https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/15/24178470/apple-rcs-support-wwdc-announcement-android-imessage
Did you catch Apple’s RCS mention during WWDC?
That's it, for Apple the mere mention is already too much. Why would anyone want compatibility if they also just could buy an Apple product?
Also the reason why ipads and Vision don't support multiple users: not only should you buy an Apple product, but so do your partner, parents, kids, etc.
iPads actually do support multiple users. They just hide the ability to turn it on behind complex IT management tools that your average user would never be able to figure out.
This makes me so mad. I swapped over to an iPhone because my parents are old, don't want to deal with technology anymore, and just want to be able to video call me when I work on the other side of the world.
Great for them, but now I can't really easily video chat or text with any of my other friends because Apple makes anything other than Facetime/iMessage on iOS a dogshit experience. Signal/Telegram/Whatapp notifications randomly mute for me for no reason.
And you know what double sucks? If it wasn't so locked in, I would actually love my iPhone. Apple Pay with it's unique credit card number per transaction means I haven't had my credentials stolen in like 5 years. Bluetooth pairing and swapping is seamless and easy (yes even with non-Apple devices). Apple Music is actually better quality than Spotify and lets me upload my own library with no issues. And ofc phone itself is a really nice piece of hardware with a long support cycle. I'm still running my iPhone X (2017) without having to worry about security or software updates.
But fuck them for their "Apple only" bullshit, and every costing more than their Android counterpart. I'm so sick of their "walled garden".
IIRC, it's controlled by the carrier and not encrypted. If that's the case, it's bad. We've been moving away from carriers and internet providers, and got some privacy back by various means. Why would be roll that back?
No, but that doesn't make it good.
The whole world except a minority moved away from SMS a long time ago.
That's great that the rest of the world moved on. That doesn't mean that those of us in locations that haven't moved on have to use the most inferior version of messaging.
They've moved on to specific platforms, not open standards. That's not a good thing. Remember when Twitter replaced RSS for most folks?
I didn't say that, but it might explain why Apple didn't say much. I'm just keeping the discussion to the thread.
The only people who didn’t move on are Americans.
Nobody else uses SMS for anything else than service messages. Nobody cares about “bubble Color” in Europe, Asia or Africa
They've moved on to specific platforms, not open standards. Ultimately, that's not a good thing. Like when Twitter effectively replaced RSS for a lot of use cases.
Might be a 10thDentist take, but I could be surprised.
It's reliable in specific use cases, I'll give it that.
Great point. I'm sure they're decrypting my rcs messages somehow and selling that data. And I'm sure your response here has nothing to do with riding apple wang
there were other comments here mentioning that rcs has issues with encryption, and I don’t think handing over our private communication to isps is a step forward. It is literally a decade long step back.
This makes no sense. Apple is bad, and also I want encrypted messaging. It's called Signal. It's free for iOS and Android both.
I love Signal and use it with my family which is the majority of my messaging. But I was surprised to find out the rest of my family on iPhone are missing features I have on Android. This doesn't help bring the iPhone users.
Except RCS isn’t awful at all. It’s also end to end encrypted on androids. If Apple’s participation isn’t encrypted, that’s on Apple.
Only Google’s proprietary extension has encryption. The actual industry standard specification of RCS has no encryption defined at all.
Edit: It turns out Apple have refused to use Google’s proprietary encryption implementation and are instead working with GSMA to update the RCS Universal Profile specification to finally have encryption defined and standardised so that any RCS client can handle encrypted payloads (whereas only Google Messages today can do encrypted RCS and requires other users to be exclusively using Google Messages otherwise messages are sent unencrypted).
Yes, that’s the right thing todo. My understanding was that Google went down this path and didn’t succeed, so went ahead with their own. Maybe have the other major mobile os onboard will be enough to get the carriers off their asses
Doesn't rcs depend on having mobile data or internet access on? If I understand it right it is strictly worse than sms.
Many people just have data off most of the time and sending messages with the system app assumes things are delivered immediately and everyone easily receives them. If you forget your data is off or don't have internet for a while then you end up assuming people received stuff when they didn't.
All phone isps have basically unlimited sms for free when data is paid in huge amounts of gold.
Sms > Rcs
It’s not worse than SMS in any fashion. Just like SMS, RCS will tell you when your text is actually delivered. You will never assume somebody received something that they didn’t. Furthermore RCS offers read receipt functionality which will additionally let you know your message was read. SMS is not capable of that.
RCS also lets you actually send media to your contacts, like photos and videos without horribly mangling them with compression.
And as for having no data connection, your phone will fall back to SMS same as iMessages do. Which shouldn’t be at all necessary as most people have unlimited data plans and even when throttled RCS has such a small footprint you shouldn’t have any trouble.
Most people definitely DONT have unlimited data plans. In fact they are so limited and expensive that many just have the data turned off and rely on public wifi connections everywhere they go to use internet.
Nobody needs to bother with sms delivery because it just works. The only time it doesn't is if someone has their phones turned off.
Sending media is just a nice to have, not necessary.
Nope, most people do have unlimited data plans. And unless you live in some tiny, mountainous, Eastern European backwater, the plans aren’t actually that expensive either. And even if you truly are a time traveler from the year 2002 like you appear to be, and you have an incredibly limited 5GB data plan, you’ll be happy to know that even if you reach your data cap, you will still have data connectivity enough to use RCS without issue. All that happens when you “run out” of data on phone plans is you’re throttled down to a slower speed that is still more than sufficient to sent text messages over RCS.
My experience is that the tiny, mountainous, Eastern European backwaters are the places with the cheapest plans, and places like Germany and Canada have the worst ones.
RCS was designed to be implemented by the carriers, but all the carriers tried it, failed to gain any traction, and dropped support again, so now the only server is the Google one which is used automatically by the Google messaging app (which, to their credit, does support encryption, through a proprietary extension which they are now allowing Apple to use as well)
What android application supports RCS except Google Messages? So, for me it is not about "allowing iOS users communicate with Android users", but about allowing communications between iMessage users and Google Messages users.
Bingo. RCS is yet another proprietary protocol, one controlled by Google (GSMA who originally designed it have practically forgotten about it for a decade) and without an open specification. RCS also doesn’t have a standardised approach to encryption as it’s designed for lawful interception.
So unless Apple have licensed Google’s implementation and extended version of RCS, this will be a shitty, insecure way to communicate between the Apple Messages and Google Messages apps and nothing more.
Google did an impressive job applying pressure and suggesting RCS was a perfect solution when in fact it’s just putting more control in Google’s hands. RCS is not an open “industry” standard. You nor I as individuals can implement it without paying license fees to see the specification and fees to have our implementations tested and accredited.
And Google have extended GSMA’s RCS with their own features (such as encryption) which is not part of the official standard and they haven’t made open either.
If Apple had been pressuring Google to implement the iMessage protocol or whatever, we’d have been up in arms (and rightfully so).
But instead of us all collectively hounding Apple and Google to ditch proprietary protocols and move to open ones such as Matrix, Signal, XMPP, etc (ones where we could all implement, use open source software clients, etc) we’ve got this shit:
Proprietary, insecure, non-private communication protocols baked into the heart of hundreds of millions of devices that everyone is now going to use by default instead of switching to something safer, private, public, open, auditable, etc etc.
If Apple had been pressuring Google to implement the iMessage protocol
Lololol
Yes and if christians had been pressuring congregations to worship Satan that woulda been super upsetting too.
Edit: funny so many people are mad when you point out how absurd an argument is when it posits that a company might do the polar opposite of everything they stand for
Nobody said Apple would do that. I don't know where you got that from.
They said that if Apple were to use their clout to pressure others into using an Apple-controlled ecosystem, people would be angry about it.
Yet, because it's Google not Apple, people are celebrating Google's RCS as a good thing and them being the good guys.
They never argued that Apple would do that, it was clearly an example to display people's double standards.
Samsung messages was using RCS since 2012... Years before Google messages adopted it.
There are others out there that use it but call it by different names like "advanced messaging", "SMS+" etc
Google was the first to add e2e encryption and push it hard though, but if you send a RCS message from Google messages to Samsungs messages app, it won't have e2e, and most likely will be the same with messaging Apple.
But given how much Apple have fought to make it hard (or at least inconvenient) to message between them, and shut down any apps that made messaging between Apple and Android better, this is a big step for Apple
I find it funny how transparent everyone's pro apple bias is in threads like this. I'm proud to say fuck apple every chance I get because they say fuck users every chance they get. And yes I know because I have them probably $8000 over the course of 10 years or so. I was all in until the iPhone came out and they returned to the "proprietary is the business model" Apple roots.
They don't even try to embrace standards except in cases where it makes them money. Their entire mo is to erase the existence of standards if a buck can be made off of it. Apple being such anti consumer monopolistic pieces of shit being uncommonly recognized is pathetic and sad, and the perfect example of corporations being a negative influence on society.
There probably are people who died because they couldn't charge their phone and couldn't call an ambulance. And no I don't care about Apple's security theater or other talking points. All of it is bullshit
Standards. Like RCS which is a proprietary standard that google controls all the keys to?
RCS is a proprietary standard, but it is not owned or controlled by Google. They just happen to be one of the first major corporations to embrace and implement the standard.
Google is the only one that allows “End to end” encryption. And practically speaking google controls the standard, they have over 800 million users out of the total possible 1.2 billion. It might not be a monopolistic standard in theory but it is in practice
Google is the only one that allows “End to end” encryption.
Allowing and implementing are not the same things. They implemented encryption in their RCS services. They don't allow everyone to use their service, but they built and own it so that's their right, I guess.
And practically speaking google controls the standard, they have over 800 million users out of the total possible 1.2 billion.
Can you elaborate here? How do they control the standard? Specifically, I'm not asking about their implementation of RCS, because of course they control that, but their implementation is not the same thing as the standard itself.
It might not be a monopolistic standard in theory but it is in practice
It's widely understood that it's difficult to implement a competent web browser. That's why there are only a handful of browser choices. This doesn't make HTTP a monopolistic protocol.
Saying the RCS standard is a monopolistic standard makes zero sense to me, even in practice. We are quite literally discussing another vendor entering the market. If you run a telecom and want to implement RCS, you are able to do so. If you are a phone manufacturer you are free to implement RCS in your software stack. None of this is easy, but it's possible and so this isn't a monopoly situation as far as I understand it. Google wanted to compete with iMessage so they built a competitor on a proprietary but open global standard, the standard which is meant to replace SMS and MMS messaging.
A bunch of carriers implemented it originally, but their implementations were all horribly broken, with messages between carriers usually not working, the carrier-installed messaging apps sucking, etc. Eventually they all dropped it and Google picked up the ashes and "fixed it" by making their server the only one instead of having per-carrier servers like SMS/MMS.
Why celebrate a feature that was added for non-customers? Why celebrate a feature they were forced to add rather than chose to? Don’t get me wrong, I think this should have been done long ago, but what’s in it for Apple to waste some of their precious announcement time? The fallback mode of iMessages doesn’t fall back as far? Yay?
What do you mean added for non customers? The entire purpose of not adding RCS or supporting iMessage for Android devices is to create a worse experience for their customers if they interact with non-customers. Sure it likely drew more people to buy iPhones, but it's also arguably pretty awful for any society that plays apple's game rather than just downloading a cross platform app.
Or it’s great for society because they support text for every phone, even feature phones (do those still exist?) and it’s a good business choice for Apple to support more features for their paying customers
The detriment to society came when the standard for text messaging between all phones was updated to support more features and a major manufacturer intentionally didn't update to drive sales. The US used to heavily punish that sort of behaviour, but in this case it took EU Chinese action to reign in a US company.
Samsung, Google, Sony, and a million other manufacturers could have implemented their own messaging system, but instead they chose to facilitate the use of devices however customers want without punishing them based on the personal preferences of their friends. In some circles people may even choose not to communicate with people who don't have iPhones or exclude them from group chats which is bad in just about any way you spin it.
The US used to heavily punish that sort of behaviour, but in this case it took EU action to reign in a US company
FWIW in this case it was Chinese action - China is requiring all phones sold domestically to support RCS. The EU DMA would have forced Apple to open up access to iMessage, not implement RCS, but they found that in the EU, iMessage market share is too small for the DMA to kick in (probably due to the overwhelming popularity of WhatsApp).
Thanks for the correction. Now that you mention it I do remember that issue from the EU. I just defaulted to thinking it was EU since they managed to get Apple to change to USB-C and this is pretty minor compared to that.
Why does it bother you, the presentation is made for investors. Investors want to know if Apple will still be able to compete in the European market and that's all they really had to show.
The WWDC keynote isn't an investors meeting, it's for Apple to talk about their exciting new features that are coming and to prepare developers for what their sessions are going to be about. The announcement was made with little fanfare because it was like a "FYI, your communication with Android devices will be slightly better for them now"
It was originally for developers and press but it's mostly for investors and press now. They practically never talk about APIs and tooling anymore.
The place users are expected to learn about the products are in ads, on the website, their favorite news outlet, or the apple store. No regular customer even bothers sitting through a 3 hour presentation.
??? The keynote is immediately followed by sessions covering the APIs mostly for the features they just announced. It absolutely is for the developers as much as it is for the press and regular users to learn about what's coming.
Back in the day the whole presentation was about it though. Now says they don't talk about the toolkits and stuff in the actual presentations with demos and examples like they used to. Infact it was the job of most tech journalist to pull out the relevant information to the user because the focus was almost entirely developer focused.
They did announce hardware at the very beginning though. It was often followed by statistics on how many developers were actively developing for the platform and the revenue developers made as a whole so on and so forth.
I remember them explaining push notifications, how it works, what you might want to implement it for and tried to sell the fact it didn't really hit battery life much because it was pushed from apples servers etc. the whole presentation that was an hour long on technologies like coco demonstrating the fluidity and speed of the new tools and how they dramatically reduced the install size while improving stability etc. there was a 20 minute section on how apples iad's were going to make developers more money while reducing overhead and had a downloadable demo in the app store.
Android already has support*
*assuming you want to use Google messages, and don't root
Just Google's proprietary app connecting to Google's proprietary servers that just happened to be preinstalled. There is nothing RCS being build to Android itself.
Hell, the only other messaging app that supports RCS is Samsung Messages. And it's not even the default anymore.
Yeah… I’m betting Google voice is nearing its end of life. All the robocall legislation is making other voip services kill off their sms equivalents, I just cant see Google voice being the one service that manages to pull through.
Especially considering it’s a Google service of more than a decade, it’s long past due to be taken out back and shot.
While acknowledging your probably right about its future prospects for longevity, I really hope you're wrong. Maybe they can roll it into Google Fi wireless mvno but it'll probably end up in the graveyard like Google pay 2.0, among many others
Yeah. I used Textra for years, and was confused why it was taking so long to get RCS. Finally decided to look it up and learning that it wasn't an open protocol yet. It's frustrating.
I have switched to Google messages, and it's been nice to text people who don't know enough about messaging to use a different app. It's only nice because Google's Messaging app is so commonly the default though.
It needs to be open and available in all apps that support SMS.
Even worse, I'm migrating to an all-Voip solution because my carrier refuses to support VoWifi/VoLTE and it solves my coverage issues.
The only disadvantage is I'm forced to fall back all the way to SMS. No MMS even, and what about RCS, the new texting system that works through your data connection well there's no support for that aside from using Google Messages and the SIM that's in the phone!
Worst "open standard" ever
I'm very confused about your setup tbh. Can you get a data plan that doesn't come with a phone number for your phone? Is that what's going on?
I do believe I've heard that Google messages (and therefor RCS) doesn't support dual Sim, which is absolutely bullshit. It's currently the same as a closed standard with empty promises for being open.
Google Messages definitely supports dual SIM, I have a physical SIM and an eSIM in my device and you can choose which one it sends from on a message by message basis
It's complicated. The main issue is, I live on a remote farm without cell coverage, except in the tiny zone under my 50' tower with booster.
However I now have Starlink, and wired and wireless APs covering a large area with high speed, low latency data.
So, port my number to VoIP.ms, which supports SMS, and make all my calls/texts through Wifi using SIP. On the road, use a basic cell plan with unlimited slow data that is still fast enough for voice. Tested, working, so far fairly simple.
Now the issues. RCS won't work with my now VoIP provisioned number, because there's no SIM for it. The SIM in the phone has a different number, that of the new plan which will be unreachable at the farm by voice/SMS just like the old number used to be.
This would all be a non-issue if my provider supported VoWifi on anything other than iPhones, but sadly this is not an option. So I've got service everywhere now, but am stuck with voice and SMS, no RCS or MMS.
So long as the green bubble still exist there's no reason for Android users to celebrate either. I had to change to iPhone because it was costing me job opportunities. And I won't be able to switch back until the green bundle is gone. Apple knows this so without legal action they're never going to end that.
I highly doubt that. I've never had to text during the interview process, everything was over calls, email, or wherever hiring platform they used. Texting in an interview process is kinda weird...
I was about to say the same, but then I remembered that I'm ignoring any business that use WhatsApp or Instagram as their sole means of communication. Fuck yeah I'm a petulant teenager, it's their loss, not mine.
I assume you're in the US? Are you saying your iPhone customers were so prejudiced against green messages that they'd go with a different supplier/partner/whatever? Was it the friction of not having all the messaging features, or just that they thought all serious businesspeople used iPhones?
From what I understand they wanted their group chat to keep working properly. I would have been issued a work iPhone since it's what I had working as a contingent worker with them so I do not understand.
No, it’s a status symbol. Children with iPhones look down upon the green bubbles, or so they say.
ftfy
What status? The Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra is $220 more than the Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max.
The low end iPhone is $429. Yes the low end Samsung is $199, but its performance is far below the SE. The closest match is the S23 FE, starting at $629.
Any feelings the blue bubbles have about the green bubbles is purely the humor of the angry green bubble making themselves feel inferior… because the blue bubbles don’t ever think about it.
When you receive MMS text on an Iphone, it makes the background text green instead of blue.
The arrogance, pettiness, and childishness of how Apple treated this announcement is shocking.
JFC, I’m old, and this new use of the word throws me for a loop because everyone writes like I’m supposed to already know what it means .
This will always be my RCS: https://www.gnu.org/software/rcs/
Had to verify what JFC was several times before it stuck for me. Acronyms will always happen. I remember when someone recently was upset when I typed rmr. Apparently they didn't like that I skipped the rest of the letters but that's how I always typed it on America On Line Instant Messager back in the day. AOL Instant Messager, or AIM for short.
Sometimes we just have to update with the times or not care, I go back and forth
Edit before someone points out rmr is not an acronym; k
That's the Apple way. Apple hasn't compared the iPhone to another phone since the first phone announcement. They pretend other phones don't exist (this is the fastest iPhone yet!). So it makes sense that a feature to communicate with other phones isn't given much importance.
They compare platforms from time to time, mostly indirectly. Android gets a mention concerning OS version fragmentation.
They don't consider the iPhone a smartphone... because they refer to it by its name?
I've got some news for you, Samsung, OnePlus, etc all call their devices by their brand names in announcements/advertising too.
Some people think their phone is a status symbol. I just love tech for what it does. Personal phone is on Android, work phone is an iPhone. They're both good.
Honestly surprised at the amount of arguing over iPhones and Androids here, its 2024. It's not that deep.
Seriously, of all things tech news related nowadays, green and blue bubbles are a non-issue. If someone has an issue with it, it's probably worth not making it your issue as well and just walking/swiping away to find someone else to talk to.
I consistently talk to iPhone users using SMS. Besides from the occasional picture compressed into oblivion, nobody cares enough to even make jokes about the phones we are using. At the end of the day, it's just a phone.
I think this sorta misses the point, at least from my perspective. Nobody cares what phone another person has until they try to send that person a picture or a video that looks like it was sent from 2004.
I know that this is only really a problem in the United States, but that doesn't make it any less annoying for those who have to deal with it. I have no interest trying to convince my 74 year old mother and a dozen other friends/family members to install a different messaging app on their iPhone so we can send each other videos that aren't compressed to shit.
Most people with an iPhone just want to use the default messenger cause, frankly, iMessage works and it works really well. You know when that default Messages app doesn't work well? When you're forced to use an antiquated technology like SMS/MMS. Apple knows this and banks on it to sell more products. It's one of many anti-competitive practices they employ.
RCS isn't a perfect solution, but this is a huge step forward in closing a gap that should've been closed a decade ago. Nobody cares what phone another person is using. They do care about having a premium experience with a device they paid $1,000+ dollars for. They're also ignorant enough to blame a green bubble or the believed cause of that green bubble, which is any device other than an iPhone.
It's much less abstract; more directed, logically laid out and verbose.
So it is actually a useful, constructive discussion piece, instead of your quoted line.
Pretty sure they said the exact opposite of that. Judging by every one of your responses in this thread you seriously need to practice your reading comprehension.
Yup okay. I'm sure I'm just making up the simpery because no one just loves apple and defends them endlessly, they're all stating neutral facts
Apple pretending RCS doesn't exist would be like Google acting like RCS isn't a 15 year old protocol without e2e encryption
Oh wait...
I'm glad they're adding support, but I also feel like this is a hard one to sell to the general public. If it creates a better experience, word will get around about it, but going on stage and talking at length about how there's a new messaging protocol would have been a challenge for non-technical viewers
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Apple will finally adopt RCS in iOS 18, effectively ending a yearslong fight for feature parity between iMessage and Android.
Apple didn’t go over how RCS adoption will finally let iPhone and Android users send each other high-resolution pictures and videos.
Apple was largely forced to support RCS in response to the mounting pressure from global regulators and competing companies.
Apple was the only holdout, and regulators, combined with some bad press (remember when Tim Cook told a guy to buy his mom an iPhone?
It’s just too bad that the long-awaited unification of the iPhone and Android’s messaging systems was drowned out by unsettling AI-generated emoji and jiggling iMessage bubbles.
Even without Apple’s acknowledgment, I’m just stoked that I’ll finally be able to exchange photos and videos from the 21st century with my iPhone-wielding friends and family members for once.
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