After ruining Android messaging, Google says iMessage is too powerful

Google failed to compete with iMessage for years. Now it wants Apple to play nice.

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[cfinazzo]

Come on Ron, this is silly. Whining or not Apple needs to start enabling RCS.

RCS sucks. Messages should be delivered to a person, not a specific device.

Most people own multiple devices. The message has to go to all of them. iMessage does that, RCS doesn't.

I forgot about this part - it's really quite an oversight and I don't know where the blame lies really. I've had the setting in Messages checked which allows for conversations to use either a phone number or an email address set to "on" from Day 1. If they fix this, and figure out how to encrypt the whole thing (this is table stakes - at least for now b/c lawyers), I can't see why carriers wouldn't adopt it.

Yes, I am aware of the T-Mobile news re iCloud Private Relay. We might need to settle for a scheme like on iOS where Apple (or in this case the carriers retain a key for special situations.

 

[cfinazzo]

Texting should bring us together, and the solution exists. Let's fix this as one industry.

Correct, the solution exists, and it is called Signal.

Well, actually...

The solution is called Encrypted RCS. If people would actually read Lockheimer's tweet thread they would know that.

On one level, this entire problem is nonsense. I don't dispute that iMessage conveys a certain status, and those left out might feel slighted. However, instead of whining that a competitor should have to hobble their product in order to create a level playing field, raise the standards for everyone. Almost all of the additions - at least the ones people would care about - that Apple created for iMessage have RCS equivalents.

With the exception of encryption - which if it is to be a truly global solution, kind of has to be run by a third party (e.g, a carrier) and might require reworking the protocol - everything else is a solved problem.

It's taken the carriers, what, six years to implement RCS? Having a carrier implement encryption isn't a global solution, it's chaos. Also what if I want to message from, oh I don't know, a computer or tablet? Call me when I don't need a SIM/phone and the encryption has been solved. Those are the "additions" that matter. Without them RCS will never be a candidate for a "truly global solution". Until then it's just the next evolution of SMS and MMS.

By "global", I meant anyone can use it. To get that scale, and not end up in the situation where differences in platform implementations break things for people, it has to come from the networks.

The lack of multidevice & eSIM support in RCS is an oversight that can be fixed. We've waited a long time for a clear picture to emerge about what needs to be done - we'll be fine if we have to wait a bit longer.

If the most important thing about RCS is that it supplants SMS/MMS and subsumes its functionality into this new thing, which in turn improves the experience for everyone, how is that not a success?

 

[cfinazzo]

who wants to use email in a web browser for chat?!

I don't know what Japanese people do now but in the past they used email for text messaging.
I don't know why this isn't good - it seemed to work just fine.
I think they have had SMS for a long time but exorbitant carrier prices caused people to use email as a messaging solution.

This is only half correct: Japanese people were using proprietary messaging services offered by the telcos; they had gateways to email, complete with @ email addresses, but they came with lots of limitations compared to real email (especially in message size).

On the other hand, the messaging service had two great advantages over regular SMTP email: the messenger client was built into all featurephones sold by the telcos, and the protocol has native push notification support. It was also a great lock-in mechanism for the telcos because, while mobile number portability has been a thing for over a decade, the courtesy didn't extend to email addresses, forcing many people to stay with their carrier just to keep using their old email address.

I'm struggling to understand how the "email" side of this thing ever got any traction.

For years, my Dad (retired as of Friday, FWIW) only had an email address through his job. Sure, Bell Atlantic (Google that, kids) gave him one when we got our first modem in 1998, but their client was garbage and he never really used it.

Whether or not porting was a thing at that point is and was irrelevant - it was a bad idea from the get go.