Yup. Solutions like WhatsApp and Telegram have supplanted the need for RCS. Everybody in my country use WhatsApp, and no Android users here use RCS.
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Sarcastic Android 'Lyric Explainer Video' Urges Apple to Adopt RCS in Messages
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He’s talking about Messages in the cloud. The toggle switch for that is not checked by default.
🎯 Wow, okay, this person gets it and this is the only reply this thread needs. So cringe they made twisted this to fit their narrative.
…And those damn horseless carriages!
I figured that out after their clarifying response. That said, even if you don't use Messages in iCloud, your messages are still contained in the iCloud backup, along with the encryption key, by default. Messages in iCloud is just a different way to store iMessages so that they are synced across all your devices and moves the master messages database off your device and onto an Apple server. Regardless of whether you keep your messages database on device or in iCloud, if iCloud backup is enabled (which it is by default), the iMessage encryption key is backed up as well.
SMS is the fallback to RCS on RCS capable phones. There’s no proposal to get rid of SMS entirely. Especially for things like satellite phones where they can’t implement RCS at all due to the limited bandwidth of satellite connections. A satellite phone can send and receive SMS like it was a regular cell phone, and that’s a pretty useful thing.
iMessage would not go away and Google wouldn’t ask them to get rid of iMessage, any more than they would ask Facebook to get rid of Messenger or Whatsapp.
I hope they don't. I find it very useful to know what type of people I'm dealing with when texting new contacts, depending on the bubble color.
Nope, Apple only has the keys when stored on their iCloud service. Using push to push out your messages to all your devices is still end to end.
We can see why Google want this universally supported as they must have to make the same kind of decision on sending a message as Apple does: Does the recipient support iMessage/RCS? If not then send an SMS. By having RCS universally supported it would become the new 'lowest common denominator' for group messaging rather than SMS today.
Is this a stable standard, or is it in a state of evolution? Would Google be 'adding things' (the old Microsoft open standard tactic of 'embrace and then modify') so that they could make Apple's implementation 'old' or 'undesirable'?
I can see why Apple would hesitate to implement a standard they have no control over and cannot depend on remaining universally the same between devices. When RSC is as universally supported and stable as SMS I'm sure they would consider it.
Is this a stable standard, or is it in a state of evolution? Would Google be 'adding things' (the old Microsoft open standard tactic of 'embrace and then modify') so that they could make Apple's implementation 'old' or 'undesirable'?
I can see why Apple would hesitate to implement a standard they have no control over and cannot depend on remaining universally the same between devices. When RSC is as universally supported and stable as SMS I'm sure they would consider it.
It’s still end-to-end. End-to-end doesn’t say anything about what happens after the message is received. It’s like saying nothing is end-to-end because one side or the other could screenshot messages and post them to the internet.
Not friends, but some of my contacts are Android users. For example, my plumber, my hairdresser, my mechanic, and other people I deal with occasionally.
A ton of replies in this thread really won't age well at all and are gonna look even dumber than they already do in a few years
Improved encryption? Because the company who has perfected scanning peoples' communications is now concerned with privacy or something?
End-to-end encryption means that only the two parties which are communicating are able to decrypt the message since no third-party has access to the key involved.
iMessages are end-to-end encrypted if you don't use iCloud Backup for it because no third-party has access to said key, which resides on the device and is never made available to anyone else, including Apple.
iMessages are not end-to-end encrypted anymore if you use iCloud Backup because the key is contained in the backup, which Apple hosts on its own servers and is able to decrypt independently. This means Apple, which is a third-party in the context of the iMessages communication, effectively has obtained the encryption key and can decrypt the messages.
Unfortunately if Apple did anything here they would assign the engineering to the new hires or the ones kicked off the other teams for incompetence and we the users would end up with another poorly thought though buggy Apple App/service.
Apple needs to fix what they have before they start adding new stuff.
Apple needs to fix what they have before they start adding new stuff.
Except that the text group with 1 Droid user is a dumb text - can’t boot anyone like in an iMessage group lol. Quite annoying a new group excluding the outlier must be created.
How does that work if there is communication with someone who is using iCloud back up and the other person isn’t?
Your messages with the person that has iCloud Backup turned on are able to be decrypted by Apple (or law enforcement).
Another example is if you have a group chat with say 10 people, and one person in the group has iCloud backup on, all messages in the groupchat can be decrypted by Apple.
Honestly, this is insanely cringe ****...
But I do think Apple should support RCS. It is objectively better than SMS and would vastly improve things for Apple users. Half the country uses Android, so we aren't all "lucky" enough to only have friends/family who are purely iPhone users. The current situation just means I'm using imessage less and less in favor of whatsapp.
They can just replace SMS with RCS as a fallback protocol with green bubbles. iMessage has enough other features these days that you shouldn't have to cripple basic **** like group messaging and sending videos.
But I do think Apple should support RCS. It is objectively better than SMS and would vastly improve things for Apple users. Half the country uses Android, so we aren't all "lucky" enough to only have friends/family who are purely iPhone users. The current situation just means I'm using imessage less and less in favor of whatsapp.
They can just replace SMS with RCS as a fallback protocol with green bubbles. iMessage has enough other features these days that you shouldn't have to cripple basic **** like group messaging and sending videos.
When I want to do anything you have mentioned I have Discord and Slack. I don’t care for any of that in messages other than the recipient gets the message. It defaults to a iMessage and falls back to a green bubble if it is someone that has a feature phone. It just works and doesn’t need over complicated. RCS might have b more important a year or so ago, but now standard text messages work over Wi-Fi so there is no longer a need to replace them.
I am glad you like Apple which has Never Lied, Never Spied, and Never Stolen anything. I could explain a lot of stuff to you, but you need to come out of the RDF first.
If I understand how iMessages work correctly: in said communication, each iMessage sent is encrypted with a public key specific for the recipient, which can only be decrypted with the recipient's private key which resides on the device. When a user receives a iMessage, the device decrypts the message using said private key which ideally is not known to anyone else.
This means that if Apple (or any third-party) obtains the private key from the iCloud Backup of an user (or by any other means), it would be able to decrypt encrypted messages sent to said user. It would not allow Apple to decrypt messages sent by said user to another user: to do that Apple would need to obtain that other user's private key.
PS: this is about defeating end-to-end encryption communication, not about Apple being able to read the whole message history, including messages sent and received, by decrypting the backup. That is also a possibility but said messages were not decrypted by a third-party, they were decrypted by the recipient itself.
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