> Can you have the same identity if you change your number/carrier?
Identity seems to be tied to a number (not carrier), but Messages uses Google Contacts as an optional layer of indirection.
So, if you change your number, and the other person changes (or adds) the number to your existing contact, your identity is preserved (for them). If the other person creates a new contact for your new number (or doesn't associate the new number with any contact), identity is not preserved.
> Can you use it not on the smartphone?
Yes, you can use Google Messages for Web on a computer, but the authentication is still tied to the phone via a QR code, and I think that communication actually is relayed through the phone if the conversation is via SMS rather than RCS.
> Can you use it without cellular data Eg with Wi-Fi only?
Yes.
> Can you throw out the SIM card and still send/receive messages?
I think that the answer is generally 'no', but there are a few edge cases (eg. I'm not sure what happens if you auth Google Messages for Web on a computer, set it to remember the device auth indefinitely, and then remove the SIM or turn off the phone).
> If the answers is 'no' then it is a carrier lock-in.
As you can see, the answer isn't quite so black and white.
> Whatsapp is also bound to a phone number ...? Is that carrier bound?
In the world with NMP - it is 'carriers' bound, but still - good luck moving to another country and preserving your number.
> Why throw out a sim card?
There can be any reasons.. but the most common one is someone 'liberate' you of your phone and other belongings (sometimes including documents). So now you want to talk to your family, you get a phone, login with your Google account... and now you are required the same phone number to work it back. So off you go to your telco office to restore the SIM. Oh. It is 3:00 AM and you don't have any documents/ID to prove what you are the someone you claim. And imagine if this would happen not in your backyard, but on the other side of the planet.
> In Belgium, the number is personal and not from someone else
MNP. But still you are tied to your /number/.
Unknown number: "Hey mom! It's me, your son NicoJuicy! I was robbed tonight, can you send $100 so I could get home?"
Yes, for me WhatsApp is similar with proposed RCS implementation - it is too 'carriers' bound. I hate what I need to throw my /phone/ number around to everyone to just be able to receive some text from them.
I would really prefer some identificator not tied to a local provider of a completely irrelevant service.
Telegram, at least, allows you to use a nickname, though it still requires '2FA' through the SMS for the registration.
I fully agree with the article. Google shot their own foot in many many things and is now slowly reaping the rewards. They had complete carte blanche to do as they wished on Android in terms of messaging, and they chose to run around like a chicken with its head cut off. RCS is a non-starter, no one outside of the US is eager to go back to an SMS-like protocol.
HN opinion has been negative on Google for a while, and this is filtering into the consumer landscape.
It doesn't mean they are going out of business tomorrow or at all, but I see a period of MSFT-like regression, reflection and then a Nadella to bring them out of their malaise.
On the other hand, the US is unique for this because iMessage is not as popular outside the US.
After reading the story about Google taking away a feature from their speakers, due to a patent dispute with Sonos, I can't help but wonder if the reason Google does such a terrible job at messaging has something to do with patents. Maybe they know they need to compete with iMessage but just can't because some patent farm or other company got there first?
Surely between one of their 8 messaging apps/teams they have the required expertise and patents? I'm not particularly keen on giving them any benefit of the doubt. They're one of the biggest, richest companies in the world.
Their products in this space really do just suck and Google's ability to do good consumer facing products is questionable and the ones that are good get killed off before they even have a chance to get off the ground.
Yup at this point if you buy into the new consumer products of either MSFT or GOOG, you have only yourself to blame when they inevitably get cancelled. Stick to their cash cows if you want stability. What really hurts is of course when they buy a different company and then kill its products. (Nest)
I always considered RCS to be raising the lowest common denominator up a bit from SMS, not really a replacement for any of the various data-based messaging services.
I have read many comments here and in other places saying that Apple makes the green SMS bubbles annoying and hard to read. But from looking at this screenshot, I don't get that vibe at all. They don't look more annoying than the blue ones. In fact, I'd say in the top part of both screenshots, the blue ones look like they have less contrast than the green ones.
The color isn't the problem, never was. The color simply indicates that the person is using basic SMS, and that has an effect on all members of the conversation.
There was an article making the rounds the other day that argued that Apple had changed the green bubbles to have less contrast and thus be harder to read that they were in previous releases.
Honestly I’m not sure if it made it to HN. I saw it somehow (don’t remember how I came across it) and the title was kind of generic about the blue vs green bubble thing. It was only if you actually went in and read it you saw it was making a pointer other than “shunning and network effects”.
It will look different depending on your settings[0] and the type of screen, affecting the gamma and gamut.
On mine, that screenshot looks like the green has an unpleasantly high saturation compared to the blue. The higher saturation increases the perceived value/lightness, lowering contrast.
[0] On my phone (a Pixel5a running Android 12), Display > Colors is set to Adaptive, rather than Natural or Boosted.
This has always bothered me. Apple definitely knows this and is doing it on purpose. The color green they chose is just hard on the eyes. They don't think it's a good color.
No, the original color was black text on a different shade of green. The contrast was much higher, and unlike the current situation it was compliant with Apple's UI rules
All Google had to do was to keep improving on their original messaging software, Google Talk.
Similarly, Microsoft would likely be a dominant player in the chat space today if they hadn't rebranded and renamed MSN Messenger several times and then abandoned it altogether.
MSN Messenger was frickin awesome. You could draw pictures into the chat window. You could play a game of checkers while you chatted. It had a thriving ecosystem of apps and plugins. Everyone I knew used MSN Messenger... and then one day, Microsoft just said screw it, everyone can move to slow and clunky Skype... and that was the end of it.
Hell, ICQ might still be around if AOL had put more development resources into it.
The chat space is so bloody fragmented now, but it has nothing to do with Apple. Any one of the above mentioned companies could be killing it in this space if they hadn't pissed away what they had.
I guess you might be able to say that ICQ is still around? And one of the largest messaging platforms around, if not the largest?
Of course I'm talking about the QQ variant, which is probably so far from the original ICQ that I have no leg to stand on making the above claim. Still, a very interesting story to follow.
And another far-from-original variant is still kicking, aptly named ‘ICQ’ [1]. AOL sold off its ICQ assets to Digital Sky Technologies (now Mail.ru) group [2] which continues to develop and invest in it to this day. From what I understand, like LiveJournal (acquired similarly by a Russian company Rambler [3], ICQ continues to have a sizable user base in Eastern Europe from what I gather.
It's a generic problem that there is something like AOL, ICQ, Paltalk, Skype, etc. that is pretty good. The company behind it lets it rot, and then there is WebEx or Facebook Messenger or Slack or Discord or Zoom which is good for a while but it will rot too...
Firms that make messaging products say they need to control the system for quality, innovation, spam control, etc. Yet, nobody questions that a Verizon customer can call a T-Mobile customer and vice versa. If all chat clients interoperated than there would be real competition to create the best client. As it is we have the pernicious pseudo-competition of two-sided markets where you install client X not because you want it or because it is good but because the person you want to talk to insists you install client X.
If the European Union wanted to make the internet better they should mandate that chat clients be interoperable the same way that telephone services are interoperable.
The conclusion I come to is that it is unsustainable to offer IM for free.
Perhaps some of the things like Slack that make money at the enterprise level can afford to keep free around and working well enough to function for longer.
One of the subtle problems with offering a traditional IM service is that there are some scaling aspects that are super-linear with the number of users. For instance, as the average number of users on your subscription list increases, more of them have status changes per unit time, and each of those status changes must also go out to more users on average. The scaling issues aren't necessarily a full O(n^2) but they're often larger than simply O(n log n). Even after a many-times-over drop in the price of computing power it's still pretty expensive to offer something like that for free.
If you look around, you can see how current solutions often work around that. For instance, Slack shards everyone simply by the nature of how it works, there isn't just a "Slack handle" that anyone can ping me at. We're not all in one big namespace. There's many fewer status updates it does, too, it's a lot more selective about what statuses you get.
Another solution is Matrix; with how cheap computing power is, if a few hundred people bring their own to the party it's no big deal anymore to run a server like that, and no one person necessarily has to bring the big bucks. But if one entity tried to run the whole network, they'd certainly notice the bill.
> For instance, Slack shards everyone simply by the nature of how it works, there isn't just a "Slack handle" that anyone can ping me at. We're not all in one big namespace.
For some reason, Slack got this right, and then Discord did it wrong anyway.
It's funny how Google Talk and MSN were so much popular but weren't able to successfully transition to mobile and capture that market. WhatsApp is number one messaging app in the world right now and probably will stay for some time.
What I like about whatsapp is that they don't do any bullshit. Unlike Viber, when they tried to pivot into some sort of social network for celebs and what not.
SMS is communication protocol; you can only send text messages or reply to text messages, nothing beyond that. No profiles, status updates, friends etc.
I don't like WhatsApp anymore but it was in its time my favourite social network. I had all my important groups there, used it exclusively to communicate with close friends and family.
It was the place were most images were shared and discussions were held and so on.
I used to think that, until I realised it's impossible (well difficult, and not officially supported) to export your messages from WhatsApp. That's pretty bullshit.
“Depending on your settings, you can also periodically back up your WhatsApp chats to Google Drive”
“You can use the export chat feature to export a copy of the chat history from an individual or group chat.”
I haven’t checked the full backup, but exports of individual chats are easily readable (zip with a .txt of all texts in the chat and individual images, IIRC)
If you have an Android phone, you can extract the SQLite DB that contains all your WhatsApp messages. When I switched from Android to iOS I backed up my DB and still use it when I need to read an old conversation.
This is highly revisionist history: Google shut down XMPP after years of neglect, and they were still late to the party implementing things like video chat even within their proprietary network. There was one legitimate technical concern — XMPP complicates push notifications for mobile clients since you don't want to prevent power-saving by keeping a TCP socket active — but that didn't force them to neglect everything else, or to close out 3rd-party clients. Trying to build their own closed network did that.
> you don't want to prevent power-saving by keeping a TCP socket active
Slight aside: keeping a TCP connection consomes almost nothing. In fact, that's how push notifications work today on Android: a TCP connection is kept open, and apps' server send a ping to Google to tell the mobile to wake up.
What prevents power-saving is if every app keeps a different socket open to a different server and pings the servers on different schedules. That forces the mobile to wake up constantly.
Note that I said “active” — if you're getting things like presence updates, you'd want to filter them to allow the client to avoid keeping the radio active and that wasn't built in to XMPP. It's definitely not an excuse given Google's level of resources — they could have had a very optimized Google Talk client and published a spec for third-party clients to use the same notifications framework so I don't consider this more than a speed bump.
That's why I don't think it was more than a fig leaf for Google's true reasons for closing up their chat network. That was during the period where they were axing anything trying out-Facebook Facebook and I wouldn't trust the stated rationale for any of those decisions.
It would be interesting to see whether Facebook/WhatsApp and iMessage have made them desperate enough to reverse course on XMPP but I'm skeptical that they'd be trusted enough to be successful.
In fact, Google already had a precursor to XEP-0352 called `google:queue`, but as I remember the stated reason for shutting down XMPP as being "spam"¹. Google apparently can't deal with spam in a federated communication system ...
Yeah, it’s sad. I can get not peering with the world but it’s not like they couldn’t do something like an open CA-style agreement to follow certain standards as a condition to peering. If they’d done that, they’d be in a much better position to ask governments to require federation with an open protocol.
It's been a persistent source of black comedy that basic messaging across almost every platform with even some encryption, mixed media, workable audio and some experimental video chat was like a solved problem in 2008 and seemed like it would be totally in the bag and then a complete dumpster fire again by about 2016.
Even people like me that hated MS and AOL had chat clients that could communicate with their networks and Google Talk/Hangouts and MSN Messenger were both great for what they were. At the time I felt like we had lost something important by moving to "push" networks versus e-mail but I'd take those days now in a heartbeat. Maybe by 2030, something like Matrix will have us back to what XMPP was doing and I'll be able to send a message to someone's shitty Teams from whatever Google's fifth chat replacement is by then.
It's even worse when I'm traveling in east Asia and there are like 5 different Korean and several Chinese chat networks in addition to WhatsApp trying to be the next LINE and becoming the one-stop access point for nearly everything. I'm honestly expecting to see a 7-11 integrated messaging network at some point.
For cross service integration I recommend mattermost, too. It has plugins and a simple enough API you can use anything with almost anything else, even if you don't want to use mattermost clients.
For whatever reason enterprise was slow to adopt messaging. I think a lot of this floundering about by Microsoft was an attempt to get wide scale enterprise adoption of a messaging protocol, and make money off of it.
I'd forgotten about that era of my life! I used Adium on OS X and had customized so much about it, down to the individual sounds played when certain friends (and crushes) came online. And I was able to essentially ignore what platform I was using to talk on: AIM friends and GChat friends appeared side-by-side. What a dream.
Trillian here for me! That shit was AWESOME. So much customization too of the UI.
I didnt realize I had trillian setup to log all my conversations to file and I found the logs recently when going through a very, very old harddrive. Middleschool me was cringey as fuck
Upsides: I no longer had to care what messenger my friends used, it was all the same to me. Extensible and theme-able which was just the way I liked my software at the time. Growl integration.
Downsides: I made the mistake of installing and using a FFVII-themed sound pack that invoked a Pavlovian response in me every time I heard certain sound effects from that game. Took the better part of a decade after I stopped using Adium to shake that off.
Even AOL Instant Messenger was awesome! I used it for almost 20 years. AOL could've turned it into Slack back in the 2000's. I used to work for startups that used private AIM chat rooms for ops issues, deployments, etc.
Also Viber that used to be the main contender of WhatsApp in Western Europe up until a couple of years ago. I believe it's still beating WhatsApp on market share in a couple of markets like Israel iirc.
China has WeChat and QQ (though WeChat is way more popular). Both are basically mini OSes at this point, with apps and other third party functionality able to be built on top of them. I'm not Chinese, but use both of these apps to stay in touch with Chinese friends and family.
I’m surprised. The younger generations (including my own, and I’m closer to 40 than 20…) seem to have abandoned the main Facebook product en masse in favor of first Instagram and then others. Are people still using FB Messenger stand-alone even if not using Facebook itself?
I still use FB Messenger to keep in contact with a group of friends. I would love to use something else, but we were never able to agree on another platform to switch too... I barely use Facebook, don't have the app installed, and would probably stop using it completely if that group chat moved elsewhere.
I have FB Messenger, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram and Discord on my phone...
Yep, WhatsApp for normal people in Europe; Telegram or Signal for those suspicious of Facebook.
I kind of miss XMPP, which seemed like the answer at one point. As it is, I need about six messaging apps (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Telegram, a Matrix client, Slack, and I'm probably forgetting one) plus SMS/iMessage to keep in touch with everyone.
So true, XMPP is fantastic. I also use it for SMS and signal (I wrote some simple bridges for Prosody). We use it for work too. It's great to have it on all my devices. Group chats (MUC) also work well. The modularity is where it really shines. Conversations on Android keeps a long running TCP session open, it works better than push based solutions and is just as light on battery somehow.
I mean, it still exists, but approximately no-one uses it. There was a time when you could talk to people on Google and Facebook's chat systems with it.
In Asia, it's a mixture of whatsapp, LINE (Japan/Thailand/Korea), Alichat, Wechat. Australia is a mixture of FB messenger and Whatsapp for families. Kids use different services depending on how old, snapchat, tiktok, instagram, discord (very much so for kids in the "fortnite years").
LINE and Ali/We chat are now more like platforms, for example, LINE has a wallet called LINE Pay that you can use in retail stores that grew out of selling virtual stickers for their chat client. They integrate to transit services and other things too.
And now it seem Microsoft is pushing Teams instead of Skype. There are even two different Teams Apps in Windows 11, one for personal use, one for work.
That sounds like how there were two versions of MSN Messenger/Windows Messenger/Windows Live - one for 'personal' and the other for 'enterprise'. Cannot quite recall the exact differentiation now but I do recall many folks having problems with log-in credentials for one not working with the other about 20 years ago!
Same happened with Skype after it was bought by Microsoft, and I seem to recall this is relatively recent. There were (are?) two Skype clients - one for 'personal' (the original Skype) and another for 'enterprise' (rebranded Windows Live for Enterprise possibly?) and not compatible. Again, I recall trying to help confused Windows users figure out why the (incorrect) client wouldn't log-in with certain credentials.
Thats because there were also two different Skypes - Skype for Business (which was Lync) and Skype. Two totally different platforms with different code. God knows why they named them the same.
Teams is supposed to completely replace Skype for Business
Buying Skype for billions and then killing MSN to force people on to it is easily the worst decision I can think of by consumer-oriented big tech company after 2005. If anyone involved in the decision still works at Microsoft they're doing something wrong. People make mistakes but this was one that has ended up costing tens of billions in value (possibly 100+) and that even a child could've told you was an awful idea - I was pretty young and I sure could've! Maybe the failure to make Windows phones big is a bigger failure but that's more of a failure to produce a good product than one decision. You could name Yahoo "not buying" Facebook/Google but deciding not to do something is more understandable than throwing away a golden egg.
I could never figure out why Android did not copy iMessage and offer the same within the Android ecosystem. The Android equivalent of the green and blue bubbles. No one is interested in a carrier driven initiative like RCS at scale.
Good question. It seems that there may be too many PM’s trying to make a name for themselves. There may also be a lack of vision, and a lack of willingness to let a product live and to make incremental changes to it… it either succeeds right away or they replace it with a similar product (rebranded) /shut it down.
... even though Google locked-in the entire Android ecosystem by forcing people onto Google's RCS servers because they couldn't wait for carrier implementation?
Not just from a European POV, but also from Eastern-Asian and South-American POV. I don't know the rest of the world.
For me and my peers, SMS is for 2 factor auth, spammy advertising, and the occasional parent that mistakenly sends a SMS instead of a WhatsApp message.
I wouldn't count on it. SMS is available on any cellphone. If you don't know what chat apps the other side has, it's still the trustworthy if clunky baseline.
For more than 10 years, SMS and a chat ap have lived side by side. The favorite chat app changed a few times, but SMS just plods along, never really gaining or losing market share.
>SMS just plods along, never really gaining or losing market share
SMS lost huge market share to messaging mobile apps so EU telecoms changed their business model from selling SMS messages and/or calls plans to selling GBs data plans. For example you can buy unlimited daily, weekly or monthly data plan or x amount of GBs data plan. Some EU telecoms went so far to sell bundled apps data plans like this https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4e/%2B_Smar...
Taken into account that mobile data is not always available it will take some time until SMS will be extinct. And this in a central european country who just upgraded phone numbers for fax machines.
To young people who never used SMS and will grow up only on WhatsApp, FB messenger, Viber, Snapchat etc.
Snapchat is basically MMS with rich user experience and advanced features. Is anybody still using MMS when you have something like WhatsApp and Snapchat?
SMS and MMS are still useful as communicating protocols and communication services when you don't have internet access but you can think of SMS as something like XMPP. Why would you use bare bone XMPP when you can use WhatsApp running on XMPP with 99 useful features that XMPP doesn't originally have and support.
Plenty of people don't care about sending images over messages with phones, they use email and facebook for that.
Plus in many pre-paid plans the amount of SMS is almost unlimited, or with packages like 5 000 per month, which hardly anyone ever consumes half of it.
SMS is still more reliable because it doesn't rely on cellular data service. In emergency situations when cellular networks are overloaded or with a weak connection it's more likely to get through.
In the absence of internet connection yea SMS is still useful but it has nowhere near the quality of UX and features of mobile messaging apps. It is just communication protocol after all.
Plus SMS uses phone signalling, like 2G does, and 3G data a bit. It needs a lot of signalling bandwidth where data and voice, ironically, do not need as much. SMS will fail long before data or voice on cellular networks fails. It has retry, which is famous for sometimes taking actual days to deliver a message.
Doesn’t apply from 4G onwards, where everything is IP, but still.
Depending on what you mean by "needs a lot of signalling bandwidth" I think that is incorrect.
I recall the early SMS functionality being added to cellular phones after the introduction of 2G in the early 1990s and as I recall, one claim was it monetised the massive amount of spare signalling capacity on the network. In the UK I recall that being said in 1994 by Orange (the first UK 'challenger' network vs 1G incumbents CellNet and Vodafone) when I had a Nokia 2010 handset.
SMS or signaling cannot use the bandwidth used for voice, they are entirely separate. On 1G and 2G one SMS needs the same bandwidth as 8 calls to go through. The signaling line can run at insanely low bitrates (and there may be errors).
The main problem was too many phones in one place causing errors on the signaling line. Like a concert. You'd get to a point where maybe one call can go through every 10 seconds. Then one person tries to send an SMS "because he can't get through" ... and the phone helpfully keeps retrying to send the SMS, each retry causing >1 minute of nothing signaling on the network. The network is now dead and while existing calls work fine, you can't even hang up anymore, never mind making or receiving a call.
Don't forget - SMS was a hack in the system messages:
> The key idea for SMS was to use this telephone-optimized system, and to transport messages on the signalling paths needed to control the telephone traffic during periods when no signalling traffic existed.
If you're outside of Europe, it really depends on the country. Some countries it might be Telegram, Whatsapp, Line, WeChat, etc. There's no real universal standard.
Imagine if Google had implemented the small feature set of iMessage and supported it on all OSes. Imagine how much market share they could have captured.
What you're describing is WhatsApp. So we don't need to speculate.
iMessage benefited tremendously from being the default. Combine that with Apple's mobile market share in the US and you get the present situation.
My gripe isn't really that it won in the US. Its that you need Apple hardware to participate.
Google may be self interested but they're right about one thing: knowingly allowing and fueling this social dynamic is inconsistent with Apple's brand. But it was never really about values, just making consumers feel good about their purchases.
I also described signal and a dozen other competitors. None of those apps are made by Google. Google ships Android. I don't think my point should have been missed.
Their point is Google should have stuffed their iMessage equivalent (such as Hangouts) inside of a generic texting app that also handled SMS/MMS by default, and then enabled all the same features that Apple did and released it for iOS.
Exactly it's the iOS app called "Messages" that is too powerful for Google's liking. Google uses an article about iMessage as a social network to make it seem like they are the victims for not out-competing the "Messages" app.
It's been said here already that gchat had the features that could be been integrated into Android's SMS app, add end-to-end encryption and they would have crushed the iPhone.
From a user perspective, the Messages app can. I want SMS/MMS seamlessly integrated (like when my cellular data connection dies, the bubbles go green), like the Messages app does. If WhatsApp cannot, then it's definitely missing a huge piece of usability.
The thing about iMessage is that you don’t need a separate app. You can have iMessage and SMS right next to each other.
Google never seemed to understand this convenience. They released Allo without any SMS support and were hostile so suggestions that it was a gating feature to adoption. Allo predictably failed as it offered no benefits over competing services, and no SMS fallback so that it could be the single messaging app.
If Google wants to level the playing field they should do it by competing and innovating. I suggest they start that endeavor by better understanding why people actually use iMessage in the first place.
The really sad thing is that they actually had this.
Hangouts on a Google Fi phone used to let you consolidate everything to hangouts - SMS, Chats, Calls, etc. It was a pain it was limited to Fi, but it worked just fine. You could also pop open Hangouts in Gmail in your browser and there all your sms messages were, nicely grouped and tracked.
Then apparently hangouts stopped being cool enough - so Google decided to shutter it in favor of "Google Messages". Technically - "Messages for web" also supports the same feature set as the integrated hangouts, but it FUCKING SUCKS.
The phone/browser syncing is bad, the UI is a complete regression. Just the process of enabling it required me to actually contact support at google fi (you have to open settings, disable previous sms settings for fi, stop hangouts, update your google account, and then opt into a beta).
Basically - Hangouts did exactly this, but Google continues to act like Google, and shutter any product that might actually be a good foundation to build/maintain, since Google has shown AGAIN AND AGAIN that it can't actually maintain any product.
Google can innovate just fine - it's the follow through that they lack.
I also had the Hangouts/sms combined app on my Google Nexus. But as you said, after annoying everyone because the sms app was suddenly gone, they annoyed everyone again because it was suddenly back. And then the annoyed everyone with several new messengers, though I am not sure who still payed attention at that time. Leaving out how annoying the death of google talk before all that was.
Google has messengers on every android phone preinstalled and nobody uses them, because they create them, never significantly update them and then abandon them. It's completely their fault they don't even get a mention when people talk about messaging apps.
Yes I used Hangouts and Google Fi for this exact reason. It was perfect. If they would have just rolled this out globally to all Android users I believe Google would have won the messaging battle with Apple.
I've since switched from Android to iOS, but Fi+Hangouts was amazing at the time. Too bad Google seemingly abandoned both projects.
This is what annoyed me the most. Google was there, they had an awesome solution. Then they just abandoned it. Even in its old, clunky state, it was still immensely useful, and user feedback was -very- vocal about its utility. They just don't care.
Around the time that they started f-ing around with 15 different chat apps and killing off products, and integrations with other products, was when a Google account with "integration" started to become more of a hassle than worthwhile to me, personally. I used to use gChat, Hangouts, etc. but now I just use iPhone stuff since everyone I know has iPhone stuff. Apple hasn't deprecated anything since at least 5 years ago (the last time I had a work iPhone) so to me that signals that I can keep iPhones and not have to continually figure out what the "new way to chat" is, like I had to with Google. I've almost completely migrated from Google, except for Photos (which is superior to alternatives, IMO; I can actually backup my Google Photos from my Linux CLI whereas I couldn't figure out how to reliably do that with Apple Photos) and Google Search usage. I have had my Gmail account since ~2004 and I basically killed/deleted all of the services in my Google account now (even Google Voice sucks now, so I basically abandoned my phone number I used from ~2001 that I ported into it) except for forwarding email to my new email address and using Photos. I used to be "all in" with Google, but they made it too hard to keep using stuff that kept being killed off, so they dug their own grave.
Yup, and didn't this exist pre Google Fi? Maybe it was just certain android phones, but I remember messaging one or two friends from hangouts in Gmail while at work, and they would respond really quick because they got the messages on their android phones. This may have been back before iPhones had SMS handoff built into iMessage on Macs, so in a way Google was more advanced than Apple's solution then.
Of course Google has killed all that many times over. They made their own bed.
Yes, but it does suggest that converting any given market doesn't require there to be a singular combined app. I think it might not have been a terrible idea, but probably not a terrible idea.
I never understood why Google didn't just clone Apple's app many years ago. Hangouts was pretty close - take that, add e2e encryption for in-app threads (like iMessage) and make sure SMS is there as a peer. Make a client for the major platforms and then let the project slip into maintenance mode.
Instead, they championed RCS which (last time I checked) isn't encrypted which is borderline unethical IMHO.
I don't have duo or allo or anything like that on my Android phone, but I have one friend that I get different background color - a darker blue than normal sms, read receipts, and encryption, in the Google Android "Messages" app.
We've never really dug in to why, as we're both using the default app. No other conversation has ever had this blue message and lock symbol and checkmarks going on.
RCS doesn’t need a separate app either. You can have SMS and RCS conversations in the same app regardless of if you’re using Google Messages/Samsung Messages/etc
When I lived overseas several years ago, and was on an ancient plan that only allowed 200 free SMS messages, the blue vs green was a critical distinction. After my free SMS allotment, it indicated whether I was being charged or not.
Honestly, Google has spent far too long creating and throwing away messaging applications. This is almost entirely their fault for not enabling an easily cross-platform method years ago.
I've made the switch to Signal, my girlfriend uses it on her iPhone to replace iMessage since I made the switch to Android last month. She can also use it on her Windows laptop unlike iMessage. My family members who are tech-y enough use Signal with me, and when they're not, I can still send standard SMS through the app. Signal even implements responses similar to iMessage 'likes' and 'hearts'. I don't think I could praise Signal enough for the great implementation they've built.
Their crypto-enterprise this past year did make me feel a bit slighted, but as I don't use that feature, I can't comment on it.
You can send SMS through the [Signal] app?! Been using it for a few weeks now but haven't figured this out. Or do you mean send SMS through the stock SMS app?
Aye, you can send SMS messages through the Signal app itself.
To do so, you have to go into your default apps, set the default messaging app to Signal (factory default is Messages for Pixel devices, likely whatever Samsung uses for Samsung devices). I just checked to see if there were any extra settings you have to enable in the Signal app, but it doesn't appear to be so. If a user uses both SMS or encrypted chat, you can long press the send button and decide between which it will use.
Do note, that any previous messages sent via SMS from other apps won't show up in Signal for message history. Likewise the same if/when you switch to another SMS app.
Thanks for the tip about the long press, I had no idea - this will be useful for some contacts that have installed Signal some time ago but forgotten about it (and haven't deregistered their number!).
Not exactly mobile, they have an iPad app that'll let you login into the same account. But not available on Android tablets. Or on other phones, but clearly the technology is there.
Nope, and it is a completely artificial restriction. For example:
- iPhone + iPad? Supported.
- Android Phone + Android Tablet? Supported.
- iPhone + iPhone (no SIM card/no phone number)? Not supported.
- Android Phone + Android Phone (no SIM card)? Not supported.
This, according to them, because they want to simplify the setup experience. But in reality adding a bypass option to the onboarding process to provide the tablet setup experience would be trivial and should have happened three years ago.
You can add this to the "list" like no Gifs on PC even though the code exists for mobile clients, and they share a lot of source code already.
It doesn’t matter if Google ruined android messaging. The point is, tons of people use android and google is trying to make it better. The title of this article suggests an orientation towards google of contempt, as opposed to showing that google is trying to do right by its former mistakes. And does not point out that apple has not been nice in the past either.
The article promotes a zero sum mentality. That only apple should win because iMessage is better and because google already messed up.
As opposed to a value oriented mentality that a new standard, RCS, could be better for android and iOS users alike.
Google hasn’t always been a great company. I don’t understand why we can’t celebrate wins, especially those that would benefit others, such as rcs.
To do otherwise is to indefinitely call some parties good and some parties bad, to engage in black and white thinking. Which is more harmful for ourselves and says more about ourselves than the individuals and corporations of the world.
What was posted by the official Android account ("Message should not benefit from bullying. Texting should bring us together, and the solution exists. Let’s fix this as one industry."), and the opinion of the article's author ("Google took to Twitter this weekend to complain that iMessage is just too darn influential with today's kids") bare no relation.
The author clearly doesn't like RCS, which is an opinion he's entitled to.. but Google's approach to try and get multiple vendors to adopt an open standard (RCS), instead of creating a walled garden seems like the better path.
The truth is Google could introduce an app today, and if it was good enough and outdid iMessage, and people would start switching over within a few years. They could make it part of Chrome to supercharge adoption but nope.
Google sounds like dudes who whine about cancellation.
“..google is trying to do right by its former mistakes” - this entire thread is a joke. I mean come on… they don’t even let their products have a chance to breathe before shutting them down just so they can release the same product with tweaked branding and a different UI.
Larry Page wanted to buy WhatsApp so Google can compete in IM app business but WhatsApp sold to Facebook. I think Google had Gmail chat called Gchat, that thing could've been successful idk how it failed tbh.
I'm so glad this is chiefly an American problem, as I wrote previously in another post about iMessage. Outside the USA and maybe some CANZUK countries, SMS are dead, iMessage is irrelevant and chat apps such as WhatsApp, FB Messenger, Telegram, Viber, KakaoTalk and LINE dominate the market - I live in Italy and I haven't received a single SMS from an actual human being in several years.
In those countries where Apple didn't have a > 50% market share in the early '10s, people simply couldn't use iMessage. For instance, this is a summary of how things went in Italy. I think something along these line could have happened in most other countries where prepaid traffic was the norm though:
1. In Italy, basically the entirety of mobile plans were and still are prepaid, which meant you charged your account with money which you then used to pay for your traffic. Most people also had plans you could easily change, which gave you stuff such as SMS and phone calls minutes for a fixed fee, and you paid for them using prepaid credit. More "serious" contracts were heavily taxed, and thus only make sense for corporate phones or if you have a VAT account to deduct some of the taxes (and even them they were not the cheapest option).
2. No prepaid plan included unlimited SMS until around 2015, when they had already become largely irrelevant to most people. Before then, you generally got a very limited amount of SMS per month or day, and those were often tied to numbers belonging to the same carrier.
This meant that most people in a certain area were basically forced to stick with a certain MVO for most of the '00s. For instance, a very popular 2007 Vodafone prepaid plan in Italy costed €6 per month, and included 100 SMS a day towards all Vodafone numbers (99 actually, you had to pay the first one). Having the "wrong" carrier in that time period meant that people had to pay a lot of extra credit to have a proper conversation with you - this was often a deal breaker for romantic relationships among teenagers, or led to people not contacting you at all. A very interesting time indeed.
3. MMS were basically never included in any plan ever, and when they did, they had the same limitations as SMS. Often, if your plan followed the "pay the first message, get 99 free" clause this was also true for MMS, meaning you had to pay for the first SMS AND the first MMS. If People were so wary of them that they actually deleted the MMS APN from their phones to avoid sending one of them by mistake - if you wanted to send a photo to someone you simply waited until you got home, in order to use MSN Messenger or email. The only usage of MMS I remember of in the '00s was sexting.
3. When iPhones and Android came out in the late '00s, data packs suddenly became a necessity to most early adopters. The iPhone heavily pushed its Internet capabilities a lot, and you often had just spent a hefty sum (remember: prepaid meant you had to pay the whole phone cost upfront) so you wanted to squeeze value out of it. Carriers at the time came out with the idea of selling extra prepaid packs with a limited amount of data (i.e. 50 MB a day, or 500 MB a month), which was not an awful lot but it was enough for maps and some light browsing.
4. I actually bought an iPhone 3G back in 2008, and it was truly amazing for its time. I paid around €550 for it, which was quite a lot for a teenager - I had to sink a lot of the money I had earned from my summer job in order to buy that. Most people around me were very against the idea of spending so much money on a phone - after all they could get by by simply buying a random Nokia 6610i or whatever for €100 and pay your 10 euros a month in prepaid credit and do whatever you needed to do. The fact that carriers in countries like the USA basically forced you into 2 year plans meant that you often got iPhones for cheap, which helped get a foothold in the market.
5. When people started to actually switch to smartphones around ~2011, most people pic...
Before Google complains about Apple holding back interoperable rich texting with RCS, Google should make RCS work with Google Voice. The people in charge of product at Google remain utterly incompetent. Get your house in order.
Yep, and before Google complain that Apple doesn't allow iMessage on Android, maybe they should make sure their closest product (Messages by Google) is available on iOS?
How do you expect that to work? Apple doesn't allow third-party SMS apps, and as far as I understand RCS is also pretty closely tied in with carriers so it probably wouldn't work without official support from Apple either.
On Google Fi, Messages can sync messages with web app. I wish there was a Messages for iOS for reading Google Fi messages on my iPad. But that would be a pretty niche use and they would have to call it something less confusing.
Hangouts used to have the ability to do both Hangouts and SMS. But it didn't have the ability to automatically switch like iMessage. They could have also rolled out the ability to sync SMS to more carriers instead of just Sprint and Google Fi.
Can't they ship a whatsup style client and then proxy it onto RCS or whatever they need to use on the backend?
The reality is a google is a total mess. We couldn't get their speakers to work with their calendars on paid accounts for the longest time (think 5+ years).
They're stored in a sqlite database on your phone. If you make an unencrypted backup of your device, you can find the db file in the output. The filenames are all mangled, but there's a manifest database at the root of the dump that has a mapping to the source file metadata.
From there, you just need to export the data you want from the messages db. The schema is kind of amazing, but not in a good way.
You don't need to buy a tool - you can write a python/ruby/whatever script.
I think he's right: the big problem I have with SMS is that it's run by the carriers, who are terrible at non-phone infrastructure — that's how you get SMS delivery latency ranging from seconds to days, completely opaque to the user, and new features are a long, slow grind. RCS preserves that model going forward.
Ah I see that makes sense. Somehow I didn't see that in the thread. So this person just wants to move away from phone number based messaging entirely.
I will say SMS Is still useful when you don't have an internet connection.
TBH I feel like most people are moving away from SMS already. I suppose google could just go the route of Apple and bake in google messaging or something into the OS.
What I’d like would be doing something like the way notifications work or what Apple did for video streaming with the TV app: make messages pluggable so I could have a single app listing all of my conversations like I had with Adium a decade ago. I might still open those apps for extra features when I need them but it’d be nice to just see my last message from someone without having to remember that e.g. we normally use Signal but sometimes use SMS or WhatsApp in groups.
SMS would be terrible as a new solution now. It is still useable because it works in any situation where you get a 2G signal, but it is mostly used as a fallback. And around here SMSes are free and unlimited in €2/month plans (data is the new cash cow).
Google did this to themselves, and now are crying that the law should protect them, despite them having larger market share than iOS.
RCS would be a regression for people who /do/ use iMessage, as RCS can randomly drop encryption, does not support multiple devices per account, and does not support group messaging. In addition to that, RCS's feature set is defined by carrier groups, who like to charge extra for "value add"/new features, and who don't move at the speed of tech release schedules.
But it would be a step up for people who use SMS on iPhone, which is everybody who texts a non-iPhone user, which is everybody. It would also be a step up for every Android user who texts an iPhone user that doesn't support rich texting. Apple is wrong not to support an interoperable rich text protocol, and Google is also wrong not to support it in Google Voice.
It would still need green bubble treatment as the security guarantees are weaker than iMessage or any of the myriad google chat systems.
At its base level it is meant to be e2e encrypted but that fails frequently enough that google has to have special UI to indicate the failure, even though they endeavor to minimize how visible that indication is.
For group chats (the ones that seem to pop up in examples) RCS does nothing: it isn’t e2e.
Group e2e is challenging, which is why it’s still rare even though it has been the behaviour of messages’ group chats since day 1. That said it is mind blowing to me that the carriers specified RCS’s group protocols as anything other than fully e2e. If you’re going to make it a standard you don’t get to half ass it. :-/
Then as others have said, in RCS your keys and account are tied to your phone number. This is not as much of a problem in the US, but in many countries changing carrier means changing number.
The security guarantees for RCS E2EE are higher than the security guarantees for iMessage. iMessage relies on a public key server controlled by Apple (or China if you're messaging someone in China). Whoever controls that server can MITM the protocol, and the client has no way to verify. iMessage also doesn't have forward secrecy. RCS E2EE, on the other hand, is a straightforward implementation of the Signal protocol, which does implement forward secrecy and which provides a way for the user to verify they aren't being eavesdropped.
Us (iMessage) vs Them (Those without iOS or macOS)
vs Those without smartphones (Mail)
vs Those without internet (Phone)
vs Those without phone or internet (Maps)
Back in the original Palm Pre days, webOS had the best messenger app.
Would do regular SMS messages but you could configure your AOL, MSN, and even Facebook messaging at one point IIRC all inside of the same interface. It's too bad it lost out compared to Android. Was so far ahead in so many areas.
Right, it had a jabber/XMPP client for that brief window when everyone was pretending to try to standardize. Google, AOL, MSN, Facebook, they were all (mostly) interoperable. Now we're back to all walled gardens.
While I’m not a proponent of Apple’s walled garden approach, I think this stuff about bullying over the blue indicator is just Google using something to shame Apple so that Google can get what they want. Even if Apple introduced RCS to their phones to give better compatibility to Android features, the blue indicator would still show that the message was sent with end-to-end encryption which is something RCS doesn’t do according to this article. In my mind, a better solution for Apple would be to release an iMessage app on the Play Store or to work with Google on building a better messaging service that includes those features. But Apple probably won’t do that because it’s actually better for sales if they do have features that allow their users to feel superior to others, as cynical as that sounds.
I'd have more sympathy for Google if they hadn't spent the last 20 years creating and killing messaging apps: Google Talk, Plus, Buzz, Wave, Hangouts, Allo, ... And, instead of fixing it, the VP in charge is blaming 12 year old "bullies".
iMessage is really good because Apple focused on making a great product.
Of note is Google never took the plunge on any of these the way Apple did. Which one of those products failed back to SMS messenger for compatibility and provided a default rich communication option like iMessage? They've never tried anything like iMessage, no idea why. It would be a different story if they were goading Apple in public to interoperate with their version of iMessage, beloved and used by all Android users. But this position they're taking here just looks kind of lame.
It's fitting that Google seized on this article that completely ignores that some kids don't have a smartphone at all, the article's author didn't even ask the interviewees about kids without phones being ostracized . This was probably placed by Google's PR dept.
Kids without phones may even, gasp, be bullied over it. Wouldn't that mean that Google, Apple and all handset vendors benefit from fear of bullying over not having a phone at all?
> end-to-end encryption which is something RCS doesn’t do according to this article
The article is not quite correct. The base RCS standard does not include E2E encryption, but at least Google's implementation includes it as an extension. Not an ideal situation -- IMO it should be a required-to-implement part of the base -- but it's definitely there for those of us using Google's infra, at least.
No, it's not. By default, iMessage messages are stored in cleartext on Apple servers. You need to use an option, to disable iCloud backups, so that this isn't th case. So the messages are only E2EE if you take care to change the options so that they are, otherwise they are not.
I don't think I'm twisting it. Pragmatically, unless you fiddle with the options, iMessage won't give you end to end encryption. So I think it's fair to call it optional.
645 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 354 ms ] threadThat's not what RCS is.
Can you use it not on the smartphone?
Can you use it without cellular data Eg with Wi-Fi only?
Can you throw out the SIM card and still send/receive messages?
If the answers is 'no' then it is a carrier lock-in.
Identity seems to be tied to a number (not carrier), but Messages uses Google Contacts as an optional layer of indirection.
So, if you change your number, and the other person changes (or adds) the number to your existing contact, your identity is preserved (for them). If the other person creates a new contact for your new number (or doesn't associate the new number with any contact), identity is not preserved.
> Can you use it not on the smartphone?
Yes, you can use Google Messages for Web on a computer, but the authentication is still tied to the phone via a QR code, and I think that communication actually is relayed through the phone if the conversation is via SMS rather than RCS.
> Can you use it without cellular data Eg with Wi-Fi only?
Yes.
> Can you throw out the SIM card and still send/receive messages?
I think that the answer is generally 'no', but there are a few edge cases (eg. I'm not sure what happens if you auth Google Messages for Web on a computer, set it to remember the device auth indefinitely, and then remove the SIM or turn off the phone).
> If the answers is 'no' then it is a carrier lock-in.
As you can see, the answer isn't quite so black and white.
RCS works through QR code outside, just like you can end text-messages.
Why throw out a sim card? You can use RCS with ANY carrier. If you can use it with ANY carrier, it's not carrier-lock in.
In Belgium, the number is personal and not from someone else. If you transfer carrier, you are allowed by law to take the number with you.
In the world with NMP - it is 'carriers' bound, but still - good luck moving to another country and preserving your number.
> Why throw out a sim card?
There can be any reasons.. but the most common one is someone 'liberate' you of your phone and other belongings (sometimes including documents). So now you want to talk to your family, you get a phone, login with your Google account... and now you are required the same phone number to work it back. So off you go to your telco office to restore the SIM. Oh. It is 3:00 AM and you don't have any documents/ID to prove what you are the someone you claim. And imagine if this would happen not in your backyard, but on the other side of the planet.
> In Belgium, the number is personal and not from someone else
MNP. But still you are tied to your /number/.
Yes, for me WhatsApp is similar with proposed RCS implementation - it is too 'carriers' bound. I hate what I need to throw my /phone/ number around to everyone to just be able to receive some text from them.I would really prefer some identificator not tied to a local provider of a completely irrelevant service.
Telegram, at least, allows you to use a nickname, though it still requires '2FA' through the SMS for the registration.
It's because of the countrycode in your number. Which indicates... The country it of from... This is literally how the routing works in the network...
What an idiot example fyi. That's not even about vendor lock-in, it's about stupidity.
You can restore documents at the city hall or at the embassy abroad.
Ps. I'm more tied to an email. But still doesn't make it carrier lock-in. I also can't use my email when I'm not on the internet...
HN opinion has been negative on Google for a while, and this is filtering into the consumer landscape.
It doesn't mean they are going out of business tomorrow or at all, but I see a period of MSFT-like regression, reflection and then a Nadella to bring them out of their malaise.
On the other hand, the US is unique for this because iMessage is not as popular outside the US.
I've always seen it this way:
Facebook is trying to be the new Google.
Google is trying to be the new Microsoft.
Microsoft is trying to be the new IBM.
IBM is trying to be the new Oracle.
Meanwhile, Apple is trying to be the new Sony.
At this point, Sony wishes it could be Apple.
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/scree...
https://imgur.com/gallery/xPib8
On mine, that screenshot looks like the green has an unpleasantly high saturation compared to the blue. The higher saturation increases the perceived value/lightness, lowering contrast.
[0] On my phone (a Pixel5a running Android 12), Display > Colors is set to Adaptive, rather than Natural or Boosted.
Convert that screenshot to grayscale in Photoshop to see
https://i.imgur.com/U8mEB93.png
This has always bothered me. Apple definitely knows this and is doing it on purpose. The color green they chose is just hard on the eyes. They don't think it's a good color.
https://imgur.com/gallery/xPib8
Similarly, Microsoft would likely be a dominant player in the chat space today if they hadn't rebranded and renamed MSN Messenger several times and then abandoned it altogether.
MSN Messenger was frickin awesome. You could draw pictures into the chat window. You could play a game of checkers while you chatted. It had a thriving ecosystem of apps and plugins. Everyone I knew used MSN Messenger... and then one day, Microsoft just said screw it, everyone can move to slow and clunky Skype... and that was the end of it.
Hell, ICQ might still be around if AOL had put more development resources into it.
The chat space is so bloody fragmented now, but it has nothing to do with Apple. Any one of the above mentioned companies could be killing it in this space if they hadn't pissed away what they had.
Of course I'm talking about the QQ variant, which is probably so far from the original ICQ that I have no leg to stand on making the above claim. Still, a very interesting story to follow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tencent_QQ
Acquired did a fantastic episode on Tencent (owner of QQ/WeChat)
https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/season-3-episode-10-tencent
[1] https://icq.com [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICQ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveJournal
Firms that make messaging products say they need to control the system for quality, innovation, spam control, etc. Yet, nobody questions that a Verizon customer can call a T-Mobile customer and vice versa. If all chat clients interoperated than there would be real competition to create the best client. As it is we have the pernicious pseudo-competition of two-sided markets where you install client X not because you want it or because it is good but because the person you want to talk to insists you install client X.
If the European Union wanted to make the internet better they should mandate that chat clients be interoperable the same way that telephone services are interoperable.
Perhaps some of the things like Slack that make money at the enterprise level can afford to keep free around and working well enough to function for longer.
One of the subtle problems with offering a traditional IM service is that there are some scaling aspects that are super-linear with the number of users. For instance, as the average number of users on your subscription list increases, more of them have status changes per unit time, and each of those status changes must also go out to more users on average. The scaling issues aren't necessarily a full O(n^2) but they're often larger than simply O(n log n). Even after a many-times-over drop in the price of computing power it's still pretty expensive to offer something like that for free.
If you look around, you can see how current solutions often work around that. For instance, Slack shards everyone simply by the nature of how it works, there isn't just a "Slack handle" that anyone can ping me at. We're not all in one big namespace. There's many fewer status updates it does, too, it's a lot more selective about what statuses you get.
Another solution is Matrix; with how cheap computing power is, if a few hundred people bring their own to the party it's no big deal anymore to run a server like that, and no one person necessarily has to bring the big bucks. But if one entity tried to run the whole network, they'd certainly notice the bill.
For some reason, Slack got this right, and then Discord did it wrong anyway.
Even iMessage seems very much like a 1-1 messaging system.
So no, at least SMS is not a social network.
I don't like WhatsApp anymore but it was in its time my favourite social network. I had all my important groups there, used it exclusively to communicate with close friends and family.
It was the place were most images were shared and discussions were held and so on.
“Depending on your settings, you can also periodically back up your WhatsApp chats to Google Drive”
“You can use the export chat feature to export a copy of the chat history from an individual or group chat.”
I haven’t checked the full backup, but exports of individual chats are easily readable (zip with a .txt of all texts in the chat and individual images, IIRC)
The individual exports work fine, but it’s very tedious to go through every conversation individually.
Slight aside: keeping a TCP connection consomes almost nothing. In fact, that's how push notifications work today on Android: a TCP connection is kept open, and apps' server send a ping to Google to tell the mobile to wake up.
What prevents power-saving is if every app keeps a different socket open to a different server and pings the servers on different schedules. That forces the mobile to wake up constantly.
It would be interesting to see whether Facebook/WhatsApp and iMessage have made them desperate enough to reverse course on XMPP but I'm skeptical that they'd be trusted enough to be successful.
¹ https://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/operators/2013-February/00... and then https://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/operators/2013-May/001680....
Even people like me that hated MS and AOL had chat clients that could communicate with their networks and Google Talk/Hangouts and MSN Messenger were both great for what they were. At the time I felt like we had lost something important by moving to "push" networks versus e-mail but I'd take those days now in a heartbeat. Maybe by 2030, something like Matrix will have us back to what XMPP was doing and I'll be able to send a message to someone's shitty Teams from whatever Google's fifth chat replacement is by then.
It's even worse when I'm traveling in east Asia and there are like 5 different Korean and several Chinese chat networks in addition to WhatsApp trying to be the next LINE and becoming the one-stop access point for nearly everything. I'm honestly expecting to see a 7-11 integrated messaging network at some point.
There were a few brief wonderful years when I had AIM, FB Messenger, GChat, and a few lesser known protocols all in different tabs in the same window.
It's not like they all needed different interfaces; same data, different wire-noise...
I didnt realize I had trillian setup to log all my conversations to file and I found the logs recently when going through a very, very old harddrive. Middleschool me was cringey as fuck
Upsides: I no longer had to care what messenger my friends used, it was all the same to me. Extensible and theme-able which was just the way I liked my software at the time. Growl integration.
Downsides: I made the mistake of installing and using a FFVII-themed sound pack that invoked a Pavlovian response in me every time I heard certain sound effects from that game. Took the better part of a decade after I stopped using Adium to shake that off.
Despite living in the US, I actually don't know what's dominant here...is it iMessage? WhatsApp?
Korea is dominated by KakaoTalk. I believe Japan is Line. China I believe has their own walled garden app ecosystems (WeChat & co.?)
Judging from what all my European friends use, WhatsApp dominates at least the UK and Western Europe?
WhatsApp seems to dominate in Europe and South America.
I have FB Messenger, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram and Discord on my phone...
Even still most in Asia also use WhatsApp.
Source: me, I've lived on all continents
I didn't use WhatsApp there. I had to SMS / tweet with my satellite device.
I kind of miss XMPP, which seemed like the answer at one point. As it is, I need about six messaging apps (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Telegram, a Matrix client, Slack, and I'm probably forgetting one) plus SMS/iMessage to keep in touch with everyone.
https://snikket.org/ is worth checking out as a (self-)hosted personal chat system.
LINE and Ali/We chat are now more like platforms, for example, LINE has a wallet called LINE Pay that you can use in retail stores that grew out of selling virtual stickers for their chat client. They integrate to transit services and other things too.
Kakao utterly dominates the market for messaging there (as it does amongst the international Korean diaspora). Even government services use it.
Same happened with Skype after it was bought by Microsoft, and I seem to recall this is relatively recent. There were (are?) two Skype clients - one for 'personal' (the original Skype) and another for 'enterprise' (rebranded Windows Live for Enterprise possibly?) and not compatible. Again, I recall trying to help confused Windows users figure out why the (incorrect) client wouldn't log-in with certain credentials.
Teams is supposed to completely replace Skype for Business
What are you saying? ICQ is still around.
Microsoft just kept making it slower, buggier, easier to eavesdrop on, and kept "refreshing" the UI over and over again until it became unbearable.
Besides, almost everyone uses Whatsapp, regardless of the phone brand.
For me and my peers, SMS is for 2 factor auth, spammy advertising, and the occasional parent that mistakenly sends a SMS instead of a WhatsApp message.
In fact, here is a small taste only with French data, which I guess is still an European country.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1188330/sms-traffic-volu...
For more than 10 years, SMS and a chat ap have lived side by side. The favorite chat app changed a few times, but SMS just plods along, never really gaining or losing market share.
SMS lost huge market share to messaging mobile apps so EU telecoms changed their business model from selling SMS messages and/or calls plans to selling GBs data plans. For example you can buy unlimited daily, weekly or monthly data plan or x amount of GBs data plan. Some EU telecoms went so far to sell bundled apps data plans like this https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4e/%2B_Smar...
Snapchat is basically MMS with rich user experience and advanced features. Is anybody still using MMS when you have something like WhatsApp and Snapchat?
Plus in many pre-paid plans the amount of SMS is almost unlimited, or with packages like 5 000 per month, which hardly anyone ever consumes half of it.
Doesn’t apply from 4G onwards, where everything is IP, but still.
I recall the early SMS functionality being added to cellular phones after the introduction of 2G in the early 1990s and as I recall, one claim was it monetised the massive amount of spare signalling capacity on the network. In the UK I recall that being said in 1994 by Orange (the first UK 'challenger' network vs 1G incumbents CellNet and Vodafone) when I had a Nokia 2010 handset.
The main problem was too many phones in one place causing errors on the signaling line. Like a concert. You'd get to a point where maybe one call can go through every 10 seconds. Then one person tries to send an SMS "because he can't get through" ... and the phone helpfully keeps retrying to send the SMS, each retry causing >1 minute of nothing signaling on the network. The network is now dead and while existing calls work fine, you can't even hang up anymore, never mind making or receiving a call.
Don't forget - SMS was a hack in the system messages:
> The key idea for SMS was to use this telephone-optimized system, and to transport messages on the signalling paths needed to control the telephone traffic during periods when no signalling traffic existed.
iMessage benefited tremendously from being the default. Combine that with Apple's mobile market share in the US and you get the present situation.
My gripe isn't really that it won in the US. Its that you need Apple hardware to participate.
Google may be self interested but they're right about one thing: knowingly allowing and fueling this social dynamic is inconsistent with Apple's brand. But it was never really about values, just making consumers feel good about their purchases.
Can WhatsApp do sms/mms now?
Their point is Google should have stuffed their iMessage equivalent (such as Hangouts) inside of a generic texting app that also handled SMS/MMS by default, and then enabled all the same features that Apple did and released it for iOS.
It's been said here already that gchat had the features that could be been integrated into Android's SMS app, add end-to-end encryption and they would have crushed the iPhone.
From a user perspective, the Messages app can. I want SMS/MMS seamlessly integrated (like when my cellular data connection dies, the bubbles go green), like the Messages app does. If WhatsApp cannot, then it's definitely missing a huge piece of usability.
Google never seemed to understand this convenience. They released Allo without any SMS support and were hostile so suggestions that it was a gating feature to adoption. Allo predictably failed as it offered no benefits over competing services, and no SMS fallback so that it could be the single messaging app.
If Google wants to level the playing field they should do it by competing and innovating. I suggest they start that endeavor by better understanding why people actually use iMessage in the first place.
Hangouts on a Google Fi phone used to let you consolidate everything to hangouts - SMS, Chats, Calls, etc. It was a pain it was limited to Fi, but it worked just fine. You could also pop open Hangouts in Gmail in your browser and there all your sms messages were, nicely grouped and tracked.
Then apparently hangouts stopped being cool enough - so Google decided to shutter it in favor of "Google Messages". Technically - "Messages for web" also supports the same feature set as the integrated hangouts, but it FUCKING SUCKS.
The phone/browser syncing is bad, the UI is a complete regression. Just the process of enabling it required me to actually contact support at google fi (you have to open settings, disable previous sms settings for fi, stop hangouts, update your google account, and then opt into a beta).
Basically - Hangouts did exactly this, but Google continues to act like Google, and shutter any product that might actually be a good foundation to build/maintain, since Google has shown AGAIN AND AGAIN that it can't actually maintain any product.
Google can innovate just fine - it's the follow through that they lack.
Google has messengers on every android phone preinstalled and nobody uses them, because they create them, never significantly update them and then abandon them. It's completely their fault they don't even get a mention when people talk about messaging apps.
I've since switched from Android to iOS, but Fi+Hangouts was amazing at the time. Too bad Google seemingly abandoned both projects.
Around the time that they started f-ing around with 15 different chat apps and killing off products, and integrations with other products, was when a Google account with "integration" started to become more of a hassle than worthwhile to me, personally. I used to use gChat, Hangouts, etc. but now I just use iPhone stuff since everyone I know has iPhone stuff. Apple hasn't deprecated anything since at least 5 years ago (the last time I had a work iPhone) so to me that signals that I can keep iPhones and not have to continually figure out what the "new way to chat" is, like I had to with Google. I've almost completely migrated from Google, except for Photos (which is superior to alternatives, IMO; I can actually backup my Google Photos from my Linux CLI whereas I couldn't figure out how to reliably do that with Apple Photos) and Google Search usage. I have had my Gmail account since ~2004 and I basically killed/deleted all of the services in my Google account now (even Google Voice sucks now, so I basically abandoned my phone number I used from ~2001 that I ported into it) except for forwarding email to my new email address and using Photos. I used to be "all in" with Google, but they made it too hard to keep using stuff that kept being killed off, so they dug their own grave.
Of course Google has killed all that many times over. They made their own bed.
Given iMessage basically has no base outside of the US because everyone uses Whatsapp or Line I'm not convinced this is terribly neccessary.
I never understood why Google didn't just clone Apple's app many years ago. Hangouts was pretty close - take that, add e2e encryption for in-app threads (like iMessage) and make sure SMS is there as a peer. Make a client for the major platforms and then let the project slip into maintenance mode.
Instead, they championed RCS which (last time I checked) isn't encrypted which is borderline unethical IMHO.
Network effects are big and they were intentionally reducing theirs! Shockingly it hasn't gone well since then.
We've never really dug in to why, as we're both using the default app. No other conversation has ever had this blue message and lock symbol and checkmarks going on.
I've made the switch to Signal, my girlfriend uses it on her iPhone to replace iMessage since I made the switch to Android last month. She can also use it on her Windows laptop unlike iMessage. My family members who are tech-y enough use Signal with me, and when they're not, I can still send standard SMS through the app. Signal even implements responses similar to iMessage 'likes' and 'hearts'. I don't think I could praise Signal enough for the great implementation they've built. Their crypto-enterprise this past year did make me feel a bit slighted, but as I don't use that feature, I can't comment on it.
To do so, you have to go into your default apps, set the default messaging app to Signal (factory default is Messages for Pixel devices, likely whatever Samsung uses for Samsung devices). I just checked to see if there were any extra settings you have to enable in the Signal app, but it doesn't appear to be so. If a user uses both SMS or encrypted chat, you can long press the send button and decide between which it will use.
Do note, that any previous messages sent via SMS from other apps won't show up in Signal for message history. Likewise the same if/when you switch to another SMS app.
- iPhone + iPad? Supported.
- Android Phone + Android Tablet? Supported.
- iPhone + iPhone (no SIM card/no phone number)? Not supported.
- Android Phone + Android Phone (no SIM card)? Not supported.
This, according to them, because they want to simplify the setup experience. But in reality adding a bypass option to the onboarding process to provide the tablet setup experience would be trivial and should have happened three years ago.
You can add this to the "list" like no Gifs on PC even though the code exists for mobile clients, and they share a lot of source code already.
Unfortunately, I don't think even this is supported. The Android app can't seem to act as a secondary device in any configuration.
I'm sure there will be more attempts to come.
The article promotes a zero sum mentality. That only apple should win because iMessage is better and because google already messed up.
As opposed to a value oriented mentality that a new standard, RCS, could be better for android and iOS users alike.
Google hasn’t always been a great company. I don’t understand why we can’t celebrate wins, especially those that would benefit others, such as rcs.
To do otherwise is to indefinitely call some parties good and some parties bad, to engage in black and white thinking. Which is more harmful for ourselves and says more about ourselves than the individuals and corporations of the world.
It's rightfully calling out Google for calling out Apple when both companies are to blame for this.
The author clearly doesn't like RCS, which is an opinion he's entitled to.. but Google's approach to try and get multiple vendors to adopt an open standard (RCS), instead of creating a walled garden seems like the better path.
Google sounds like dudes who whine about cancellation.
In those countries where Apple didn't have a > 50% market share in the early '10s, people simply couldn't use iMessage. For instance, this is a summary of how things went in Italy. I think something along these line could have happened in most other countries where prepaid traffic was the norm though:
1. In Italy, basically the entirety of mobile plans were and still are prepaid, which meant you charged your account with money which you then used to pay for your traffic. Most people also had plans you could easily change, which gave you stuff such as SMS and phone calls minutes for a fixed fee, and you paid for them using prepaid credit. More "serious" contracts were heavily taxed, and thus only make sense for corporate phones or if you have a VAT account to deduct some of the taxes (and even them they were not the cheapest option).
2. No prepaid plan included unlimited SMS until around 2015, when they had already become largely irrelevant to most people. Before then, you generally got a very limited amount of SMS per month or day, and those were often tied to numbers belonging to the same carrier.
This meant that most people in a certain area were basically forced to stick with a certain MVO for most of the '00s. For instance, a very popular 2007 Vodafone prepaid plan in Italy costed €6 per month, and included 100 SMS a day towards all Vodafone numbers (99 actually, you had to pay the first one). Having the "wrong" carrier in that time period meant that people had to pay a lot of extra credit to have a proper conversation with you - this was often a deal breaker for romantic relationships among teenagers, or led to people not contacting you at all. A very interesting time indeed.
3. MMS were basically never included in any plan ever, and when they did, they had the same limitations as SMS. Often, if your plan followed the "pay the first message, get 99 free" clause this was also true for MMS, meaning you had to pay for the first SMS AND the first MMS. If People were so wary of them that they actually deleted the MMS APN from their phones to avoid sending one of them by mistake - if you wanted to send a photo to someone you simply waited until you got home, in order to use MSN Messenger or email. The only usage of MMS I remember of in the '00s was sexting.
3. When iPhones and Android came out in the late '00s, data packs suddenly became a necessity to most early adopters. The iPhone heavily pushed its Internet capabilities a lot, and you often had just spent a hefty sum (remember: prepaid meant you had to pay the whole phone cost upfront) so you wanted to squeeze value out of it. Carriers at the time came out with the idea of selling extra prepaid packs with a limited amount of data (i.e. 50 MB a day, or 500 MB a month), which was not an awful lot but it was enough for maps and some light browsing.
4. I actually bought an iPhone 3G back in 2008, and it was truly amazing for its time. I paid around €550 for it, which was quite a lot for a teenager - I had to sink a lot of the money I had earned from my summer job in order to buy that. Most people around me were very against the idea of spending so much money on a phone - after all they could get by by simply buying a random Nokia 6610i or whatever for €100 and pay your 10 euros a month in prepaid credit and do whatever you needed to do. The fact that carriers in countries like the USA basically forced you into 2 year plans meant that you often got iPhones for cheap, which helped get a foothold in the market.
5. When people started to actually switch to smartphones around ~2011, most people pic...
Good point. Messaging apps enabled group chats for real this time. SMS was something like proto/quasi messaging app.
>I live in Italy and I haven't received a single SMS from an actual human being in several years.
Btw spammers still use SMS. But spamming bots are not humans tho ;)
I thought Google had their own thing, but I think I was getting confused between Messages by Google and Hangouts (or one of their other apps).
Can you do a hangouts chat within messages by google? (The whole Android messaging ecosystem is so confusing to me!)
Hangouts is dead, replaced by Google Chat.
On Google Fi, Messages can sync messages with web app. I wish there was a Messages for iOS for reading Google Fi messages on my iPad. But that would be a pretty niche use and they would have to call it something less confusing.
Hangouts used to have the ability to do both Hangouts and SMS. But it didn't have the ability to automatically switch like iMessage. They could have also rolled out the ability to sync SMS to more carriers instead of just Sprint and Google Fi.
The reality is a google is a total mess. We couldn't get their speakers to work with their calendars on paid accounts for the longest time (think 5+ years).
From there, you just need to export the data you want from the messages db. The schema is kind of amazing, but not in a good way.
You don't need to buy a tool - you can write a python/ruby/whatever script.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/21/22538240/google-chat-allo...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discon...
I think he's right: the big problem I have with SMS is that it's run by the carriers, who are terrible at non-phone infrastructure — that's how you get SMS delivery latency ranging from seconds to days, completely opaque to the user, and new features are a long, slow grind. RCS preserves that model going forward.
I will say SMS Is still useful when you don't have an internet connection.
TBH I feel like most people are moving away from SMS already. I suppose google could just go the route of Apple and bake in google messaging or something into the OS.
RCS would be a regression for people who /do/ use iMessage, as RCS can randomly drop encryption, does not support multiple devices per account, and does not support group messaging. In addition to that, RCS's feature set is defined by carrier groups, who like to charge extra for "value add"/new features, and who don't move at the speed of tech release schedules.
At its base level it is meant to be e2e encrypted but that fails frequently enough that google has to have special UI to indicate the failure, even though they endeavor to minimize how visible that indication is.
For group chats (the ones that seem to pop up in examples) RCS does nothing: it isn’t e2e.
Group e2e is challenging, which is why it’s still rare even though it has been the behaviour of messages’ group chats since day 1. That said it is mind blowing to me that the carriers specified RCS’s group protocols as anything other than fully e2e. If you’re going to make it a standard you don’t get to half ass it. :-/
Then as others have said, in RCS your keys and account are tied to your phone number. This is not as much of a problem in the US, but in many countries changing carrier means changing number.
Or, in less loaded and hyperbolic terms, a visual indicator of the medium used for the conversation.
Would do regular SMS messages but you could configure your AOL, MSN, and even Facebook messaging at one point IIRC all inside of the same interface. It's too bad it lost out compared to Android. Was so far ahead in so many areas.
iMessage is really good because Apple focused on making a great product.
Google just deployed the same logic to remove dislike counts on YouTube, despite those being valuable for users.
Kids without phones may even, gasp, be bullied over it. Wouldn't that mean that Google, Apple and all handset vendors benefit from fear of bullying over not having a phone at all?
The article is not quite correct. The base RCS standard does not include E2E encryption, but at least Google's implementation includes it as an extension. Not an ideal situation -- IMO it should be a required-to-implement part of the base -- but it's definitely there for those of us using Google's infra, at least.
Part of the elegance of iMessage is that E2EE isn't optional.
E2EE is mandatory in Messages.
Backup is optional - my phone has never seen an iCloud backup (all local backups).
I don't think I'm twisting it. Pragmatically, unless you fiddle with the options, iMessage won't give you end to end encryption. So I think it's fair to call it optional.