'Green Bubbles and Blue Bubbles Want to Be Together' Says Samsung Ad Pushing Apple to Adopt RCS

[marzbarz]

You know that if Apple collaborated on a standard, they'd still have control over its implementation, right? Look at USB C, they helped establish that standard and now use it everywhere. No one is suggesting they should give up control to Google.

What? Lol, you think Apple loves how there's many different flavors of USB-C? 100% no.

USB-C allowed for 60W/100W 2.0/3.0/3.1 cables to exist simply because other manufactures complained it would cost too much money to include higher speed cables.

Meanwhile, lightning cables, something that Apple controlled 100%, just works.

Sorry but you're completely wrong.

This has nothing to do with what I said.

It literally has everything to do with what you said. Sorry but this conversation has gotten too ridiculous to continue. You're completely ignoring what I said.

 

[marzbarz]

If you really think it is't you've never exchanged media with a non-Apple person.

I exchange media with Android friends all the time through Telegram. LOL

 

[ericthered926]

But Google’s default implementation is a proprietary extension to RCS, it’s not available to others unless they directly license Google’s RCS service. And it’s hodge-podged on top of RCS instead of being implemented in any sort of interoperable way. Google RCS is not RCS any more than JScript was JavaScript.

I’ve responded to this a few times. You’re right about that. The real issue is iMessage falling back to SMS and green messages being unencrypted/lower quality. Maybe RCS isn’t the solution, not saying it is, but SMS should not be the iMessage fallback in 2023.

This whole thread is a little frustrating bc yes, it would be asinine for apple to implement RCS in its current state, but let’s not ignore that they have the market share to influence getting onto a more secure standard (not saying that’s RCS) than SMS.

 

[marzbarz]

Not if you ever sent any media to anyone outside your iPhone strata.

I literally sent hundreds of pics from a wedding to a telegram channel full of Android people. literally better than RCS, so what's the point?

proved your assertion wrong. lol. sorry but you're getting to be quite insulting to me. I'm done.

 

[toobravetosave]

standard sms is a dated and unsecured technology

Maybe rcs isnt the answer but Apple should still care about the security of those green bubbles often carrying one time passwords or 2fa codes

 

[boss.king]

What? Lol, you think Apple loves how there's many different flavors of USB-C? 100% no.

USB-C allowed for 60W/100W 2.0/3.0/3.1 cables to exist simply because other manufactures complained it would cost too much money to include higher speed cables.

Meanwhile, lightning cables, something that Apple controlled 100%, just works.

Sorry but you're completely wrong.

Sure they do, that's why they themselves use it as a point of differentiation between devices. If Apple wanted to have one set of specs for their USB C cables and connectors, they could have done it easily. They chose not to because it benefits them.

It literally has everything to do with what you said. Sorry but this conversation has gotten too ridiculous to continue. You're completely ignoring what I said.

How so? A universal, interoperable standard has nothing to do with Google being in China or not. Just because you can't follow along with a simple point doesn't mean I'm wrong.

 

[PeterPanana]

Who really cares what color a stupid bubble is? This whole green bubble blue bubble is annoying and stupid. All I know is that when I send a message to someone and it's a green bubble, my iPhone is sending a message using ancient technology that should solely be used when the world is ending and the internet is down. SMS should be a last resort way to send a message, not a default, which Apple is choosing to use when communicating with non-iPhone users.

And this whole blaming Android thing is dumb, if there were 4 other mobile operating systems out there, Apple would still be choosing old-ass SMS. RCS is a standard, not something that Google invented.

 

[platinumaqua]

I must be the few people here who don’t care about green bubbles vs. blue bubbles. A text message is a text message, I don’t care if it comes through SMS or iMessage.

 

[kc9hzn]

I am on the same boat. I do think it is time to move on from SMS technology, and perhaps RCS is the way to go, but I want something independent from these big data firms like Google.

Basically, none of the carrier based approaches to RCS caught on, in part because the carriers didn’t bother with ensuring that their RCS versions were interoperable (it may also be that RCS wasn’t particularly designed with interoperability in mind, which would explain a lot). Because RCS was hot garbage (and because data fell in price faster than SMS overseas), over the top messaging became the norm.

 

[SMH4KIDIOT]

USB C was never going to happen, until it did. I see the same arguments here with RCS.

 

[kc9hzn]

I see what you’re getting at, but I think you’re too in the weeds there. I even agree with you, I don’t necessarily think RCS is the answer, but we do need a better solution.

As it stands today, iMessage falls back on SMS, a standard created in 1986. We can do better. The cool thing about RCS is that it’s open. If Google can add to it, so can anyone else, and maybe even come back and make it a new universal standard. Just an idea, I’m not married to RCS, though.

So many things in the industry are iterative, like how the original iPhone OS was advertised as a version of OS X. We don’t hear that marketing talk anymore, but a lot of that code still lives in the OS. That doesn’t make iOS bad by any means. It’s been iterated on and improved. We should expect the same for our texting standards, but as others in this thread have stated, we probably won’t see anything without regulatory intervention.

In effect RCS isn’t open, if Google’s version is the only version that offers in-demand features like E2E encryption and there’s no way to fork it to create your own independent version of RCS. This comes up whenever RCS comes up. I’d support an actual open standard designed for 2023 and on instead of a 15 year old standard that Google extended with proprietary extensions. Also, iMessage falls back on MMS, only falling back on SMS when even MMS doesn’t work (which is the same thing with RCS), so the lowest common denominator fallback is always going to be SMS.

 

[4odomi]

I want Apple to support RCS, but only if RCS gets its act together. My list of complaints:

• Interoperability between carriers and Android phones is still problematic.
• Google Messages probably has the best overall implementation of RCS, but many phones are preloaded with alternate RCS client. And most don't bother to change the client. It doesn't help that Google has a confusing messaging client strategy.
• RCS should use IP (data), not SMS or carrier's backhaul. I should be able to send RCS to anyone on the planet without fear of additional charge (other than data).
• Depending on the implementation, end-to-end encryption is either missing or only partially implemented (e.g., group chats).

Which is why Apple won't join the party and rightly so !

 

[ericthered926]

Who really cares what color a stupid bubble is? This whole green bubble blue bubble is annoying and stupid. All I know is that when I send a message to someone and it's a green bubble, my iPhone is sending a message using ancient technology that should solely be used when the world is ending and the internet is down. SMS should be a last resort way to send a message, not a default, which Apple is choosing to use when communicating with non-iPhone users.

And this whole blaming Android thing is dumb, if there were 4 other mobile operating systems out there, Apple would still be choosing old-ass SMS. RCS is a standard, not something that Google invented.

Going to start communicating exclusively through singing telegram instead of sms now

 

[4odomi]

It would make so much more sense to open up iMessage or really any other internet-based chat protocol, rather than some garbage that works through the carriers.

Everything should just be data. That's why half the world uses WhatsApp.

I only use it for Android users

 

[4odomi]

I say it. The poor communication between Android and iPhone goes both ways, it's as frustrating for the iPhone user to chat with an Android user than the other way around. I'm not advocating for feature parity, but in 2023 I should be able to have E2E encrypted communications or remove someone from a group with an Android user. Your point about monopoly is fair, but that doesn't mean that the experience *should* stay bad on iMessages

Android users use WhatsApp and I'm fine with that, they're not really friends of mine, just aquintances

 

[ericthered926]

In effect RCS isn’t open, if Google’s version is the only version that offers in-demand features like E2E encryption and there’s no way to fork it to create your own independent version of RCS. This comes up whenever RCS comes up. I’d support an actual open standard designed for 2023 and on instead of a 15 year old standard that Google extended with proprietary extensions. Also, iMessage falls back on MMS, only falling back on SMS when even MMS doesn’t work (which is the same thing with RCS), so the lowest common denominator fallback is always going to be SMS.

That’s fair. I think a lot of this thread is underestimating the power apple has to influence the state of things as the market leader in the us, though. While they don’t really have a financial incentive to jump on RCS or improve the experience outside of iMessage, it would make their privacy marketing more consistent. Would get them a lot of good faith if they helped push for a modern, universal upgrade from SMS/MMS.

 

[kc9hzn]

It’s always the same conversation whenever RCS comes up. The pro-Google camp always describes RCS as an open standard that Apple really should support, as a better fallback than SMS (usually glossing over MMS, incidentally), and conflates Google proprietary features with native features of RCS. The pro-Apple crowd always points out that RCS interoperability between any Apple supported extensions and Google supported extensions generally would be poor, that carrier based RCS itself had poor interoperability, that non-Google RCS effectively doesn’t exist anymore*, and that features like E2E encryption and phone number independence simply aren’t part of the RCS standard and would need to be provided by extension**.

Yes, we do need something better than SMS/MMS, and yes, it ought to be an open standard, not controlled by any particular player in the game (which RCS effectively isn’t). Truthfully, we need something better than standards based RCS, too, because we shouldn’t be adopting any standard that doesn’t offer end to end encryption. And implementing RCS would prevent a truly modern replacement. But really, the only reason we’re even talking about RCS is because Google has self-sabotaged messaging on Android for years due to an absurd internal political culture and VP level in-fighting, then they decided that RCS was the flavor of the month for improving Android messaging. Google RCS is effectively already over the top already (all the good features are), so they could make a cross-platform messaging app, but they decided to perform necromancy by attempting to resurrect a stillborn 11 year old pseudo-standard. There really isn’t anything new to say about RCS that hasn’t already been said (other than the fact that I wasn’t aware that Google only just added encryption for group chats).

* Carrier RCS basically doesn’t exist, since all the carriers are using Google Jibe now. So the only two implementations of RCS are Jibe and Google’s proprietary version that may or may not even be fully interoperable with Jibe at features in the standard.

** Do you really think Google would work towards interoperability with Apple extensions to RCS, even encryption? No, there’s about as much incentive for them to do that as there is for Apple to adopt RCS.

 

[4odomi]

I am, so don't generalize.

Get an Android and happy days 😊

 

[4odomi]

Nobody in the UK uses texts or iMessage or RCS anyway

You clearly don't know everyone in the UK, myself all of my friends & family are strictly on iMessage, we tend to avoid Android users for privacy reasons mainly, but not exclusively 😊

 

[BobVB]

Why is everyone so against rcs on here? All it would do is improve the texting experience with android users… it wouldn’t hurt current user experience in any way. It might get some people to leave iOS if they don’t feel locked in anymore, which I get from apple’s standpoint, but that’s a pretty bad reason from a consumer perspective.

I’d love to be able to send full quality pics and videos in my family and friend group chats. “Just use WhatsApp/telegram/signal/instagram/messenger” nah. I could, but I don’t like my chats living all over the place, and I can’t align my family and friends all on 1 platform.

Editing to add that yeah, google’s implementation is the main one rn, but there’s nothing stopping apple from doing it themselves or working with google/samsung/carriers to implement something universal that doesn’t give google access to chats. That said, pretty sure E2E encryption is already a feature in RCS (ok more research, google has added e2e encryption in their implementation, nothing is stopping anybody else from doing the same, though).

Apple gets to stay out of the conversation because of the iMessage dominance/lock in, but do we really want that? I think more choice is always better. Especially when our messages with android peeps default to sms/mms, protocols that aren’t private or safe. Idk. I think in 2023 we should have a better fallback than sms.

And sounds like a lot of work that Apple really doesn’t need to do. As you noted there are already alternatives - why would they implement someone else’s protocol into their messaging app, or waste the time developing their own version from scratch?

 

[kc9hzn]

That’s fair. I think a lot of this thread is underestimating the power apple has to influence the state of things as the market leader in the us, though. While they don’t really have a financial incentive to jump on RCS or improve the experience outside of iMessage, it would make their privacy marketing more consistent. Would get them a lot of good faith if they helped push for a modern, universal upgrade from SMS/MMS.

But you don’t get privacy from RCS unless you use Google’s implementation or you make your own proprietary version of RCS (and if you take the latter approach, the fallback between incompatible versions of RCS is just as insecure as SMS/MMS). So you can’t call RCS private, unless you’re using Google’s implementation.

What really needs to be done to have a truly open, secure standard is for Apple, Google, and all the major carriers in the USA, Europe, China, India (and probably Africa, too) to come together and actually create a new standard. And Google is just as disincentivized to do that as Apple is (and as the carriers are, too). Literally no one, apart from the users, benefit from a new standard, and users have just decided to use over the top solutions instead.

 

[Naraxus]

We are in 2023, and it is still not possible to send a photo or video clip in original quality, unless you have an iPhone, or arrange for everyone to use the same chat service.....

So use it and quit complaining or expecting Apple to cater to your personal whims

 

[NT1440]

If all the carriers are licensing Google’s implementation, then that means that Google did the old embrace-extend-extinguish trick and that “standards based RCS” simply doesn’t exist. (It also means that adopting RCS in any meaningful form on iOS would require licensing it from Google.)

The deals aren’t licensing, they’re handing off the actual infrastructure aspect (the servers) or prebundling Google’s RCS client app (whichever one is to be killed off in coming months).

Basically because none of the telecoms actually want to commit money (why should they?) Google said “we’ll do it” and some money likely changed hands

Either way, when it comes to the US, RCS is *all* Google. The carriers haven’t actually adopted it, they’ve “near-shored” it.

 

[lyunmac]

I don't really care about green bubbles. It's pretty ridiculous to not want to talk to people because they're a green bubble. I wouldn't want to talk to people that prefer those with iPhones and their blue bubbles. I like to use both my iPhones and Galaxy phones so I'm always off iMessage anyway so I can switch between both platforms easily. I use other apps to chat with friends and share pics.

 

[NT1440]

But you don’t get privacy from RCS unless you use Google’s implementation or you make your own proprietary version of RCS (and if you take the latter approach, the fallback between incompatible versions of RCS is just as insecure as SMS/MMS). So you can’t call RCS private, unless you’re using Google’s implementation.

What really needs to be done to have a truly open, secure standard is for Apple, Google, and all the major carriers in the USA, Europe, China, India (and probably Africa, too) to come together and actually create a new standard. And Google is just as disincentivized to do that as Apple is (and as the carriers are, too). Literally no one, apart from the users, benefit from a new standard, and users have just decided to use over the top solutions instead.

Even Google’s implementation falls back to SMS…and not reliably. RCS posts on Android forums have plenty of complaints of messages simply disappearing into the ether and not getting delivered at all when a problem like weak signal comes up.