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

[spinedoc77]

Honestly, SMS/MMS isn’t THAT bad for that kind of communication, apart from the lack of encryption (and, if encryption is necessary, SMS is obviously the wrong tool for it) and persistence (my employer bought us all work phones so they could save conversations for regulatory purposes, seems it was cheaper than the potential regulatory fines that could occur for conducting business over non-persisted channels). If SMS/MMS truly were that awful, I’d probably be a WhatsApp user and wouldn’t bother with the Messages app. So, while a secure, modern, open standard would be great, honestly SMS/MMS is probably good enough for most people.

Seriously? Try sending a picture or video on SMS/MMS and see how well that looks. What about all the other features, video chat/facetime, stickers, tapbacks, etc. SMS/MMS is so antiquated it should only be used as maybe an emergency fallback, if that.

 

[Azathoth123]

For Google, it isn’t about messaging, they’ve already shown multiple times that they aren’t interested in messaging after what, 17 attempts? What they are interested in is a way to scrape data and serve ads on iMessage. RCS could do that for them.

 

[kc9hzn]

Seriously? Try sending a picture or video on SMS/MMS and see how well that looks. What about all the other features, video chat/facetime, stickers, tapbacks, etc. SMS/MMS is so antiquated it should only be used as maybe an emergency fallback, if that.

Are you telling me that you use those features with business contacts? I find it annoying how Skype for Business translates ASCII into emoji, so I can’t imagine using Tapbacks and the like in business conversations. For family stuff, we use Facebook Messenger because it works whether you have a phone number or not. For sharing a quick meme to a group chat, though, I’ve really got no complaint with MMS.

 

[nutmac]

Only in the US IMessage is winning, for the vast majority of the earth population both RCS and IMessage are outdated, caveman technologies that people couldn’t care less about.

The true winner is WhatsApp

You are right, to a point. When messaging was taking off, many carriers lacked the foresight to offer unlimited SMS, especially outside Australia, Canada, and USA. It is particularly true for countries where international messaging is common, such as Europe, South America, and Africa.

With SMS and RCS, there's no clarity on whether it will be "free" or not. And while iMessage is data-based, it requires carrier support, which coupled with Android domination, explains why it isn't popular in most countries outside Australia, Canada, and USA.

 

[spinedoc77]

Are you telling me that you use those features with business contacts? I find it annoying how Skype for Business translates ASCII into emoji, so I can’t imagine using Tapbacks and the like in business conversations. For family stuff, we use Facebook Messenger because it works whether you have a phone number or not. For sharing a quick meme to a group chat, though, I’ve really got no complaint with MMS.

Absolutely yes. I'll give you an example, last week I had a collaborating doctor send me a MRI image of a patient we shared that he was concerned about. I got enough information on the picture sent to formulate an action plan. Yes I requested the MRI images and viewed them on my high DPI screen when I got to work, but the image sent was enough for us to collaborate on a treatment plan while I was on the road and unable to view the full MRI images. Another example is being able to video chat with business partners and associates. Finally there is some flavor necessary even with business contacts, having colleagues send me pics of their kids or maybe a hospital event, it's nice to be able to tapback a heart or thumbs up instead of having to type out a response. The world has moved on from SMS/MMS and anyone stuck using that is severely handicapped.

 

[kc9hzn]

Absolutely yes. I'll give you an example, last week I had a collaborating doctor send me a MRI image of a patient we shared that he was concerned about. I got enough information on the picture sent to formulate an action plan. Yes I requested the MRI images and viewed them on my high DPI screen when I got to work, but the image sent was enough for us to collaborate on a treatment plan while I was on the road and unable to view the full MRI images. Another example is being able to video chat with business partners and associates. Finally there is some flavor necessary even with business contacts, having colleagues send me pics of their kids or maybe a hospital event, it's nice to be able to tapback a heart or thumbs up instead of having to type out a response. The world has moved on from SMS/MMS and anyone stuck using that is severely handicapped.

That’s fair. In my own business context, we have regulations that require the company to keep our messages. So we largely work via work provided channels, mostly Outlook, Skype, and WebEx. As a matter of fact, we could face significant regulatory fines for using SMS/MMS should an investigation come up. That’s technically the company I’m contracted to, though the company that signs my paycheck is all in on Microsoft Teams. And previous companies I’ve worked at were all in on Slack. Generally, it’s been my experience that I have to use the messaging platform that work provides me, so it surprises me to see people using SMS/MMS for business purposes.

So I mostly use SMS/MMS for friends and family, and mostly for text and links, at that, and a decent number of them are iPhone users. Occasionally, the small meme picture. For the non-iPhone users I know whom I’d video call, we all have Facebook accounts. Facebook also tends to be the app we’d use for large pictures and the like. From my use case, MMS/SMS works just fine, apart from the lack of encryption.

 

[co.ag.2005]

It's so shocking how people here are genuinely opposed to better interactions between iPhones and Androids. I don't understand that. SMS is terribly limited and outdated, and not E2E encrypted. And it's not like Androids are going away, so why keep the experience this bad on iMessages?

Not that I think this ad campaign will have any effect on Apple at all, but that doesn't mean that Apple should do nothing on improving communication standards on iPhone

I agree! Just add RCS as the fallback to iMessage (and SMS/MMS as the fallback to RCS). Keep the bubbles a different shade of green if you need to, but I still want a better messaging experience when I text friends/family who own Android phones.

 

[spinedoc77]

That’s fair. In my own business context, we have regulations that require the company to keep our messages. So we largely work via work provided channels, mostly Outlook, Skype, and WebEx. As a matter of fact, we could face significant regulatory fines for using SMS/MMS should an investigation come up. That’s technically the company I’m contracted to, though the company that signs my paycheck is all in on Microsoft Teams. And previous companies I’ve worked at were all in on Slack. Generally, it’s been my experience that I have to use the messaging platform that work provides me, so it surprises me to see people using SMS/MMS for business purposes.

So I mostly use SMS/MMS for friends and family, and mostly for text and links, at that, and a decent number of them are iPhone users. Occasionally, the small meme picture. For the non-iPhone users I know whom I’d video call, we all have Facebook accounts. Facebook also tends to be the app we’d use for large pictures and the like. From my use case, MMS/SMS works just fine, apart from the lack of encryption.

We do have a specific portal for HIPAA protected information just like this, but in this case the patient was in the office and gave the go ahead to send their information, so it wasn't a great example because normally we would use the portal. An alternative solution I've worked out is to simply use Google Voice for all my business contacts, it works well enough as a much better option than SMS/MMS. I think what I'm trying to say is that SMS/MMS is just so incredibly primitive and outdated it shouldn't really be used as anything other than an emergency fallback, but there really isn't anything else that is truly universal.

 

[kc9hzn]

I agree! Just add RCS as the fallback to iMessage (and SMS/MMS as the fallback to RCS). Keep the bubbles a different shade of green if you need to, but I still want a better messaging experience when I text friends/family who own Android phones.

But I don’t think RCS satisfies the need for a better messaging experience, at least when looking at base RCS without Google’s proprietary over the top components. And apparently, the actual user experience of using RCS isn’t much better than SMS/MMS. Besides, no one, not the carriers, not Google, not Apple, not Samsung, is really incentivized to make RCS work well or to come up with a better replacement, so over the top it is. Hastening the carriers’ decline to dumb data pipes.

 

[kc9hzn]

We do have a specific portal for HIPAA protected information just like this, but in this case the patient was in the office and gave the go ahead to send their information, so it wasn't a great example because normally we would use the portal. An alternative solution I've worked out is to simply use Google Voice for all my business contacts, it works well enough as a much better option than SMS/MMS. I think what I'm trying to say is that SMS/MMS is just so incredibly primitive and outdated it shouldn't really be used as anything other than an emergency fallback, but there really isn't anything else that is truly universal.

Re: nothing else universal, I agree. But I’m reminded of the XKCD comic about standards. You’d have a hard time, especially with years of existing user experience and network effects, to get everyone on one standard, even if it were truly universal (and, in my case, I have friends/family without smartphones, so something tied to a phone number can’t be universal).

 

[bobcomer]

Are you telling me that you use those features with business contacts? I find it annoying how Skype for Business translates ASCII into emoji, so I can’t imagine using Tapbacks and the like in business conversations. For family stuff, we use Facebook Messenger because it works whether you have a phone number or not. For sharing a quick meme to a group chat, though, I’ve really got no complaint with MMS.

Pics and video's, I sure have. It's downright handy. Unfortunately it doesn't work so well between android/iPhone, but then that's why I have both. I don't have to often, it's true, but it's enough to keep it in mind. (and have a way to do it)

 

[FindingAvalon]

I don't think it was your intention, but I wish everyone would stop saying the solution is Whatsapp or FB messenger or whatever other 3rd party service there is out there. Personally I have hundreds of contacts, roughly guessing I'd say at least 80%-90% are on an iPhone device. As an Android user, getting hundreds of contacts to switch to a 3rd party service would be virtually impossible, especially since a lot of those contacts are business contacts and we really don't interact on a personal level like that.

I agree that RCS as it stands today, more specifically Google's RCS implementation, is awful. The ball is really in Apple's court to decide if they would rather keep their consumers in their walled garden, or sacrifice some profits to universally release a clearly superior messaging service to the world. They can still monetize it very simply by selling a small subscription to an iMessage app, that may even be enough to match whatever customers they might lose and would push them to develop other features to keep customers on board instead.

Yup, it’s annoying. Every time this subject pops up you get all the non US citizens mentioning everyone uses WhatsApp. They completely fail to understand the circumstances that led to that being the case and why it’s not like that here.

 

[kc9hzn]

Pics and video's, I sure have. It's downright handy. Unfortunately it doesn't work so well between android/iPhone, but then that's why I have both. I don't have to often, it's true, but it's enough to keep it in mind. (and have a way to do it)

That’s got me curious about what kind of work you do. I’m a software developer at Fortune 500 level companies (maybe even Fortune 100), so I recognize that my experience is going to be more “enterprise-y” than most people’s.

 

[spinedoc77]

Re: nothing else universal, I agree. But I’m reminded of the XKCD comic about standards. You’d have a hard time, especially with years of existing user experience and network effects, to get everyone on one standard, even if it were truly universal (and, in my case, I have friends/family without smartphones, so something tied to a phone number can’t be universal).

Yep. The carriers had their chance with RCS, but they blew it on purpose because they couldn't figure out how to monetize it. Google's RCS is even worse as it's a vehicle for their data harvesting/ads.

 

[awshucks]

I'm totally fine with that. The world has to move on from being middle school kids who care about green bubbles. The real issue is interoperability, encryption, ability to send pictures/videos, etc. If anything in this world of "look I have an Apple device," I'd welcome the green bubble for my texts.

I agree 100%! I have android users in my messages and I don’t even pay attention to the color of a bubble.

 

[CarAnalogy]

I don’t really see why Apple should have cooperated on it. It’s a standard that, given usual lag times, was designed more for feature phones and early Symbian smartphones than it was for the new era of smartphones. It would have been looking long in the tooth as a chat standard even in 2011 when Apple launched iMessage. Effectively, it was a desperate last attempt to control messaging by the carriers in the face of things like BlackBerry Messenger and smartphone apps.

And frankly, over the top approaches worked better for customers because 1) they were cheaper than the price gauging carriers used to do for SMS and 2) they were far more responsive to user feedback than any sort of carrier based standard ever could be. Apple had no incentive to support RCS because it would be capitulating to the carriers, ceding power that 1) they didn’t need to and 2) would have limited Apple’s ability to drive user experience improvements. Besides, ceding to the carriers here would have given them on iOS the same heckler’s veto they have on Android (the same heckler’s veto that definitely contributed to Google killing Hangouts). Apple was right to fight against the carriers here.

I don’t really disagree with any of that except for this: consider that where we are starting from is SMS, which is about as low as the bar gets. I’m not sure how RCS as originally conceived would be capitulating to the network operators. They definitely had no incentive to go out of their way to support it, but it should have been the network operators making it essentially a drop-in replacement. They completely failed to do that, as usual. I’m not so sure Apple fought anything, more like they simply did nothing. It really should not have been on either Apple or Google to handle the back-end implementation. Again, this was supposed to simply just be better SMS, which we are still stuck with today.

So I guess really my point is that no, Apple shouldn’t go out of their way to support it, and yes I admit that at this point it is a de facto Google standard. We don’t disagree. It’s just sad that it got to this point. If not RCS then what are we going to do with SMS? We’re going to be stuck with this crap for a thousand years because nobody has any financial incentive to replace it. We’ll be stuck with it until the cellular system is fundamentally redesigned.

It has zero to do with Apple and everything to do with the fact that this service is from 2008 and is a zombie spec. Developed prior to that initial release, and most importantly, prior to the smartphone boom - a means to, yes, offer something better than SMS and charge a per send fee… on a flip phone. By the time smartphones were factored in 7 years later, the ship had already sailed and WhatsApp had conquered the world. This is too little, too late, and is a proprietary fork of a proprietary system that’s only licensed to carriers and OEMs by the GSMA.

As such, any time Google or Samsung (who controls WearOS now) mention anything about RCS, they aren’t talking about GSMA anything - they’re talking about a very closed source, proprietary fork - while shoving words like “open” and “standard” down your throat - it’s the opposite of both.

If Apple were to stand up their own RCS service and include all the cobbled-together additional features that still come nowhere near parity to other offerings… it wouldn’t be able to send messages to anyone but Apple users. To then connect to those outside, they’d need to strip those features off, connect to Google Jibe, and send clear text unencrypted to it. So what Google is really asking here is… send me all of your messages, and I get to profit off of server fees and metadata acquisition.

That’s a big no. And it always should remain such. Federate it, or bust.

New Google site begs Apple for mercy in messaging war

Google is tired of losing so badly to iMessage, so it wants Apple to adopt RCS.

arstechnica.com

You both make the same point in the first paragraph, which I find interesting. But I also think it’s an irrelevant point. Symbian is gone, smartphones have been around for more than a decade, but that doesn’t change the fact that SMS is still here and just as bad as it was on the Nokia 9100s.

I don’t want Google to be in charge of it any more than anyone else does. This was supposed to be a network operator cooperative standard. Yes Google proposed it, but that’s how almost every standard happens. A company that uses it gets the ball rolling.

There are analogies to USB-C here. Apple helped invent it, was one of its first primary users, but it’s not an Apple spec. It officially belongs to a standards body that is an industry consortium that frequently gets things wrong but at least fosters some degree of interoperability.

It’s just that the “standards” body in this case turned out to be the network cartels, and they killed it in the crib because they couldn’t figure out how to gouge people for it.

After discussing this and reading more and thinking about it, I sadly have to agree with you both that in its current state, no Apple shouldn’t support RCS. But again, wtf are we going to do with SMS?

The problem is not going away, it’s just that no one actually wants to solve it. They only want to use it to their own advantage. Google to try to amend its many, many messaging mistakes. Apple to preserve its iMessage moat. Network operators simply to make money. No party involved in this cares one bit about the actual experience.

 

[CarAnalogy]

It does not increase security for "green" messages. Unless you use Google Messages, the app, your messages are in clear text for the world (figuratively) to see. And in order to get Google Messages, Google - not Apple - needs to release their app... which they could do yesterday.

I gotta say I may have changed my opinion today based on re-analyzing the situation here. That is a very good point. If they really want RCS on iPhone just release Google Messages. RCS as it stands has already fragmented into being a de facto Google standard. There’s no way at this point for it to become anything else until the network operators implement an actual federated system, which they have shown that they will not do.

So I guess the answer to my question of, if not RCS then what do we do with SMS, is to do what everyone else has already seemingly decided to do. Ignore it, use something else, deal with it if you have to.

 

[BuffaloTF]

I don’t really disagree with any of that except for this: consider that where we are starting from is SMS, which is about as low as the bar gets. I’m not sure how RCS as originally conceived would be capitulating to the network operators. They definitely had no incentive to go out of their way to support it, but it should have been the network operators making it essentially a drop-in replacement. They completely failed to do that, as usual. I’m not so sure Apple fought anything, more like they simply did nothing. It really should not have been on either Apple or Google to handle the back-end implementation. Again, this was supposed to simply just be better SMS, which we are still stuck with today.

So I guess really my point is that no, Apple shouldn’t go out of their way to support it, and yes I admit that at this point it is a de facto Google standard. We don’t disagree. It’s just sad that it got to this point. If not RCS then what are we going to do with SMS? We’re going to be stuck with this crap for a thousand years because nobody has any financial incentive to replace it. We’ll be stuck with it until the cellular system is fundamentally redesigned.




You both make the same point in the first paragraph, which I find interesting. But I also think it’s an irrelevant point. Symbian is gone, smartphones have been around for more than a decade, but that doesn’t change the fact that SMS is still here and just as bad as it was on the Nokia 9100s.

I don’t want Google to be in charge of it any more than anyone else does. This was supposed to be a network operator cooperative standard. Yes Google proposed it, but that’s how almost every standard happens. A company that uses it gets the ball rolling.

There are analogies to USB-C here. Apple helped invent it, was one of its first primary users, but it’s not an Apple spec. It officially belongs to a standards body that is an industry consortium that frequently gets things wrong but at least fosters some degree of interoperability.

It’s just that the “standards” body in this case turned out to be the network cartels, and they killed it in the crib because they couldn’t figure out how to gouge people for it.

After discussing this and reading more and thinking about it, I sadly have to agree with you both that in its current state, no Apple shouldn’t support RCS. But again, wtf are we going to do with SMS?

The problem is not going away, it’s just that no one actually wants to solve it. They only want to use it to their own advantage. Google to try to amend its many, many messaging mistakes. Apple to preserve its iMessage moat. Network operators simply to make money. No party involved in this cares one bit about the actual experience.

SMS is still here, because SMS will never go away. I’ve mentioned this previously, but SMS is the paging line that keeps your phone connected to the tower - makes it ring, initiates a data call, a voice call, so on and so forth. Every ping your phone makes has a leftover 140 bytes. SMS uses that and sends 160 7-bit characters on it, consuming the remainder of space. So even if RCS existed for everyone… it falls back to SMS by design - and since RCS is really poorly developed, that’s very often - or it just drops them into the ether. Though that’s not to say reliability can’t be improved, but that’s where we stand today.

 

[CarAnalogy]

SMS is still here, because SMS will never go away. I’ve mentioned this previously, but SMS is the paging line that keeps your phone connected to the tower - makes it ring, initiates a data call, a voice call, so on and so forth. Every ping your phone makes has a leftover 140 bytes. SMS uses that and sends 160 7-bit characters on it, consuming the remainder of space. So even if RCS existed for everyone… it falls back to SMS by design - and since RCS is really poorly developed, that’s very often - or it just drops them into the ether. Though that’s not to say reliability can’t be improved, but that’s where we stand today.

Yeah exactly. As I recall it was almost discovered by accident that it could be used for this, and the Japanese network operators added it on as a free bonus since it cost them nothing extra. The American operators saw this and realized they could charge for it.

That’s why I say we’ll be stuck with it until a complete redesign of the cellular system, which if technology history so far is any guide, will never happen.

And there is zero chance the American operators especially will spend one cent to upgrade it, since the charging for SMS ship has sailed.

 

[stevemarks]

Just adopt RCS and keep those bubbles green. Blue bubbles stay iMessage exclusive.

I honestly wouldn't mind an upgraded green bubble experience.

 

[StoneJack]

Green bubbles matter!
Nope

 

[bigjnyc]

I could definitely see the value in this and why some folks would want it or care..... I however have a hard time caring about it since I message with a whopping total of 2 people who are android... and both happen to live outside of the U.S. so I use whatsapp with them..... Literally everyone else I message with regularly has iphone and iMessage.

We had one friend who ventured over to Android a few years ago, totally blew up our group chat and caused havoc... he ran back to iPhone like 5 days later lol. Not just because of iMessage, he said he found the Android OS to be discombobulated and messy (his words not mine) But yeah iMessage also played a big part in his decision. So all this to say... Not sure what incentive Apple has to adopt this? iMessage is one of their major selling points and way to keep folks in their ecosystem.

 

[Musocat]

A good friend's phone is a "green text" one. We text each other regularly. It works fine, and neither of us gives a rip about it.

 

[SpotOnT]

Yup. Don’t care about RCS.

Moved on to Signal for messaging and am not looking back. iMessage can go stuff itself.

 

[bobcomer]

That’s got me curious about what kind of work you do. I’m a software developer at Fortune 500 level companies (maybe even Fortune 100), so I recognize that my experience is going to be more “enterprise-y” than most people’s.

I'm an IT Manager at a wool combing company, so not fortune anything and small, and I have to help the users quite frequently to do things like this. Pictures of broken parts and machines, mill pictures, things like that. We don't have some of the common ways to transfer files in a user friendly way like you may have.