Submitted 7 months ago by Salamendacious@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/10/23910941/samsung-rcs-shaming-apple-getthemessage
Samsung has released a new video in support of Google’s #GetTheMessage campaign which calls for Apple to adopt RCS or “Rich Communication Services,” the cross-platform protocol pitched as a successor to SMS that adopts many of the features found in modern messaging apps… like Apple’s own iMessage.
Okay, Samsung is the party with some credibility here. It’s a lot harder to hear Google whine about messaging standards when their churn in messaging has been hilarious and embarrassing.
I’ve lost track of all the messaging apps they had:
I’m sure I’m forgetting a few.
Google Talk
There’s also Duo, which turned into Meet. it’s basically Google Facetime.
Google Talk was the name before it became Gmail Chat
Hangouts was so close to perfect before they blew it all up.
Now I’m using a mix of Chat and Voice and it’s terrible for everyone. Voice doesn’t even support RCS from what I can tell, and all my messages with iPhone users are full of reactions. It’s so annoying. I’ve had the same Google Voice number for over a decade, why is this so frustrating.
They also killed YouTube DMs
Duo (videocalling app)
Don’t forget the one that stole its name from the other one.
Samsung has 0 credibility here because they just use Google messages and Google’s Jibe implementation of RCS.
If Google drops Jibe for something else, it means Samsung is as well.
RCS isn’t really a standard anymore either. Once Google put out their own proprietary Jibe implementation, everyone just adopted that instead of putting in the work to implement it themselves. All the carriers in the US use Jibe as their RCS backend, and Samsung moved to using Google Messages as their default messenger. And all RCS messages go through Google servers.
If Google decides to do something else and drop Jibe, like they have with every other messaging service they have had, that’s it for RCS.
Samsung’s record on RCS isn’t great. Their Samsung Messages app didn’t work across networks for most of last year. Like RCS only worked on t-mobile, but only for t-mobile branded phones, and for some time they couldn’t send to AT&T. Not sure if Google Messages was much better during that time period.
Unless the EU makes them, they’re not adopting rcs. I could see them putting out an imessage app for Android though. Probably ad supported to make the experience extra shitty for us. They’d quickly own the messaging market, at least in the US.
Internal memos explicitly stated execs were worried that if they brought iMessage to android, poor families might buy their kids cheap android phones instead of iPhones.
You can’t make this stuff up
The audacity of parents trying to buy something less expensive in these crazy inflated times
You can’t make this stuff up
Except that You literally made it up though? You embellished the part about poor families and cheap phones, here’s the actual quote:
I am concerned [that] iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove an obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones.
Ok I’ll ask, how is iMessage fundamentally any different from texting (other than this RCS stuff)? You can still text. Or is it that weird color thing or checkmark that kids are social pressured into?
Do you think the problem lies with Apple, or the idiot kids that somehow created a hierarchy around a text bubble color?
And let’s face it- if you owned/ran a company that was making fuck-tons of money because idiot kids rallied around exclusive text bubble colors, you’d want to keep that going as well. Don’t even try lying about it.
Since not even iPhone users in Europe use iMessage I highly doubt anyone would use it outside the US.
I feel Europe is a lot more diverse than you think. In Norway, which have a fairly high percentage of iPhone users, iMessage is the most used - or at least I don’t know anyone who doesn’t use it by default.
A few friends chat are on Messenger or Snapchat. Signal / Telegram / WhatsApp etc are extremely rare.
I tried using the Apple app on Android for tracking the tracking thingies. Horrible, horrible app. I will not be trusting anything put out by Apple for Android unless they do a Microsoft and go all in. Otherwise, they will always have a reason to make the Android experience worse than the iPhone experience.
There is a FOSS app for that github.com/seemoo-lab/AirGuard
Under new EU laws, Apple will be forced to allow interoperability with iMessage in the future. That doesn’t necessarily mean them adopting RCS or bringing iMessage to non-Apple platforms, but it does mean they’ll need to at the very least publish an API allowing external software or services to use iMessage.
I just expect them to make the interoperability as shitty as possible
I think they found imessage not to be a leading platform so AFAIK this isn’t the case for now. Maybe if more people start using it they’ll revisit the question.
RCS isn’t a good solution. As long as all RCS implementations are proprietary and Google doesn’t even include an RCS client in AOSP and doesn’t let you use a third-party client it’s just as shitty as iMessage. Just use Signal, it’s FOSS, cross-plattform and stores as little data about you as possible. It’s also not run by some garbage big tech corporation.
Unless carriers deprecate SMS/MMS.
Phone carriers should be deprecated.
This is what I believe Google is actually trying to get carriers to do, and I suspect carriers (in some shape or form) will actually do this, just not in the way you think.
RCS will eventually become the dominant messaging standard, however, I think they’re actually working on a backwards compatibility for SMS and MMS in some capacity. In this way, phones (like the iPhone or older Android phones) will still be capable of sending and receiving SMS and MMS in typical elitist walled-garden fashion, but the carrier will receive it as an RCS message and relay it to an RCS-compatible device as an RCS message.
In this way, group chats with four Android users and two iPhone users will still allow those Android users to benefit from RCS from each other (typing indicators, reactions, potentially some level of E2E, etc), while the iPhones in the group chat will actually be the ones having a negative experience (no typing indicators, reactions appearing as text messages, no E2E, obnoxious green bubbles) since Apple refuses to integrate RCS into their Messaging application. Of course Apple will continue to gaslight their customers through high contrast green bubble dark patterns, and continued refusal of adopting RCS or creating iMessage for Android.
The #GetTheMessage ads are likely gearing up for the eventuality of this change, and the Pixel x iPhone ads are all “buddy buddy, kill them with kindness” so they can out Apple as the hostile ones when they refuse to acknowledge the existence of other smartphones either through its aggressive marketing, or through refusal to adopt open standards.
If this were all to happen, depending on how well the RCS backwards compatibility worked and its ability to out Apple as the shut ins that they are, I could (crazy talk) foresee Apple creating a standalone iMessage app to, at the very minimum, keep Android users talking within their iMessage ecosystem.
Not going to happen. They charge such an insanely high premium vs real cost for a very primitive messaging system, they’re not letting that go!
Is there any precedent to ads in Apple products (apart from their store)? Although they’ll surely find other ways to annoy non-Apple users, I don’t think ads are “in style” for them.
Gotta love how Google has spent the last, what, 10 years?, fighting iMessage and losing due to their own short-sightedness/lack of focus and incompetence. The company that dethroned MSN Messenger couldn’t win a fight against an opponent that, on a global scale, represents ~25% of the mobile market. Meanwhile, Whatsapp dominates the instant messaging world.
I really thought Facebook overspent when they bought Whatsapp for $1B but I was wrong. It took Google too long to finally get behind a single messaging strategy. That’s just poor leadership.
Messaging with Google is a funny story thought. They had something that worked and destroyed it by defederating it
After that they had like what 10 more apps, and multiple one not link together from their own services
Google photo has its own, google Drive too, probably other as well, and then there’s Google Meet…,
Wasn’t it a crazier number—like $15 billion or something?
In order to grow a chat app you need a consistent and stable interface over a long period of time. It can’t have too much bullshit in it either.
In order to grow your career at Google you need to build ridiculous shit and then leave once you get your promo. Entire departments get reorged so someone can hit their people manager quota.
Product groups, business units, “orgs”, VPs, SVPs, it’s all just a game and “everyone’s playing except you.” This is why Google kills shit. Because Google rewards behavior that results in killing shit.
Facebook bought Instagram for a billion. WhatsApp was 19 billion.
iMessage will have to open up bridges to other messaging services soon regardless thanks to being a Gatekeeper under the EU Digital Markets App.
bad news, imassage was not classified a gatekeeper because in europe they have to few users
While Apple should adopt RCS, I cannot help but feel that Google is being extremely hypocritical. They complain about iMessage being proprietary, but their implementation of RCS isn’t open source, and I believe they even mentioned they have no plans to open it up for 3rd party devs to implement it into their own sms apps. This just feels like an iMessage equivalent for Android. It has rich features that are exclusive to Android as a platform… just like iMessage within iOS/MacOS/iPadOS…
Their implementation is closed source, not the protocol. They can’t change the protocol unilaterally whenever they want, etc.
Big difference.
Okay but their implementation is what they are touting. The standard RCS protocol is only marginally better than sms. Google constantly uses encryption in their ad campaigns for RCS, which is exclusive to to googles implementation. There is no way anyone is going to get Apple to work on an implementation that interoperates with Google
Any open source Android RCS SMS apps then?
Yeah, the only issue is that RCS is actually better and the counter argument is that Apple is breaking the messaging platform by not implementing it in some way.
The other point to make here is that iMessage wouldn’t have to just disappear. They could continue to support iMessage while just allowing text messages to be better for those who just don’t want an iPhone. The whole thing is hypocritical on both sides. Apple has convinced it’s users, very successfully might I add, that it is an Android problem and instead of having choice over your phone, you should just buy an iPhone.
As someone who works in IT this is really not the answer users should get. To me, this is equivalent to, “your computer quit working? Just buy a new one.” But imagine you only had one choice and it’s because that company refuses to just improve standard text messaging for all users across the board but iPhone users don’t understand that Google has a method to fix this problem Apple just refuses to make it a better experience for everyone.
Additionally, I think RCS is an open platform. Google’s fork of it carries encryption and group messaging integration. Point being Google genuinely has a viable iMessage solution to non iMessage texts. Apple wouldn’t even have to stop using iMesaage.
While I agree, Apple is being obnoxiously stubborn and it truly only does benefit Apple users as well, it just feels disingenuous from Google. It more feels like they want to get their product onto Apple devices. If Apple could implement RCS the way they wanted to and interoperate with Google, then I think it would be a more valid argument. But Google clearly wants Apple to use their own version and is putting up this annoying ad campaign to mask it. (As far as I know, the standard RCS implementation doesn’t even include E2EE, rather it’s something unique to googles implementation, correct me if I’m wrong). Google uses encryption as a talking point in their ad campaigns and is honestly for me the biggest reason for it to be used in iOS. Otherwise the experience is only marginally better than sms, and I wouldn’t expect Apple to even bother with it. At least with encryption one can challenge Apple‘s stance on being a privacy focused company…
Im also a software engineer and it’s annoying as hell that Apple is stubborn, but from a business perspective, it’s a gold mine for Apple - ecosystem lock-in is just too valuable to them as a company.
Google Voice still doesn’t support it!
Its just trillion dollar companies doing trillion dollar things.
Haha fair enough 😂
It doesn’t seem like you understand what a protocol is
Friendly reminder that none of these asswipes are your friend :)
Just like actors, musicians, athletes, & authors. None of them are your friend.
Exactly. The software is being kept closed source. You have no idea if Google is up to its shitty stunts to data track or anything along those lines. If it was open source then that argument is gone, till then…
That’s not what the word friendly means
Breaking news: Apple and majority of its users still don’t care.
I’d love to have RCS, but it’s not a make or break feature for me, and I’m tech savvy enough to know what it is and what it does. Try convincing the average consumer to give a fuck about invisible tech that doesn’t meaningfully change their experience.
Well, it would change their experience. They would see improved photo quality to/from Android users via text messages. But Apple has managed to train people to think that Apple’s refusal to put iMessage on other devices is somehow a shortcoming of Android.
Considering how much time Apple users spend bitching about green text bubbles and “shitty android photos” it would meaningfully impact their experience when talking to anyone that’s not on iPhone.
Apple don’t want it because it removes part of their marketing strategy. (Being, if your friends have Apple, you also need apple)
Apple Users don’t know what it is.
You say you don’t know what it is or does. Yet you say you’d love to have it. That’s quite contradictory don’t you think?
And it WOULD impact their experience.
It amazes me that people like you, who don’t actually know or understand the topic, can be so vocal about your opinions and conclusions. About something you don’t know.
It’s the USB-C standard all over… “Apple and majority of their users don’t care”. And that’s still not what it’s about. It’s about setting a standard so we don’t need 9 different cables and 7 different apps, just to send a God damn picture or video
yeah, people are use to having 10 different chat apps, and it seams to be normal, which is sad (somebody should make a standard! *insert that xkcd comic about making a better standard)
With RCS there seams to be less chance that they destroy it like they did with XMPP (google / Facebook and cie)
I’d love to have RCS if only because iMessage is literally the only reason I have an iPhone.
I got roped into it because all my friends and family refuse to change to be able to exchange media messages.
This isn’t about making iPhone users care per se, I really think it’s just a public perception thing.
MKBHD closed this topic for me forever. Apple is never going to open up. It provides them tremendous value. They don’t give a shit if Samsung taunts them lol. They want your teenage kids taunting their friends over their green bubbles. And it’s working.
Only happens in Muricaland. In every other countries I visited, WhatsApp rules.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
closed this topic for me forever
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Why should anyone care about RCS? The trend has been to get everything into data instead of carrier owned services for two decades now, we don’t need another SMS (it will likely always be a fallback). What we should move onto is a carrier and device type angnostic universal standard protocol over TCP / QUIC like XMPP or Matrix, with SMS as the backup.
When you get a phone you can get an phone system account and a telephone number already. Modern apps in the Google ecosystem should already recognize you are already signed in with Google and sync your contacts. Since almost everyone is already in the Google ecosystem, if Google supported it they could have extended their XMPP implementation in Hangouts to allow messaging directly via XMPP to those contacts and SMS for anyone not yet in the system (similar to how Signal did, Apple does, and Google does now with RCS). Unlike Apple, since its just XMPP, users can still add friends and be added by friends on other XMPP servers (ex. their ISPs, their own, or a third party). They could have supported or jumpstarted a new very simple open source alternative app for that portion for AOSP if the EU complained. Eventually Carriers could have supported passthroughs for those still on feature phones and other users of SMS to use the number@carrier accounts to hit XMPP users with generated SMS numbers for non-SMS users (pushed either by business necessity or part of a government / teleco org like GSMA staged removal of SMS and telephone numbers). It’s all data at the end of the day.
Instead, they developed a whole new protocol to fluff the telecos and keep the now badly managed telephone number system even more necessary allowing spammers and allow the problems of legacy SMS to continue.
Apple, Google, and Samsung should all be shamed for not supporting fully open protocols and necessitating dependency on user harming stacks.
This sounds nice at a superficial level, but there’s a lot of reliability and backwards compatibility issues being ignored. During natural disasters and emergency situations, internet and cellular data are the first to fail. It’s not casual. For the phone and SMS (GSMA) protocols are sturdy enough that they can operate with very simple, low energy consuming and highly reliable machines. Internet data services on the other hand consume way more electricity (more expensive to have them operate with backup generators, for example) and are more delicate and prone to failure. They also need to be replaced more often. 100% of national emergencies systems run on phone and SMS tech, that could reliably operate for several decades with little maintenance that would cost billions to replace them with internet based system that were as reliable and durable. And then on top of it all, wired phones can even operate without electricity and connect with cellular terminals to contact other phones and cellphones. Only the tower needs to have power. There’s just a lot banked of that reliability that most modern conveniences don’t have.
Apple is not going to change this unless legally forced to because it is quite possibly the biggest driver of iPhone sales.
A whopping 87% of American teens use an iPhone, and the green text from Android SMS is the biggest reason. At that age people will do almost anything to fit in and get a date, and the green text was chosen specifically to elicit an “eww” response. Most of those teens will likely will continue to use iPhones as adults because it’s what they know.
Meanwhile outside of the United States basically no one uses iMessage. Precisely because it’s so terrible it interfacing with non-apple devices. Everyone just uses WhatsApp which will work with anything.
Of course WhatsApp’s quite a crap program as well missing basic functionality but at least it’s not device specific.
Imagine a world where we can adopt a scalable, secure, open communication protocol where users can use whatever app they want. Imagine humanity moving past the diaspora of special-snowflake chat apps and on to better things.
I’d be ok with everybody adopting Signal protocol but I can safetly say no government anywhere would “allow” that
First privacy, then USB, now RCS.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Samsung has released a new video in support of Google’s #GetTheMessage campaign which calls for Apple to adopt RCS or “Rich Communication Services,” the cross-platform protocol pitched as a successor to SMS that adopts many of the features found in modern messaging apps… like Apple’s own iMessage.
The video, titled “Green bubbles and blue bubbles want to be together,” shows a Romeo and Juliet-style conversation between two users who want to be together, but who are kept apart by one of their “parents.”
The “bubbles,” of course, are a reference to Apple’s iMessage interface which shows feature-rich blue bubbles for messages sent between Apple users, and discordant green SMS bubbles with reduced functionality when Android users participate in the chat.
This two-class system is especially frustrating in countries like the US where about half the population is using an iPhone and the other half is running Android on a Samsung device.
Apple, of course, has every incentive keep the status quo as a form of ecosystem lock-in, but it might be forced to open up its messaging service as a result of the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA).
Regulators are currently investigating whether iMessage meets the bar to be considered a “core platform service” under the rules, which would compel Apple to offer interoperability with other messaging services.
The original article contains 232 words, the summary contains 218 words. Saved 6%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Apple will never listen, but maybe the EU could decide it's important enough issue for them to force it. It's starting to feel like we should just go to them, first. I'd like to imagine we have another candidate problem for regulation enforced fixing, with Mac laptops' long-standing displayport multistream problem. Macs will only mirror and never extend to an nth monitor over displayport splitting ... but the availability of thunderbolt adapters as a workaround takes some of the "oomph" out of that argument.
The other issue alluded to by another commenter, though, is that rcs is not low-level in Android os like SMS is. Like the API to get the information into other competing apps is not there, so it seems a little bit hypocritical.
This public shaming bullshit reminds me of Epic’s Fortnite debacle and it’s not a good look, especially from Samsung who usually mocks Apple on Monday and is copying them by Friday (see “no CD drives in laptops” or “no headphone jack” or “no removable batteries in the phone”). I know they’re completely different issues but whining is whining.
Satan and the Devil call Lucifier.
I think this issue is mostly a USA one, considering that most communications there have caps (data, phone time, SMS etc.) Paradoxically, the market there doesn’t work very well and prices are relatively high. Big corporations take advantage of it to lock people to their ecosystems. There is a high probability that this issue, will be regulated by the EU, since US policy makers are unable to solve much more important problems. For them this is not an issue. The market has solved it.
RCS needs to happen, I’m so sick of Whatsapp.
Just download Signal. Cross platform, verifably E2E, and verifiably no data collected by Open Whisper (as per their submission in a lawsuit). Also, one of the authors/architects of Signal occasionally trolls the companies that provide mobile spyware.
itoddlers btfo
I haven’t sent an SMS since like 2013 or something like that. Couldn’t care less about this blue green controversy, my use of SMS is receiving 2fa codes and spam.
iMessage works.
Who has even heard of RCS outside of tech folk?
RCS dates to 2008 and Appul didn’t support it. Now we know that Appul is stuck in 2007 or earlier.
My big question is: Why does Apple need to adopt it in the first place?
Answer is: closed nature of system they created and closed (yes) nature of RCS ecosystem.
We should adopt user-friendly democratic operating systems and chat protocols instead.
“What did the EU ever do for us?” in the monthy python mood. After usb c, apple is getting its proprietary model challenged again. When will Apple understand that in the long run it hinders innovation? And that openness and standardisation is a catalyst for it
My understanding with RCS is that similar to SMS it uses the infrastructure of your phone carrier. First question: Do all carriers support this? Second question: What prevents carriers from monetizing this? At least with some sort of roaming trap when you are abroad…
Sorry, this just reads to me as the little kid being angry he can’t join the bigger kids. I really believe that were the shoe and the other foot and were it Google with iMessage, they wouldn’t be so keen to let Apple use it.
Google and Samsung should bribe regulators to make it happen. Apple will never changed unless they are forced to and the only way that happens is shoving money in corrupt assholes pockets.
redcalcium@lemmy.institute 7 months ago
AFAIK there is no open source messaging app that support RCS yet. It’s not even included in android AOSP (or is it? I can’t find any reference). It would help with adoption if google actually open-sourced the RCS client app.
ArtificialLink@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
They won’t let any third party apps use it so they are basically as bad as imessage.
Tetsuo@jlai.lu 7 months ago
The simple fact that iMessage has 0 interoperability makes it much worse than everything else.
So I doubt RCS could be as bad except if they remove the ability to operate with other RCS clients. And even for Google and Samsung that would be extremely stupid.
spankinspinach@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Forgive me if I’m mistaken but did Signal adopt RCS? I they abandoned SMS for RC- if I recall - couldn’t SMS my friends on it anymore and abandoned ship lol