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Samsung joins Google in RCS shaming Apple
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2023
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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
https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22406303/imessage-android-eddy-cue-emails-apple-epic-deposition
The audacity of parents trying to buy something less expensive in these crazy inflated times
Except that You literally made it up though? You embellished the part about poor families and cheap phones, here's the actual quote:
How else would you read that lol come on, now
Kids might want an Android phone for another reason than "we're poor". For a while, there were plenty of apps you could get on an Android that you couldn't get on an iPhone. Customization was a big deal back when I was in highschool. All the cool kids had these shitty custom launchers that made their phone borderline unusable if you didn't know how they were setup, but that was the cool thing to do back then.
I've got the money to buy an iPhone, but prefer Android for customization and app reasons still. Apple is far too restrictive of a phone that you own. I like the ability to side load apps, and I play a lot of emulated GBA/DS games, and apple doesn't allow emulator apps on their store.
I can afford an iPhone 15 but I run a used OnePlus 6T I got on eBay for $100 because postmarketOS runs well on it. I ran a $200 PinePhone for a while before that. Bring on the phones that put the user's control ahead of the profits.
I'd read it the way it was written. Apple has less expensive phones for people who want them, and honestly most poor families just get their phones through their carrier at a monthly rate, so your assertion isn't really a necessary tactic.
Uh... Apple has the iPhone. That's all they have. They make the iPhone. One phone. What other phone do that have?
They currently offer 4 different families of iPhone for sale. The cheapest one is the SE for $429.
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?
The color is one part, the other is that it breaks functions in iMessage. So the elitism doubles up
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This was the experience Android users had initially, then Android started parsing them and adding the reaction to the message. This is also when iMessage started getting that type of message instead of the reaction, as a sort of dig at iMessage
Doesn’t look like it does.
Iphone users keep sending me long horribly compressed videos i can't see at all because it's not a problem between iPhones. And something about group chats?
That's all I know of based on my experience.
And Android users send me postage-stamp sized videos I can't see at all. Not gunning, just saying it's a problem in both directions (and apple's fault). Also, Android doesn't have the same easter eggs, like automatic confetti filling my screen when someone writes the word "congratulations!" in iMessage. Oh, right - iMessage gives me in-line replies and the ability to give a thumbs up/down/heart etc. response to a single message. Don't know if android has this feature, but android users just get a blank text if I "thumbs up" a comment, for example.
Yes, we literally have all of that including normal quality images if Apple would just play fucking ball outside of their own ecosystem.
Reactions are a thing in most messengers. It's just apple using proprietary code.
Some android messaging apps have the ability to interpret emoji reactions and display them correctly. The issue with photo and video quality is infuriating, though.
Google Messages (RCS app) does that. It even works from iMessage to Android but that is just because Google parses the SMS text that says they reacted that iMessage passive-aggressively sends and makes it appear correctly. It's not following RCS protocol, it's basic text parsing is all.
Incidentally, Google also started sending the same pass-aggressive reacted SMS messages to iPhone users for those using those RCS features, so now Apple gets the messages Android users had to deal with for years (and still do, if they aren't using Messages). I don't know is Apple is doing the same parsing or not as Google, if they aren't then somewhat ironically to Apple's intention Android now has the better react experience.
It's a lot of things, and Apple kinda backed into the lock-in aspect I think by mistake. At the time it debuted, you mainly used SMS when mobile texting, and SMS is garbage. It's not encrypted, was limited to a small number of characters, etc. Picture/video messaging also isn't part of the standard, so MMS was tacked on with massive limits, because the thing about SMS is that it wasn't really designed with it's own bandwidth in mind and instead piggybacked on the carrier signal in idle time (I'm real fuzzy on the details because it's been so long, if someone knows exactly that would be helpful context.) Most importantly, in the US at least, SMS was a fee carriers absolutely scalped you for. When iMessage came out, carriers were still charging absolutely stupid prices for a package of like 200 texts and per text after, and receiving also counted towards that.
Apple says "hey we have the internet on this thing, let's make it a feature that when you send to other iPhone users it doesn't count against your text package" and then built a "modern" text platform. E2E, rich image/video support, the stuff you mention, etc. They made it so that you didn't have to worry about whether your friend was on iPhone, you could send a message to their number and Apple would figure it out. The green bubble thing initially was just "btw you're paying for this one." The reason I say they kinda backed into the lock-in thing is because obviously the idea here was "buy an iPhone and stop paying stupid carrier fees" which is obviously a lock-in strategy, but that aspect of the carrier plans basically collapsed as Facebook released Messenger that same year, so it quickly became "unlimited for $20" and then just "it's all in your plan (which we're just being less obvious bout gouging you on.)"
The green bubble thing sticks around though in the US largely because the US is one of the few places where iMessage becomes a major player in the messaging space, probably because the US market sees a larger share of iPhone sales due to economics and Apple not really having a low-end strategy except "buy an older iPhone." Other places go to WhatsApp or WeChat or whatever, but Apple continues to grow (I think around 55% in the US?) and now it's an annoyance for everyone. I don't think I've ever really seen anyone care about the green bubble other than "shit now I have to figure out how to send them this video of the whatever." At least for younger generations, this just means that the primary text method becomes Snap (me and my wife are about the only people my kids open the Messages app instead of Snap for) while the olds all use Facebook Messenger, and those who refuse just spend more of their day annoyed.
Anyway, it was a nice convenience when it launched. Personally, I think Apple has little reason to develop and process messaging for free for Android and businesses don't do things to be nice, but they're all about service revenue, so I think they should release an Android app, and make it easy to buy stickers and shit like that, send money via Apple Pay, etc. iMessage has already subtly shifted that direction on iPhone and I know at least in my friend/family group we pass money around like that all the time, and this becomes another thing that's sort of annoying when we hang out with someone who isn't on iOS. also, probably obviously, but it's not even like "oh we're hanging out with the poor friend on Android" or anything, he is also holding a $900-$1200 phone, so the lack of interop on these types of things that should probably just be a protocol is annoying af.
Wikipedia sais WhatsApp was released 2009, two years before iMessage. So the idea wasn't new and they most likely didn't lock out Android users by accident.
Yes, having to figure out how to send a video is super annoying. The easiest default is FB messenger because everyone has it, but fuck I don't like giving my private messages to meta.
It goes both ways. Both videos and photos from Galaxy phones end up at like 128x80 on my iphone.
It would be fixed both ways if Apple adopted rcs
iMessage is basically proprietary RCS. SMS doesn’t support images, for example. When you send an image via “sms” you’re really probably using “mms” behind the scenes, which has severe limits to quality. If you send an image with imessage, RCS, or any of a variety of custom messaging protocols, you can get the full-quality image.
They also support gimmicks like “reacting” to messages which get overlaid in-line with a heart icon. On SMS it is sent as “MooseBoys loved ‘be right there’”.
Technically, yes SMS doesn't support reactions. But you can do what Google does and just parse that text and "turn" it into a reaction for viewing purposes.
If an iPhone user sends me a reaction it looks fine to me, but funnily enough now when I send one back it looks the exact way Apple sends it to non Apple devices.
It’s not just the bubble color. The bubble color means it will be more difficult to exchange photos/videos (they get sent in MMS and compressed to hell) or use stickers/reactions properly.
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.
And also as a Norwegian I don't know a single person that uses iMessage.
Everyone I know are using Facebook messenger, Snapchat or WhatsApp.
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 https://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
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, support for large media, 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. As they've made clear, they don't care about giving their customers the best possible experience, and prefer to maintain market control for as long as possible.
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.