Comment on Nothing Phone builds a blue bubble iMessage bridge while Google and Apple fight over RCS
ChicoSuave@lemmy.world 11 months agoThe messaging is provided by a third party who is dedicated to working on their iMessage compatibility. Apple has no reason to stop this because this is a good move for them in the larger battle between mobile messaging standards.
Google owns Jibe, the company behind RCS messaging found on all Android phones and an emerging, competent product from the only game in town that can compete with Apple. Google has decided to take this to the government level and push for a unified phone messaging standard, normally a good thing, but people their own RCS solution.
Apple is pushing iMessage as a protest against Google and their inevitable lawsuit to conform with RCS adoption. Android may win unless Apple shows it has parity and provides a non-legislative option: if enough people use iMessage then governments don’t have to make any laws or enforce changes. The company Nothing is using iMessage, which helps Apple prove there is both a significant user base, which would cause a burden on Apple and it’s customers to change, and there is no monopoly on iMessage or messaging in general. So if enough people use iMessage, Apple sees it as a good thing.
Apple has no reason to stop this because this is a good move for them in the larger battle between mobile messaging standards.
Uhhhh no? Don’t know if you’ve noticed but Apple is winning the battle between messaging standards, and they like it that way.
Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
RCS is not a Google product, see en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSMA
Apple has been pushing iMessage for quite some time, but they want to keep it just to their platform and have made no attempt to make it open to other users. That’s Apples way and it’s not as a “protest” to Google lol
That’s like saying they made the lightning port as a protest to USB standards, nah they just want their proprietary shit.
nezbyte@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Google’s RCS service is unique in that it is not telecom based. I would advise looking at the RCS Wikipedia article here.
Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Can you please point to me where it states Googles “version” of RCS can’t also interface with telecom based RCS?
Because it seems from my reading the Google just has some enhanced features on top of RCS (like e2e encryption) when both sides are through Google, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work with telecoms as well, unlike Apples walled garden of iMessage which doesn’t work with anything else lol.
nezbyte@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Google RCS was designed to be interoperable. Apple iMessage was not.
kirklennon@kbin.social 11 months ago
They wanted a new, compact, durable, reversible plug for their mobile devices. There was no industry-standard option that met their requirements, so they made their own. If USB-C had existed at the time, they would have used it (though as a physical connector, Lightning is still just plain better).
Th4tGuyII@kbin.social 11 months ago
Do you really think that?
Back when that would've been a good argument... but why then when USB-C did become a thing, and became robust and well-supported enough that even Apple used it on every other device they sold, didn't they adopt it onto the IPhone despite lightning being an inferior standard in basically every way?
Why did they literally have to be forced by the EU to adopt the very standard they helped to create, a standard that was de-facto almost everywhere else?
Because they wanted that sweet, sweet proprietary monopoly. Plain and simple, the rest is just excuses.
kirklennon@kbin.social 11 months ago
What's the advantage of using USB-C? Because it's a standard, right? A standard means wide support and it works with what you already have. Except Apple had effectively already established that with Lightning. It was in hundreds of millions of devices before USB-C became mainstream. Sure USB-C was nominally standard, but Lightning maintained the advantages for Apple's customers as a de facto standard. The switch to USB-C meant buying new cables, while Lightning meant using the cables you already had.
Poggervania@kbin.social 11 months ago
Lmao, how is Lightning better than a USB-C? They’re both practically the same thing, even in durability. Apple might’ve made Lightning first, yes, but then USB-C came out like 2 years later.
Be real here: Apple only stuck with Lightning because it’s stupid easy money for them. Cables are hella cheap to make, and if you make them in-house, you basically spend like $2 at most to manufacture 1 cable. Lightning has the upside of both that and forcing people into the Apple ecosystem because their old phone cables can charge the new phones.
kirklennon@kbin.social 11 months ago
It's physically smaller, doesn't require the thin little piece inside the port on the device, and the rounded corners make it easier to insert without lining up perfectly. To clarify, I'm not saying this makes USB-C bad, but the physical design just isn't as good.
Third parties sell Lightning cables and Apple sells USB-C cables (really nice ones, actually). There's no significant monetary impact to Apple regardless of which connector they have.
I thought the whole argument in favor of USB-C was that because it's a standard, people already have cables for it or can buy them for dirt cheap. If that's the case, the fact that people also have Lightning cables wouldn't be a major reason to stick with an iPhone when upgrading.
Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
I don’t buy this argument at all, they could have contributed towards a combined connector with the usb-if, but instead they made their own proprietary connector.
snowe@programming.dev 11 months ago
They did contribute towards usb c. And lightning came out years before c did. They had promised to only switch connectors once a decade because people got so mad about the switch from the thirty pin to the lightning.
kirklennon@kbin.social 11 months ago
There was already one in the works but it was still years ago. They wanted to ditch the dock connector and didn't want to wait forever.
gregorum@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Apple’s ideology behind not expanding iMessage to other platforms has been - at least in part - due to the security of the iMessage platform and how it authorizes senders and recipients. Apparently, Apple has low confidence in the diaspora of Android devices and just decided to forget even trying to create a client for Android it could tie down to hardware authentication due to not having a reliable hardware base. This was many years ago.
I don’t know if this is still true or even necessary today, or if they’ve even bothered to explore it recently, but that’s Apple’s main issue. Sure, it also benefits them in other ways such as driving users to their platforms, but this is their main issue.
Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Not according to the leaked emails… x.com/TechEmails/status/1589450766506692609?s=20
gregorum@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Clearly they also saw the benefits of keeping it to Apples platforms, but that doesn’t remove the technical limitations, at least, early on.
Like I said, I don’t know if those limitations still exist. Clearly, the profit motive would if it weren’t for all of the legal and regulatory liabilities that exist abroad. This is why I suggested in another comment that purchasing this compatibility layer would be a good workaround for them in that regard.