing up green all of a sudden; you can't tell who brought the Android to the party.
Or as the rest of the world would describe it: That's why it's always a pain including Americans in a group chat – they usually don't have WhatsApp :)
"The rest of the world" is also not the whole rest, there‚a China, Japan, Korea, with WeChat, KakaoTalk, ...
So, won't help with Americans or any other part of "the rest of the world".
But what I wanted to highlight is that SMS/MMS and generally carrier-based messaging is just as much of a weird communication island at this point as all of these OTT messengers are, from a non-US point of view.
RCS would just be a continuation of that, so I'm not sure if it's worth cheering on Apple for taking this path, further cementing Google's hold on Android messaging in the US – they run almost all the infrastructure and get all the message content, after all!
I personally dislike getting full-resolution images in iMessage by default and wish there was an option to manually request the full-res one (the sender could just upload two versions, or maybe a progressively compressed one). It seems like the worst of both world (in that it still wipes metadata from the photos, last time I checked, making them annoying to save in my photo library).
I expect the metadata scrubbing on message-sent images is a security thing.
I'm fortunately too old to ever have experienced this myself, but so I have to rely on others' observations for this.
That said, I wouldn't quite call it "discrimination" yet, but it's certainly uninformed, targeted at the wrong entity, and on top of that is at least a bit icky given the quite large difference in retail pricing of iPhone and Android smartphones.
The reality is just that people only install new apps if the preinstalled ones don't do the trick, or at least only if most of their friends already have too.
So in my view, the entire problem is that apparently no regulator has been considering it a problem for the better part of a decade that Apple is effectively running half of the country's communication infrastructure without being regulated anywhere close to the way landline or mobile carriers are from a competitive and interoperability point of view.
But this seems to already be changing; Apple definitely didn't implement RCS out of their strong desire for openness and interoperability. I just wish they'd picked a better protocol/system.
On the large scale, I agree. We have telecom regulations for good reasons.
I can’t use WhatsApp because on iOS it asks for access to your contacts, which I refuse to give. (Facebook already burned me once, there.) So in WhatsApp, all my contacts show up as numeric phone numbers, and there’s no way to change that, so it’s basically useless to me.
At least on iOS 18 it will become possible to provide partial phonebook access, as far as I've heard.
A data protection consultant once told me in theory I can sue my friends for violating my data privacy by doing that...
Genuinely curious -- why do you feel it's necessary to figure that out at all?
I don’t know if that’s Google’s, Apple’s, RCS’s, or SMS’s fault.
after many years of this I gave up and now I use the default: SMS
life is too short for this
Sometimes I think that keeping SMS and especially MMS ridiculously expensive was the greatest unintentional gift European mobile network operators could have ever given their customers:
People now just accept OTT messaging as a fact of life, and enough people will be able to provide that type of tech support, just like they'd fix a parent's or friend's internet connection in case of problems.
E2EE apps have inherent UX problems. It's possible to do multi-device messaging with synchronized message history and a way to get in if you lose your codes, but it requires trusting the service and/or your cell carrier in some capacity. Something has to give if you want E2EE, usually it's the chat history or multi-device support.
True, but then again, neither SMS nor RCS have server-side message history either.
WhatsApp lets you backup your chat history to iCloud or Google Drive, optionally end-to-end encrypted using a passphrase.
The only major app I've seen handle everything 100% reliably is FB Messenger, since the start, which was easy because there was no e2ee. Just a server-side master with simple web and mobile clients using it.
SMS is bad, but at least I can send/receive it on my Mac without my iPhone being online, idk how.
I think it was 2020, but in any case, it was very late. To be fair, it is quite hard to do securely and without compromising too much on usability with end-to-end encryption.
> even then I wonder if it knows how to merge divergent chat histories if one device misses messages.
There's one primary device (I think it has to be a phone) that maintains the "source of truth" message database and also does the backups, I believe.
> SMS is bad, but at least I can send/receive it on my Mac without my iPhone being online, idk how.
Are you sure? Does this work with the iPhone completely off (i.e. not just on mobile data, because it does proxy SMS to iMessage in that case)?
I didn't think that was possible. Only very few operators even allow voice calls via FaceTime (without proxying the audio data through the iPhone via local Wi-Fi), but maybe they extended that to SMS over IMS recently. I can't test it with mine in any case, since my provider/plan is not on that short list.
> Are you sure?
Nope, I was wrong. I must've been thinking about how the SMS forwarding will work even without cell service, provided the iPhone is on wifi, which was a new feature at some point and requires carrier support (AT&T was early).
"To automatically forward SMS/MMS messages to one or more of your other devices, the other device must be signed in with the same Apple ID as your iPhone, and your iPhone must be connected to a Wi-Fi or cellular network."
SMS/MMS, for all of its myriad faults, is something you know that everyone has.
I wouldn’t be surprised if SMS experience has more to do with carriers and with the details of the network topology and composition between correspondents, than with phone vendor.
My assumption is that iOS somehow manages to lose some SMS messages when sent in rapid succession more often than it would happen for usual reasons.
It's Apple's fault for "extending" a standard messaging standard with a non-standard protocol.
I've never experienced this in decades of using GSM, and it's only recently become a thing (mostly for 2FA SMS since I stopped using it for P2P communication).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS
Oliver, Earl, Design and Implementation of a Short Message Service Data Channel for Mobile Systems
MMS is a hot mess of a protocol stack straight from the early 2000s that is only still meaningfully used in the US, due to the unique iMessage situation there.