It‘s another nail in the coffin for SMS/MMS due to being a more modern replacement.
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RCS Messaging in iOS 18: What iPhone Users Need to Know
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Apple never cared, even a little bit, what Google thought. They had zero intention to add RCS until China forced them.
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Yes. It’s cross platform and will be on all phones by default including iPhones, without the requirement to install third party software.
It means I can communicate with WeChat users and WhatsApp users without having to install either WeChat or WhatsApp. Furthermore, it means I can have both these users in the same group chat, with the advanced multimedia features of RCS, instead of just using SMS.
Yes, some users have both WeChat and WhatsApp, but in my experience, that’s the minority. WeChat users generally do not install WhatsApp (because most WeChat users are in China where WhatsApp is banned), and the vast majority of WhatsApp users do not install WeChat.
iMessage works in all these regions, but only if everyone is on an iPhone. If you’re communicating with both iPhone and Android users then for group chats you’re currently stuck with SMS/MMS.
It should be noted that currently the two most popular messaging apps in the world are WhatsApp and WeChat. WhatsApp has about 2 billion users and WeChat has about 1.4 billion users, but as mentioned most of these people have one and not the other.
I don't use WhatsApp, WeChat, or any of those others...so, you are saying you will be able to text WhatsApp and WeChat users using Apple Messages only, instead of installing both of those additional apps? If so, I can definitely see an additional advantage to Apple implementing RCS.
Do you mean in the US? Because the shift started around 2007-2008 where carriers began to move away from charging for SMS and started unlimited plans, free SMS became pretty ubiquitous by 2010 or so. Whatsapp was released in what 2009? iMessage was released in 2011 so maybe there was a couple of years where Whatsapp might have been more palatable than SMS/MMS (especially because MMS limits were set by carrier and not by spec). You caught the market right before the iPhone craze hit.
My memory is hazy during that period of time but I don't think it was particularly important for consumers. The iPhone 3G and the 3Gs had a resolution of 480 x 320 so MMS didn't look anywhere near as bad as it does with today's incredibly high resolution screens. Remember also that most were still on flip phones with much worse resolution at the time, the larger screened/higher resolution phones were just starting to get off the ground, many consumers on the 2-3 year upgrade cycle were still on older Nokias and Sony Erickssons. Typically US carriers limited MMS to 1.2mb, which was enough to display at the IP3G/IP3Gs' resolution.
It's interesting if you look up the stats Whatsapp isn't the 2nd most popular messaging platform in the US, it's actually the 4th, behind Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and iMessage. Which to me says the issue is even MORE convoluted and necessitates some sort of universal standard such as RCS to avoid more fragmentation. Or conversely the argument can be made that non-US users should all switch to Facebook Messenger because it has the majority, I'd be curious to see what the Whatsapp champions outside of the US say to that.
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No I’m not saying RCS will work with WeChat or whatever. I’m saying that WeChat, WhatsApp, and iMessage users will have RCS support on their phones without having to download any additional software.
Right now they all have SMS support but as we all know there are various issues with SMS, and having RCS will go a long way to addressing these problems.
This is a very good point. Most people I know in Canada do not have WhatsApp installed. Or WeChat for that matter. They’re much more likely to have Messenger. I personally don’t have any of the three installed.
My wife has WhatsApp specifically to communicate with her brother when he’s in Brazil but otherwise she uses SMS/MMS for group chats when he’s in Canada, despite all the deficiencies of SMS/MMS, because most of the other people we know in those group chats don’t have WhatsApp. By the way, about 85% of my messages are iMessage. The other 15% are SMS/MMS. I use iMessage even to communicate with friends in Asia including China but for those with Android, it’s SMS/MMS, with the MMS part being really hit and miss.
That's what I notice among my acquaintances, friends, and family; those who have Whatsapp installed really only use it for international free calls/texting. It's interesting that most of these people have Whatsapp, but not a single one has ever asked me to switch to Whatsapp and just use iMessage. Anecdotal of course, just my experiences.
ELI5:
There are no downsides to having two groups that once strictly adhered to their own positions merely enjoying peaceful-cohabitation after the initial confrontation has settled-down.
Nah mate. I’m completely fragmented, juggling with iMessages , WhatsApp and Telegram.
Personally I think RCS being allowed to work on iPhones is too little to late for Google to save its messaging project.
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True. WhatsApp is a piece of c... but people don't mind, and they hardly switch apps once they get used to them.
You just have to be able to make sacrifices like that. Real friends / people close to you will reach you wherever you are.
I don‘t care about random group chats on WhatsApp, I just left all of them and added a note that I‘m only reachable via iMessage / RCS or SMS.
Your mileage may vary, as my hardcore texting times are over anyways (in terms of hopping on to chat, my social circle only texts the bare minimum cause we aren‘t teenagers anymore). I‘m more active on random Discord communities than via texting on my phone, heck I even call more people than I text because it‘s easier to do so from a car or when working on something.
Be the change you want to be, don‘t fear the ecosystem lock-in (or exclusion). If everyone thinks like that ("I can‘t leave WhatsApp, everyone is there") then no change happens. Could also wait for a theoretical interoperability future, which I doubt happens any time soon.
Claiming that carriers are paying Google for Jibe without any data to back that up ALSO means stuff is being made up, just not by me.
It’s already been reported that Google is compressing images being transmitted over RCS, which is absolutely a cost saving move. Hopefully, it’s saving them enough money to keep it going if times get tough.
Google Messages better get this fix before iPhone RCS support rolls out
The iPhone is finally going to support RCS in 2024. However, Google should fix a huge problem with Google Messages before that happens.
www.androidauthority.com
I don’t either, just like I don’t understand the handful of people that will never use WhatsApp. If someone that a person wants very much to communicate with is using RCS or WhatsApp, they’ll either comply or perhaps they didn’t want to communicate with them all that much in the first place.
Given that RCS is becoming a thing and WhatsApp is already in use by millions of Americans (and will still potentially be in use for millions of Americans NOT on iOS 18) with millions more added each year, both the RCS and WhatsApp holdouts have challenging futures ahead!If there’s one big negative, it would be mainly for those folks that, similar to the anti-WhatsApp folks, don’t want their messages going through and being available to Google (instead of Meta). But, that’s more of a “personal preference” thing. Otherwise, from a technical perspective, it’s an improved experience with the big difference from SMS being that it’s only available where cellular data or WiFi is available and is best for folks with unlimited data plans. For folks still on limited data plans with unlimited texting (carriers still offer plans like this in the US), the messaging would count against their data plan, so they may want to monitor their usage and adjust their usage accordingly.
I don’t understand the handful of people that will never use WeChat. If someone that a person wants very much to communicate with is using RCS or WeChat, they’ll either comply or perhaps they didn’t want to communicate with them all that much in the first place.I don’t either, just like I don’t understand the handful of people that will never use WhatsApp. If someone that a person wants very much to communicate with is using RCS or WhatsApp, they’ll either comply or perhaps they didn’t want to communicate with them all that much in the first place.
But, still, it’s only available if the phone has a data plan. There still needs to be another BIG step where all carrier signals are capable of data, but that requires a broad infrastructure expenditure and is likely why carriers never signed on in a massive way in the first place.
This raises a very interesting point. As this is really only a problem for those in the US that are unable to get others to come to or use the platform of their choosing. Folks like you and others are people that are able to get the folks you want, to connect to you how you like. Others that aren’t able to do that have had (and will have) to maintain several different apps in order to keep track of those that don’t use what they would like them to use.
Some of these folks MAY be under the misapprehension that, now that RCS is a thing, that will solve all their problems. However, in the bigger social picture, if RCS, i.e. carrier messaging is still NOT where the people they like to communicate with are, they’re STILL not going to be there. It’s just that, in the future, when those folks say, “Why don’t you just use Messenger (or Instagram or iMessagelike everyone else in the group?” it will be via a read receipt enabled messaging service!
Exactly LOLI don’t understand the handful of people that will never use WeChat. If someone that a person wants very much to communicate with is using RCS or WeChat, they’ll either comply or perhaps they didn’t want to communicate with them all that much in the first place.
Which is why having RCS will be great.
As mentioned before, it's not as if everyone is on WhatsApp or WeChat. Only about half of worldwide mobile phone users are on any third party messaging service. Of those, the most popular is WhatsApp, but in second place is WeChat. However, as mentioned, most WhatsApp users don't have WeChat, and most WeChat users don't have WhatApp. Furthermore, that varies from country to country. In the US and Canada the most popular by far is Facebook Messenger (with WhatsApp using representing less than half of the number of Facebook Messenger), but a very large number of people don't have that either.
If you have worldwide contacts in a large group chat like many of us do, trying to make everyone agree to WeChat or WhatsApp or Messenger is just pointless, because people in Europe, China, Japan, and North America are generally not all going to agree to the same messaging application.
In my case it would mean having to install 3-4 separate additional applications to communicate with all these people on their preferred messaging apps, and it also means we can't include all of them in a group chat with these apps, so in the end I chose none of those apps, and we all communicate with SMS. Guess what? There are no complaints. They happily use SMS just fine, they aren't asking us to install WhatsApp or WeChat, because they are smart enough to understand that these applications have regional preferences. Furthermore, WhatsApp isn't even allowed in certain countries, so if you restrict yourself to WhatsApp, you are automatically excluding 1/5th of the world's population.
However, iMessage is a decent solution for many iPhone users because it has SMS fallback, and will soon have RCS fallback as well.
That's not my issue at all. The issue is we have group chats with SMS but SMS doesn't support the multimedia features. RCS solves this.Some of these folks MAY be under the misapprehension that, now that RCS is a thing, that will solve all their problems. However, in the bigger social picture, if RCS, i.e. carrier messaging is still NOT where the people they like to communicate with are, they’re STILL not going to be there. It’s just that, in the future, when those folks say, “Why don’t you just use Messenger (or Instagram or iMessagelike everyone else in the group?” it will be via a read receipt enabled messaging service!
To put it another way, what I'm trying to say here is that third party messaging applications are still extremely problematic with worldwide group chats. We have already solved this by using SMS to communicate with everyone. However, the drawback to this solution - which we are already using - is that the multimedia support is poor. RCS addresses this problem.
RCS isn't just a competitor to third party messaging apps, but it is also a replacement for SMS, which tons of people are using on a regular basis. If RCS adoption by carriers is going to be an issue, we will still NOT be switching to WhatsApp because it simply won't be an option for many people. In that scenario, we will just continue to use SMS, because that's the only truly fully supported messaging standard for all users in these group chats.
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I mentioned this before, but I'll mention it again. I've had smaller group chats which included people in China, using just iMessage, with SMS not even needed. Why? Cuz iMessage works fine in China. In contrast, neither WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger work in China. Both are blocked by the Great FireWall, but iMessage is not.
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I use iMessage because all of my friends use iMessage including those in Brazil, Mexico and England as they also have iPhones. I’m not going to use anything from Meta.
I don’t either, just like I don’t understand the handful of people that will never use WhatsApp. If someone that a person wants very much to communicate with is using RCS or WhatsApp, they’ll either comply or perhaps they didn’t want to communicate with them all that much in the first place.
I don't use Whatsapp because out of the hundreds of my contacts not a single one has ever asked me to Whatsapp, and the people I know that have it only use it for international calls. Plus I really dislike Facebook/Meta and do not wish to support their products.
Whatsapp is actually 4th in the US market penetration behind FB Messenger, Instagram, and iMessage. iMessage accounts for 29% of the market meaning roughly 98 million, far from a "handful," and it's actually much higher I just didn't find stats for messaging apps already loaded onto sold phones like Google/Verizon/Samsung, etc etc.
That's the beauty of RCS, it will already be built into every phone sold in the US, and most likely many other countries such as China which has a huge population. But here is the kicker and what baffles me about this discussion, if someone doesn't like RCS they can just turn it off and go back to their SMS/MMS world.
I just got RCS on beta 3 with first net. Most of my bot friends have converted to RCS. but I have two contacts that still say SMS. They confirm they have RCS turned on. I have deleted the thread, closed Messages, and even toggled RCS off and back on again.
Thoughts?
Thoughts?