Well, in that decade, Google created, what, 15 different messaging apps?
They’re doing this because none of their prior efforts have worked. This one also won’t work.Categorically false. Dumb phones and feature phones are still a thing and none of them are getting RCS. Maybe if you had said “all Android phones” instead of “all phones”, but even that might not strictly be true. Having RCS on Android is dependent on having Google Play Services or on having Samsung’s Android stack, which means that imported phones from India or China might not have RCS. It would perhaps be true if RCS were actually supported at the carrier level, but it isn’t.
See, the “basic smartphone functionality everyone expects” in reality is “you use the app the person you want to chat with uses”. There are a bunch of folks that don’t want this to be the way, that want everyone to use THEIR chat app and, for those that are charismatic enough, they can get folks to use their chat app, this isn’t even a problem for them.
Oh yeah, it seems to have been an utterly borked standard and a hot mess from the beginning, as early as 2008. Which is part of why I’m wondering why Google is pushing it so hard (if not for licensing or deep iOS access), they’ve had to put so much work into making RCS usable as even a relatively modern messaging system and, even then, they’ve only managed to by adding proprietary extensions on top of it that you only get if you’re using Google’s proprietary gateway (not even if you’re using a Jibe gateway). If I may be blunt to the people in this thread who are asleep at their desks, Google’s approach to RCS is no more interoperable than iMessage is, and Google is, in fact, lying through their teeth when they claim otherwise.
That still would not solve the problem of phones that don’t support apps at all. iMessage was never intended to and will never be a replacement for SMS.
No, no one could adopt Google’s RCS because they haven’t published API’s that would make that possible (and doesn’t appear that they plan to). If someone’s using Google’s RCS they’re only chatting with other Google RCS users. This is why I say that, without carrier support, all Google RCS is going to be is “just another app”. They’ve actually made the problem WORSE by making yet another incompatible chat app!
Yes, RCS is dead. Google’s RCS is “just another app” and just distracts from the fact that the carriers (which had implemented SMS BEFORE Apple’s iPhone even existed) need to go back to the drawing board and come up with the replacement.
Yep, basically Google’s schtick here is “let’s create a system just as proprietary as iMessage so people have to pay us licensing fees but base it on a notionally open standard and claim it’s an open standard”. Since it’s just as proprietary as iMessage (especially if you want to, I dunno, actually send someone [especially a Google Messages user, the only users of RCS these days] an RCS message, since inter-gateway support never was actually accomplished with RCS and it never really became interoperable), Google’s song and dance about it being an open standard is deceitful and manipulative.
If I may add to this, even if Apple were to gain access to Google Messages’ RCS API, it wouldn’t truly be interoperable. As a matter of fact, it would just further solidify the smartphone duopoly, as you would either need an iPhone or an Android phone blessed by Google to have better texting than MMS. Feature phones? Nope. Cheap Android phones without the Google Play store? Nope. Desktop computers, tablets, smartwatches, VR headsets, SIM-less device classes we haven’t even come up with yet? Nope*. Edit: Oh, and it would likely kinda suck for multi-SIM phones (oh, like most recent iPhones released in the past 3 years…) when used on the second SIM (imagine not getting your texts because you’re abroad and on the second SIM’s network).
No kidding. MMS/SMS was clearly already broken by 2005, otherwise Blackberry probably wouldn’t have introduced an OTT solution in the form of Blackberry Messenger (the WhatsApp of its day, I suppose). RCS was an attempt to fix some of the flaws, but only the superficial ones like file size limits. It left the fundamental flaws gaping open, and carrier politics and greed seem to have added completely new flaws, to the point where it was so overengineered as a standard that I’m not sure if it’s even possible to write an interoperable gateway.
Well, every possible solution, other than a true interoperable carrier based solution is “just another app”. Even iMessage on Android would be a “just another app” solution. Basically, the solution is to download the app(s) that lets you talk to the people you want to or use SMS/MMS. In the latter case, if you want to share videos or photos, best to do it via sharing links.
Technically, I think it’s possible (especially since, as a replacement to SMS, the focus is on adding/improving features rather than encryption), but with the current entrenched carriers, not likely. I mean, being REALLY pessimistic, the iPhone really only happened because Cingular was small and wanted to make a big splash. Luckily for them, all the other carriers had already said no, leaving them the sole provider. The US may also have gone down the road of WhatsApp if Cingular wasn’t around pushing the iPhone as hard as they could (and the lenient texting plans, thereof).
Well, I was going off the description of the standard document being so complicated that only the writers of the standard document could make sense of it. It seems like it was so complicated a standard that no two implementations would work the same way (just from not understanding, let alone the carrier politics). I mean, not even Google could get its gateway to be compatible with the Jibe gateway, and Google’s private gateway is almost assuredly derived from Jibe!
RCS is no more interoperable than iMessage, as I stated before. And why should we privilege Google as the de facto standard for smartphone default messaging, which is what we’d be doing by adopting RCS? RCS doesn’t even fix the issue with regards to smartphones, as RCS would just be on iPhones and Google Play Services enabled Android. Tizen? Maybe it gets RCS? Low end Android phones with no Google Play Services? Out in the cold. Newcomers (like Ubuntu Touch or FirefoxOS had been), also out in the cold. You can’t fix it for smartphones without simultaneously fixing it for dumbphones.Categorically not false. The problem is you and others are looking for any little nit pick thing to cry "FALSE!!!" and ignoring what is actually happening.
Smartphones now. "Dumbphones" later (tbd).
Step 1: set smartphone default messaging to RCS as the standard.
Step 2: idk at this point.
