Who’s talking about feature parity? Who gives a rat’s ass about bubble color. This is about the next gen after SMS.
Currently if you’re on an iPhone using Messages and someone sends you a message using RCS you will never see it.
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'It's Time for Apple to Fix Texting' Says New Android Website Pushing RCS Messaging Technology
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Who’s talking about feature parity? Who gives a rat’s ass about bubble color. This is about the next gen after SMS.
Currently if you’re on an iPhone using Messages and someone sends you a message using RCS you will never see it.
What’s the case for RCS/MMS/SMS fallback over just SMS/MMS fallback for 90% of users? What do you get from RCS that you don’t get from MMS that makes it worth the engineering effort to implement?
Without feature parity, the people who claim to be bullied for not using iPhones still will be in the same position. If that’s not your motive for supporting RCS, what is? If someone sends you an RCS message, it’ll fall back to MMS, because Google Messages does MMS fallback just like iMessage does. So your argument doesn’t make sense to me.
The issue isn't the green bubbles, seriously are people so immature that they care about this? The issue is being able to properly send things like video and pictures without having them be so compressed as to be basically useless.
Read receipts. Full quality media (pictures and video). Longer character cap. Wifi messaging.
What is Apple's motive not adopting RCS when the industry is moving towards it? Is it "Pure"? Why can't I send high resolution Photos and Video to family members who use Android? How does not adopting RCS benefit me as a user of Apple products?
So no, I didn't ignore whatever purity test you think these corporations have to pass. I just think its daft to think any corporation is "pure". Every single one of them want more customers and want more control of data because data is valuable. The modus operandi of any business is to make profits and all their actions is geared towards that motive, some for the benefit of the customers and others not. What does the website being an Android site have to do with anything? Google's motive is simple, make a better messaging experience across platforms thereby improving the image of Android messaging when compared to iOS. They also will now have control of the default messaging on Android just like Apple does on iOS. They all want control of data on their platforms.
When it comes to pictures and videos, I tend to treat messaging the same way I’d treat pictures and video over email. Share a link. It’s a better user experience, too, because that means they don’t have to have the video or picture taking up space on their device unless they want it to.
I have to admit that I don’t share a lot of video over chat, and I don’t know anyone who does. Pictures, sure, but the resolution issues haven’t been a problem for me. For most people I know, pictures and video either stay on their phones or end up on Instagram or Facebook.
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Think of the same features you have now when using iMessage but now you can have similar features when messaging friends and family who do not use iOS or have iMessage.
- Client-to-server encryption with optional end-to-end encryption
- Data-based messaging with SMS/MMS fallback
- Delivery and read receipts, and typing indication
- Full resolution Image, GIF, video, and other rich media content
- Group chats
- Group file transfers
- IP voice and video calls, both individual and group
- Geolocation exchange
- Business and services messages
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I disagree that it's a better use experience, it adds more complexity to the process, in fact I'd go as far to say it's a horrible user experience. Most of us on these forums are tech savvy enough to be able to work it out, but most consumers balk at added complexity. When I was back on Android last year it was a nightmare sending videos/pics of the kids to their grandparents because of the added complexity which they were just not used to when dealing with iPhone to iPhone, and don't even get me started on group messaging. My wife had an iPhone and while she could work the tech details out if she wanted to, she was too busy to bother because it was another layer of complexity. In that sense it's bad PR for Apple because iPhone users then wonder why they have to go through the extra work, and they won't necessarily blame Android.
Just different use cases I suppose, but I share video in chat a ton. Mainly of my kids to the rest of the family, and vice versa. The compression that is used when they fall back to MMS make them look atrocious even on a smaller phone screen, often you can barely even see what is going on in the video.
Ive literally never met someone who asks for WhatsApp or FbMessenger by default. Most I ever got was GroupMe in college, occasionally. I must live somewhere weird, its basically always phone number primarily. One of the reasons I switched back to iPhone was because I was annoyed being stuck on MMS and not having airdrop when I was in college.
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Now, if Google had had a solid multiplatform OOT messaging solution (I suppose they could have named it Hangouts) that they supported for an extended period of time and clearly signaled would be their equivalent to iMessage (and FaceTime, for that matter), we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation. But Google seriously dropped the ball on it, and I really don’t understand why they’re pushing RCS so hard or why they picked it up out of the trash can and dusted it off (well, other than to justify their purchase of Jibe, who were heavily invested into RCS despite it being a go-nowhere technology at the time). Why exactly is stock messaging the way to go instead of Hangouts or even Allo? Is it just because Google needs to kowtow to the carriers for some reason? Like seriously, it seems as though the reason for pushing. RCS is to avoid pissing off the carriers by launching an OTT messaging platform, but why is a company as big and powerful as Google so beholden to the carriers? For that matter, why is YouTube so beholden to mainstream media outlets and to mainstream advertisers, despite its absolute monopoly on online video?
I still don’t know how, after 3 years, it’s still not understood that RCS has nothing to do with carriers. At all. Google took RCS and went alone, it’s an OTT platform now. Carrier services have all but shut down, they had terrible adoption. This service requires, exclusively, the Google Messages app to function. There are no alternatives. Nobody is trying to appease a carrier here, if anything it’s a giant middle finger to them. What Google wants is more data. An untapped market of information they can use to sell more ads. They want to expand that market further.
FYI for those with an apple device that can be used as a server, Bluebubbles works really well in giving Android phones iMessage capabilities. It's far from perfect, but not a bad solution for those with a Macbook lying around.
To put it in perspective. This is what happens to videos when you send it via MMS since it seems some people are so used to messaging only people that use iMessage on here. MMS will compress any high-resolution photo you send, and the file limit is different with different carriers, ATT maximum is 1MB.
Uncompressed 360p video not even full HD.
After MMS compression
Maybe Google should open up RCS to 3rd parties and become a dumb pipe, passing encrypted messages over their servers where the best data they can get is “——-BEGIN PGP MESSAGE———“ and zero additional information. But they never will. They aren’t interested in giving a message service out for charity. They are interested in more metadata and selling even more targeted ads.
That actually looks pretty good compared to some of the atrocious results I get. Keep in mind that in that video it's pretty close up, now imagine a kid's soccer game where there is fast motion and you might want to zoom in on your kid, it's basically just a bunch of pixelated blobs.
to be fair, there's not anything there that many of us are going to think 'i really wish texting did that'. I accept everyone is different.
- Client-to-server encryption with optional end-to-end encryption Dont Care
- Data-based messaging with SMS/MMS fallback I have free texts so dont care
- Delivery and read receipts, and typing indication Nice but not important to me.
- Full resolution Image, GIF, video, and other rich media content Most people just send annoying GIFS. If i want to send content to family i can send it by email although tbh they all have apple so imessage does fine
- Group chats I can understand this would allow people who love groups so they can send daft gifs without whatsapp but id be more likely to use email or facebook for a group
- Group file transfers Email or facebook do fine.
- IP voice and video calls, both individual and group I have unlimited calls.
- Geolocation exchange Why?
- Business and services messages I get lots of business and services messages through SMS, do i really want them being able to send video or see if ive read them?
This is how illogical you are.
Apple should implement RCS
You: No
Apple should open iMessage so others can adopt it
You: No
Matter of fact, Apple can use the considerable amount of power and leverage they have to add to the RCS specifications, but I imagine you would also say NO.
Your reason being targeted ads also makes no sense as Google's RCS is E2E encrypted except for group messages.
That’s because RCS is in a weird position. On a technical, standards-compliant level, RCS is Universal Profile. But Universal Profile was hot garbage and Google Jibe was the only way to make it not utterly suck. But Jibe’s implementation of RCS isn’t exactly Universal Profile RCS, even if it is largely compatible with it. But Google Messenger isn’t even Jibe, it’s Google-specific stuff on top of Jibe, which is Jibe specific stuff on top of Universal Profile. You don’t get the Google Messenger stuff if you just use Jibe as your gateway, a la T-Mobile. The Google Messenger stuff is limited to Google and Samsung, who directly licenses it, and it all goes through Google’s gateway. So, in some sense, it’s still the same mess we had with Universal Profile and its incompatible implementations, just controlled by Google instead of the carriers.
But Google is in large part responsible for the confusion, since they deliberately and maliciously refer to Google Messenger (and Jibe, for that matter) as RCS, as if they’re compliant implementations of the standard, and Apple is the bad guy for not using open standards. But Google Messenger isn’t RCS, it’s RCS + Jibe + proprietary Google features. RCS is Universal Profile and not this other stuff that’s dependent on paying a licensing fee to Google. And Universal Profile is the carriers. So it’s kinda sorta OTT but also kinda sorta not, and a large part of Google’s argument is that it’s not OTT and that it’s the “open” and “standard” way of doing it.
Edit: Come to think of it, the fallback system should be as universal as possible. I’d argue that Google’s implementation of RCS isn’t necessarily as universal as possible, as it would ignore entry level phones such as those running KaiOS. Unfortunately, as of now, MMS is the best fallback system. RCS backers need to show that the value of RCS as a(n additional) fallback system outweighs its lack of ubiquity (and perhaps would make enough of a difference for user experience in light of the explosion of multiplatform OTT offerings from not-Google to make up for its lack of availability on entry level phones or Android phones without access to Google Play Services).
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There’s nothing “illogical” about that, as neither is a contradictory statement (unless you’re operating from an unstated and unproven assumption that Apple must do something to improve chat compatibility between Android and iPhone). One can logically hold both positions if they feel that Apple doesn’t need to do anything in this scenario. It’s up to you to prove the logic of your unstated assumption before you can say whether these statements are logical or not. Now, if the original comment you’re replying to had suggested Apple needed to do something but rejected the only possible solutions, then it would be illogical. But are these two the only possible solutions if we accept that Apple needs to improve interoperability? Not necessarily, Apple could always make some compatibility system that isn’t RCS, then it would be in Google’s court.