And yet, still, no Android Messages for the App Store.
Not even nearly the same thing. SMS messaging is the standard for phone messaging; iMessage builds upon it by taking the phone number and also adds in email addressing to enable a rich communication mechanism over an IP netowork instead of carrier. Apple has and does not offer ANY alternative for SMS-style (read as: phone number) messaging to all the devices that are not within Apple - you
must only use the Messages app.
Technically all messages to phones is via or extended from SMS messaging which is attached to the phone number. Apple completely does not allow alternatives to the SMS-style messaging. Google does offer alternatives, but it's still tied to that phone number and you must pick one. So it's really not possible to offer a "android messages" for IOS, it's the standard communication mechanism between phone numbers that's been around since practically the creation of the cell phone.
What? Are you even an iOS user or are you just here to blab about nonsense? Messages doesn’t use carrier messaging; that’s a feature for comms with Android users only because they have an interest with the Fed to sniff your texts via carrier messaging, and so does RCS.
Messages-to-Messages is encrypted end to end via a private network that apple doesn’t colocate that doesn’t rely on carrier messaging networks.
I am both an iOS customer and an Android user.
RCS is end-to-end encrypted as of 2019. The iMessage network and RCS similar in many ways.
Messages uses carrier messaging (the green bubbles) when communicating with anything outside of Apple, using the extremely legacy SMS protocol, instead of RCS. This is precisely what I'm talking about here.
This isn't about comparing them and stating that any one or other is better or worse. You distinctly sound like you're trying to pick a fight, and that's not the point. It's that Apple does not choose to use RCS at all when communicating with phone numbers that are outside of their iMessage paradigm -- they solely use the legacy SMS protocol, which is completely unprotected. So if you have an Apple user attempting to communicate with any Android user, the message is guaranteed to not be protected by Apple //
or be protected by RCS // it is sent using the ancient SMS protocol.
An Apple user has zero choice when sending messages to Android except using the Messages app (or 3rd party IP mechanism - whatsapp, wechat, discord, etc) but when sending messages to phone numbers, you have no choices except what apple chooses. Apple chooses the lowest security mechanism with no E2E.
Honestly it's really about protecting everyone. For a company that prides itself in security, Apple doesn't appear to care about messages outside of their walled garden, and that's just myopic. Even the responses here are blindly protecting something that really is a gaping hole in security.
It's better to just say "why don't they just all become Apple customers" but that's not how the world works. With Android owning 70% of the world market share, it's not exactly a stretch to consider a safer interoperability for all concerned.