I don't mind Apple adopting RCS the same way that SMS is implemented. I like that iMessage can add features at whatever pace Apple wants. RCS will at least fix the annoying group message problems that Android/iOS have.
Agreed. I don't mind them having their messaging platform. I don't mind it being technically superior to RCS.
I DO have an issue with them intentionally doing a shit job of integrating with a telecommunications standard and then slapping a green bubble on it to get their oblivious users to ostracize people's kids.
Apple doesn't put a green bubble on SMS "to ostracize people's kids". Kids are ostracized just for having a default skin in Fortnite--because kids can be little shitheads. Apple differentiates because what you can do with SMS is different from what you can do with iMessage and that's a clear way to demonstrate it (and also to indicate if there's something weird going on when it changes from iMessage to SMS).
RCS is a suboptimal standard, and while it's good that Apple will support it to try to de-jank mixed-platform group messaging, I'd expect it also to be a different color because RCS in turn introduces its own jank that iMessage doesn't have. So people who want to make up an Apple to get mad at will still have their chance, I guess.
Can you talk a bit more about how iMessage is fundamentally diferent than SMS on the functionality level? Is it like "Signal" different or is it like "different" different?
Edit: bonus points if you can offer why iMessage is able to be the skeleton key into your iPhone, as often it and WebKit seem to be behind most of the serious 0-days...
I can edit an iMessage after sending it, I can use threads and it doesn’t require a cell carrier - just an Internet connection. It’s also e2e encrypted and I can optionally let people know I have do not disturb on.
It integrates with sharing my location and I can tell when someone is actually typing
> Can you talk a bit more about how iMessage is fundamentally diferent than SMS on the functionality level
It's different in the same way every messaging app is different from SMS:
* Group chats, with custom group names and icons
* High quality images/videos
* Reactions
* Stickers
* Rich link previews
* Threads
* etc. etc.
> why iMessage is able to be the skeleton key into your iPhone
I don't think a lot (any?) of the vulnerabilities are unique to iMessage. It's more about the fact that SMS/iMessage is a means for someone to send you data that's then parsed/decoded immediately by the system.
Both iMessage and Webkit have to accept requests from unknown sources that can contain a wide variety of content type. some other content types, like EPS are themselves programming languages that could contain infiltration scripts. That is why Apple has dropped EPS support. Similar situation can happen for other kinds of image and video content.
I don't know much about how iMessage communication is implemented but it does offer end to end encryption and supports richer interaction and content than plain SMS does. that was one of the reasons that Apple marked SMS clients with the green bubbles to indicate not to expect the same interaction with them. It was some little shits that turned that into an anti-status symbol.
I just laugh because Signal is way better than all of this and—wouldn't ya know—the default is "blue bubbles". They are the ultimate blue bubble to me because its almost all yours and gives you way more control than anything else like iMessage and its all audited and open for examination (theoretically)
You gotta find a way to make it clear you dont consent to be sharing your stuff with anyone but you , case closed. It has all the same toys and whistles so theres just no excuse.
Its a boundary and we all need to get real better at understanding and being respectful thereto.
Only issue is if you want them more than they you, there's a bit of a dance to navigate . If the like Musk, send them to all his endorsementz. At the end of the day, it will have to be a negotiation at play and its more of a toughlove ultimatun purely for the area of which messenging platforms to engage with.
> You gotta find a way to make it clear you dont consent to be sharing your stuff with anyone but you , case closed. It has all the same toys and whistles so theres just no excuse.
"It's not what we all already use."
There's exactly one person I know who uses Signal on a consistent basis. I don't turn on notifications for anything, so I don't see their messages on a consistent basis, but Signal offers me no incentive to use limited social credibility to try to encourage others to use its awkward affordances and non-native interface over either a native interface with reasonable security (iMessage) or a much better non-native interface without (Discord, Slack).
"There's no excuse not to use the one I like" is Linux-on-the-desktopping and is not responsive to how normal human beings actually operate in life and society. You might put picky conditions on your interactions, but most people meet others where they are--because network effects are real and humans matter more than technology.
If you actually use Signal and you have notifs you would not be saying any of this. Signal is beyond smooth in the UI/UX departments and the only difficulty is someone 1)install app 2) open app 3) enter number or username 4) basically done? That's literally every damn app. So tired of this FUD.
Has all the features of anything else without the bullshit and lack of credibillity/hazard to their own users.
If people respect themselves and their data enough, they will find a way. I've had zero problem with my closest friends cuz they trust I don't assign them random bullshit for shiggles. Maybe you need to reevaluate your relationships and the extent to which you place primacy on being able to communicate freely and without crap that works against you (or at least isnt built to work with you rather than rat you out about everything controversial you privately express)
Just don't get it man, maybe they're more the Telegram type. Nothing's more advanced or private than a Telegram for sure. Stop.
There was a point where I did try to use Signal in anger. It petered out almost immediately because nobody I talk to uses it except to turn on disappearing messages, shit-talk somebody else, and then go back to Slack or Discord. Because it does do disappearing messages well! But nobody I know wants to deal with it past that because contrary to your "it's just like everything else", its affordances are at best not distinguishing and certainly not good.
At some point, perhaps it will enter your consideration that talking about things like "people respect[ing] themselves and their data enough" is alienating to anybody who has a job and a mortgage and things they care about more than your minority choice of a messaging platform. Normal people don't care because normal people don't have governments, etc. in their threat models because normal people are boring. If you want to interest normal people, you have to be better than the BATNA--better than non-use. And saying "privacy" or "just get your friends to use it too" is a fail state.
Linux-on-the-desktop failed, too, when the only tool in the box was hectoring. (He said, from a Linux desktop.)
I can picture teens or younger acting snobby about phone choice. Not really clear why, if it’s a financial thing, as it’s been years since iPhones were priced at a premium relative to competitors. But well, they’re kids. However, I’ve experienced critical attitudes from adults well into their 40s when I had an Android phone. Personally I prefer iOS, but to judge someone based on their phone choice seems fairly ridiculous for an adult.
Phone/platform arguments are the worst, I do my best to avoid or extinguish them in whatever politik means is available. People can be such egotistical jerks about this foolishness.
I went through a phase like that and got over it early. As a kid, I thought that Amigas and then Linux were so far superior to Nintendo and Windows that I felt like I was at war with anyone using the other platforms. Later on I realized that this just made me miss out on the joy of using those systems and I would have done better to try to get all of them, rather than fixate on ones I thought were superior.
Its weird how much they deemphasize it and every time there's a zero-day, the solution is to upgrade. Let us add more to the pile while taking away a single point of entry.
Actuvate LockDown, and its all gone. Indefinitely cuz it blocks the original sin. And there's basicaly 0-downsides.
Different like … totally. SMS was part of the very early GSM design work in the mid ‘80s and is built into the network at a fundamental level (this is why the particular character limit etc etc)- it was designed in the GSM/SS7/ telco world and has been used for over thirty years.
iMessage was designed and built by Apple as a single operator with virtually total control of the backend and user devices.
They achieve similar results in completely different ways, the best analogy I can think of is how octopus’s and jellyfish can see too, but evolved eyes very different to our own.
I currently have an iPhone 15 Pro Max and have also used Android devices in the past. I like to switch each time I get a new phone.
Apple definitely picks an ugly color to make you feel uncomfortable texting with a non iPhone user. They should at least let users choose the color (which will never happen).
The green predates the existence of iMessage. That green is the color that was used from the beginning of the iPhone in 2007; iMessage was only added in 2011. iMessage was given a different color than the preexisting one.
Trying to claim that Apple picked an "ugly color to make you feel uncomfortable" is simply false.
The original green bubbles used a different shade but more importantly they used black text. iOS 7 switched to white text and a shade of green that means the contrast for SMS failed Apple's own guidelines. Even for people with decent eye sight it can cause additional eye strain and be perceived as ugly even if the green on its own would be fine.
To be fair the blue they choose is also not ideal, but it is a lot better than the green.
It’s the system “green” color. It’s used anytime there is a UI element that’s supposed to be green, same as system “blue” is used for iMessage and everything else in the OS.
> Apple definitely picks an ugly color to make you feel uncomfortable texting with a non iPhone user.
But what's Apple's motivation? Making me feel uncomfortable reading an Android user's messages does little to influence that Android user into buying an iPhone.
That said, I don't know why Apple thinks the transport protocol (iMessage vs SMS) is so important that users want to see a color indicator for every message.
White on green is one of the hardest color pairings to read due to how cone cells are distributed in the retina (this image isn't completely representative, in the fovea green gets even higher as a proportion):
That's RGB lit up contrasted with just G lit up. One of the only worse pairings would be white on yellow, which would be RGB vs RG lit up, with the only distinguishing signal coming through blue, which we have the lowest resolution of.
White on blue is RGB vs B, all the visual difference in RG which we have the highest resolution of.
This is why you generally want different color schemes for light vs dark terminals, if the color saturation is high (saturated blue text on black is bad, saturated blue text on white is fine and vice versa for green and yellow).
> I DO have an issue with them intentionally doing a shit job of integrating with a telecommunications standard and then slapping a green bubble on it to get their oblivious users to ostracize people's kids.
The green bubble is there because in the past, when telcos charged money for individual SMS messages, green meant money. I.e., greenbacks, US dollars.
The story is Steve Jobs just announced that without consulting any engineers first. It was a total surprise to them.
They actually seemed to be working on it, but Apple was quickly hit with a patent suit from some company over FaceTime. I believe they had to re-architect how it worked to get around the patent.
They haven’t done anything about it since then. I wonder if they simply can’t because of patents. Either way by now I think they’ve decided it’s a strategic advantage and they wouldn’t do it by choice.
That would be an interesting chance: buy an iPhone and get it with the hardware, or download and app and pay Apple a subscription. I wonder how many Android users would be willing to pay the subscription?
Why would you turn it off? What if you hire a contractor for some work and they need to send you pictures/video from an Android? Or a realtor, mechanic, craigslist seller, or just someone you don't have/want a personal relationship with. You're not adding these people to WhatsApp/Telegram.. I have probably hundreds more phone contacts than people I have on whatsapp.
Google's service uses end to end encryption. Of course, Apple can choose not to implement it (seems that they'll only implement it if it's standardized).
As an Android user I've asked a very similar question before to my iPhone friends, and most of them are just apathetic and don't care either way, but some of them will actually say some variation of: "if somebody is on Android, I don't want to talk to them anyway. It's a useful filter." The first time I heard that it was a little shocking, but especially with Gen Z, it's a minority but not unusual opinion.
I feel like this is something way more talked about online than actually occurs IRL. I didn't get an iPhone until the 13 (2 years ago?) and I'm still on it. Nobody stopped talking to me because I had green bubbles throughout my, I dunno, 10-15 years of Android phones. They would make fun of me for how reactions (Bob laughs at $reply) looked on my screen but just friendly jabs.
I think the age does make a big difference. I'm about 40, and I've rarely heard this IRL among people near or older either. The people I've heard it from were mostly in their teens or early 20s. Some 30s and 40s have admitted to leaving friends or family out of group chats because they were on Android though.
But that said, how do you know nobody stopped talking to you because of it? One of my friends (who is early 40s) said his family started leaving one of their family members out of the group chats because it "degraded the whole experience" and I doubt he ever told the person he was being left out, let alone why. I would imagine it's kind of like telling somebody that you aren't going to date them anymore because they're not attractive enough. Not something you want to admit, and even though it obviously happens, I've never heard of somebody actually being told this.
Maybe I've been kept out of group chats, it is annoying group chatting an imessage thread with android in it. I forget what it does but something is strange about it, but I'd definitely remember if someone I remotely cared about talking to just ghosted my SMS one day. I can't think of that ever happening. I had tons of friends in my 20s and almost none of them ever used Android. It was mostly tech people I knew that used Android.
Most of my friends are in their 40s/50s. No one knows what iMessage or RCS even is if they have an Android or iPhone. WhatsApp spread like wildfire here because no one gives a shit :)
So far, yeah I have been. Android users don't seem to use RCS for anything advanced, they use WhatsApp. Anyway, iPhones already let you toggle MMS, so RCS might be togglable too.
I had a mechanic send me a video about a problem with my car. He just SMSed me a link to their systems, where I could also approve the additional work after reviewing the video.
or if you're like my parents, and pay for a plan with plenty of data but leave it switched off at all times just because you don't want to accidentally go over your cap.
and you can also add your plumber or realtor on whatsapp. there's no reason not to. it's just a messaging app, i've got all kinds of customers and vendors on my whatsapp.
The reason I'd turn off is because of spam. Everytime RCS was enabled on my phone, I was bombarded with all kinds of nauseating spam. I'd like an option to avoid this infliction.
> What if you hire a contractor for some work and they need to send you pictures/video from an Android?
I would absolutely not want to do business with a contractor that uses an android phone. That's a serious red flag for someone doing work on a (usually very expensive) home to be using cheap tools.
Do you also exclude contractors that don't have a fully decked out Ford F-350? What if they carry a cheap $1 pen instead of a $50 pen to write some quotes for you?
Also, you realize there are android phones that are plenty expensive right?
The next significant step would be opening up iMessage and I'm pretty sure that Apple already has implemented most of it. Otherwise, they cannot realistically follow the DMA timeline in the worst case where EU designate iMessage as a gatekeeper.
That's never going to happen for two main reasons.
The first one is that, despite the EU’s blatant attempt to carve the rules around the likes of Apple while simultaneously trying to shield EU companies, they've overestimated the amount of iMessage users, excluding iMessage from the DMA rules.
The other one, which is more important in this discussion, is that the EU kept the definitions of services rather broad to the degree that Apple’s adoption of RCS will automatically fulfill the interoperability requirement.
> That's never going to happen for two main reasons.
I wouldn't say "never". DMA is inherently political at its heart and designed to target US big techs precisely. Apple is not immune and EU gave the regulation board enough flexibility to target all of US big techs. Apple knows this and they decided to support RCS for this exact reason to gain public supports.
> The other one, which is more important in this discussion, is that the EU kept the definitions of services rather broad to the degree that Apple’s adoption of RCS will automatically fulfill the interoperability requirement.
EU already has defined iMessage as a separate core platform service from iOS and Apple hasn't argued against it because it would give them a chance to exclude iMessage from the scope of the regulation. Hence, OS level support for RCS won't cover iMessage if it's also designated as a gatekeeper.
iMessage is not really a gatekeeper in the EU, because the number of friend groups that are close enough to iPhone exclusive isn't that big. Instead we use any combination of Whatchapp, FB messenger, Snapchat and Signal.
I can imagine a pretty great commercial where Craig Federighi throws an iPhone like a football, and a tracking shot zooms in to show it swiveling around to correct it's orientation mid-flight.
Supposing I did want to vote with my wallet, where would I have spent my money to make that vote heard? They seemed to disappear from everywhere at once, at least during the time I kept my last phone.
The latest 7nm phone from Huawei lets you choose between using the second sim card tray for a sim card or removable storage up to 256GB (albeit their proprietary storage medium). From my experience, plenty of Chinese phones offer what geeks in the US want (expandable storage and removable batteries).
There's plenty of options on the market for phones with headphone jacks. You won't find an apple or samsung flagship with one because it directly impedes waterproofing and isn't desired by the vast majority of people buying those devices. It's common to see on low and midrange phones.
I'm curious if this means Apple will run their own RCS service for their customers or will rely on a telco provided one.
I tried to find info for example about RCS in Australia, and saw a piece about Telstra launching RCS in 2017... but now it's apparently turned off and customers are expected to use the Google RCS service?
Maybe not green, but it should probably remain different so there’s an unmistakable visual indicator of which conversations are encrypted (assuming Apple implements carrier-flavor RCS, which to my knowledge is not encrypted unlike Google-flavor).
I think it'll remain green. Apple might feel pressure to implement RCS to ward off regulators, but keeping the chats green will likely still serve Apple's purpose. Even if RCS is 100% as good as iMessage, a decade of green bubbles has cemented the perception in people's minds. Even if people don't know why a green bubble is worse (and even if they aren't worse), it will still be their perception.
Apple has no reason to change the color from green and let users know that they shouldn't care as much as they used to.
It says they're going to support Universal Profile, which is the GSMA defined feature set, and it's not immediately obvious to me if that includes E2EE capacity (I highly doubt it's a requirement) - I recall seeing something saying that "standard" (non-Google) RCS group chat doesn't support it.
I would be very surprised if they integrated E2EE with Android phones. Being able to say "green bubbles aren't encrypted so everyone can read them" is a big competitive advantage and reason to justify why people need an iPhone. Plus there might be calls for doing away with stigmatized bubble colors if there aren't good reasons. Apple will want to maintain the bubble colors as long as they can, so it's win-win for them to not implement encryption.
I was working on RCS systems back in 2012. It was the future back them - incredible low latency for messaging and gaming, rich messaging, and a decent SDK.
How did carriers fuck it up so badly that, a decade later, it's barely a blip on the messaging landscape? The were so desperate to stop OTT (over the top) services that they... locked everything down in the hope that customers wouldn't churn. It backfired spectacularly.
It wasn't the carriers, it was Apple mostly winning the race in creating their walled garden, and everyone else being disinterested in an alternative in the phone race wars.
It's now some badge of shame Apple users discriminate against the blue vs green windows if a friend or relative doesn't have an i-thing, and Apple loves it all the way to the bank.
Apple only has dominant marketshare in the US. Everywhere else in the world people use Whatsapp. Why didn't they all hop on the RCS train? Because it sucks to implement and is a black box to use. Google was stuck with SMS because of their inability to implement a cohesive messaging app, despite owning and distributing an operating system. So what did they do? Pitched sob stories and got the europeans to threaten to regulate. Shitty move. They should have just built something good.
This, but with Apple. Whether or not Google whined about it, iMessage was never going to last. It was never a matter of if iMessage would be forced to reconcile itself with the interoperable protocol it replaced, but when.
So... Apple should have been ready. They should have been drafting absurd standards centered around their own servers, and taunting Google into adopting it. They could have even charged a license fee for the software. But instead they played high and mighty, and now they have to contend with the law. Frankly, I'm glad Google summoned Shai Hulud.
> They should have been drafting absurd standards centered around their own servers, and taunting Google into adopting it.
It's hard to imaging you sincerely think this would have been better. It seems like you want them to engage in dishonesty.
> But instead they played high and mighty, and now they have to contend with the law.
iMessage isn't going anywhere. They're just going to add RCS support in the same way that SMS is supported, because now there is momementum for carrier support. This is really a storm in a teacup.
> They should have been drafting absurd standards centered around their own servers, and taunting Google into adopting it. They could have even charged a license fee for the software. But instead they played high and mighty, and now they have to contend with the law.
Isn't the situation in the EU that they're looking to force Apple to allow others to use the iMessage protocol? So why would Apple work on getting Google to support iMessage, when Google is putting in work to get access to it?
Well... let's say also that the telco investment were not light. That Google was pushing for RCS, and SMS, and their messenger of the moment. Apple refused to implement RCS, because why do so, since there was no carrier at the time proposing it.
So yeah, no.
Google absolutely had a cohesive messaging app (Google Chat, later called Hangouts), they just threw it away and tried to rebuild it several times and under various other names and paradigms rather than iterating on it.
If they'd simply added a "WhatsApp/iMessage mode" to Google Chat in 2015 (i.e. allow Google account based users to seamlessly communicate with phone number based users), I think we might be seeing a very different messaging landscape today.
Google Chat was great back in its day (standard XMPP) and had a somewhat "loyal" and large user base. Rebranding it into Hangouts, rebuilding it, and generally sabotaging themselves was, well, their own doing.
We wouldn't because the issue always was iphone users never willing to use an app outside of imessage. What good is a messaging platform if more than 1/2 your network won't use it?
I think iMessage doesn't have the most dominant marketshare outside the US (and possibly Canada)
iOS /iPadOS (and by extension, iPhone and iPad) however, has slim-to-major majorities in most lucrative markets[0] and even in markets where iOS is not a majority, its well known in the mobile industry that iOS / iPadOS customers are far more lucrative
I think the parent comment was referring to messaging, ie iMessage vs the others. Ie, in Taiwan and Japan the dominant solution is Line, not iMessage or SMS.
With every princelet or otherwise rich folk in the world using Apple, does it matter?
It's still a race war, apple (rich folk) vs. everyone else. Some middle ground probably, but not much - apple folks are obviously the richer targets.
I know who to target with spyware and otherwise get rich quick schemes, ransomware, kidnapping, almost any other major crimes. The best demographic with 1200 to spend on a phone.
It's not a "race war" if you need to clarify that apple <=> "rich folk". I might give you "class war", except there is no "war" part and no need to include it.
In the UK at least in practice it means you text (whether iMessage or not) with companies/builders, but otherwise use WhatsApp. Especially with groups.
They used to love using SMS to take as much money as possible from their customers. Imagine texting "Hey" to a friend and getting charged $0.20 for it.
Bingo. The cartel was so focused on trying to save their existing money printing machine they took their eye off the ball and refused to disrupt themselves.
The cable television industry did the exact same thing. If they’d been willing to go OTT a decade ago and not force agreements based on geolocation, a lot of the streaming services that exist wouldn’t even need to exist today.
Kinda but not really. The cable providers were and continue to be hamstrung by the networks who force the cable providers to buy channel packages. Cable never had the leverage to, say, tell Disney that they only want to offer ESPN but not the 10 other Disney branded networks being offered. It was often all or nothing.
Exactly right. A lot of people have tendency to simplistically choose heroes and villains. SO Disney is hero, cable TV bringing disney to home via their Coax cable is villain. Top artists are heroes, but ticket booking service which ultimately are reason for enormous payout to these artists are villains gouging fans.
The artist is their customer, not you. If Ticketmaster didn't gouge you, give most of the gouging proceeds to the artist, and take the flak like a lightning-rod, they would quickly be replaced by a service that did.
There is. But the nature of popular media is that it is desired by the populous. Lots of cheap places and venues have no name bars with no name musicians and singers playing all the time.
But if you want to see someone that appeals to the whole populace, then you will have to compete with the whole populace.
A significant amount of Ticketmaster's fees go to the artist. It lets the artist make more money while fans get mad at Ticketmaster instead of the artist.
>I get your point but how is Ticketmaster not a parasitic price-gouger?
Ticketmaster isn't the true price-gouger. It's actually the artist + promotor + venue that collectively set the high prices. Ticketmaster is just the administrative computer system to implement the high prices that the artist/promoter/venue want to charge.
For example, top artists can negotiate to get 105% of ticket's face value from the concert promoter. Indeed, people have speculated that Taylor Swift had so much leverage in negotiating the terms of the Eras tour that she got 110% of the ticket's face price.[1]
If Taylor gets 110% of the ticket money, how does that leave anything left for the promoter and the venue?!? With those artists' financial demands, you now have a math problem: where to get the extra +5% or +10% and also pay the promoter+venue without taking a loss? By charging extra fees.
It's a very clever bit of financial sleight-of-hand. The artist/promoter/venue can all charge more money but hide the blame by embedding it in Ticketmaster's "convenience fees", "service fees", "order processing fees", etc, etc. In this way, Ticketmaster is perceived as the parasite.
Your question where Ticketmaster is already assumed to be the "bad guy" means Ticketmaster's deliberate manipulation of public perception is working exactly as designed.
>Ticketmaster merged with LiveMaster, a promoter and venue owner/operator.
Yes, but when other promoters (not Live Nation) book artists at non-LN venues and use Tickemaster as the ticketing agent, all the extra convenience fees are still there.
E.g. Taylor Swift's promoter for Eras Tour was AEG, not Live Nation. And in Dallas, she performed at AT&T Stadium which is a venue owned by City of Arlington, not Live Nation. Ticketmaster was only the agent selling tickets for that Dallas show and it still had all the extra TM service fees padding out the price. In that case, Taylor Swift + AEG + AT&T Stadium got their slices of the pie by using Ticketmaster fees as the "bad guy".
Live Nation acquiring Ticketmaster in 2010 doesn't fundamentally change what Ticketmaster is designed to do: take the public relations blame for artists, etc charging the higher prices.
The networks and the cable companies are both complicit with their demise. No one is arguing otherwise. I mentioned cable companies specially because they have the same legal monopoly that telephone companies had even post AT&T breakup in terms of location-based authority (it took widespread nationwide wireless for that to change in the U.S., which was like the early 2000s in terms of not having to get a regional wireless plan that could roam on a friendly network spectrum) and because like wireless carriers, cable companies have refused to acknowledge they are just a dumb pipe offering data and that they can’t continue to print money off of things that cost them nothing anymore. Oh, and because in the US, ISPs and cable companies are overwhelmingly the same companies.
The networks ruined their own businesses too — even if some were smarter than others (HBO being the smartest and also why it was the most valuable asset of the AT&T acquisition and the Discovery acquisition) — but I chose to focus on the cable companies b/c they are dumb pipes the same way wireless carriers are and they refused to disrupt themselves.
That was true until the cable companies themselves bought networks. Comcast owning NBC Universal, the various cable associations with the artists formerly known as Time Warner, the various local station and sports station roll ups for the various providers, all make them entwined.
And the networks were already offering online access to their content via TV Everywhere. They didn’t want to do the geolocation thing, that was all requirements of the cable companies (the issues with the network broadcasters like ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox are much more complex).
In fact, you could (and I would) argue that it was the cable companies insistence on maintaining their defacto monopolies on who could get what service where (because there was never consumer choice in who your cable provider is, unless you count satellite, which I do not) that pushed the networks hands into creating their own competing OTT services based on the content they owned. Because as people cut the cord, the networks weren’t going to watch their businesses completely go up in flames. Now, should they have done that sooner and more aggressively (HBO did it best and earliest with HBO Now as a companion to HBO Go — a move that earned them the ire of the cable industry, the same industry who often refused to let HBO Go subscribers who paid the cable companies directly for HBO, do things like access the service on an Xbox b.c they didn’t like the idea of people not paying a $5 a month fee for an extra box), yes. 1000%
But let’s not pretend like the cable companies were without leverage. If they’d acted decisively and disrupted themselves early enough, they were the ones with the direct relationship with the customer, not the networks. They were the ones who could have created their own bundles of OTT content. But no, they refused until it was too late and got to see the whole industry bleed itself and for live content to essentially die.
And carriage fees are not at all related to the cable companies refusal to adopt or accept OTT solutions. They could have still offered the same shit they offered coax but you know, over a web browser, without requiring you be on a home network from an ISP also your cable producer (Comcast), or on whatever device you want (Comcast, Charter) all to save the stupid extra box fees that they lost anyway.
People didn’t quit cable because of price. They did it because of price to perceived value. As has been shown with the current state of streaming services, it isn’t actually cheaper to cut the cord. But what you do get is a lot more flexibility.
Imagine if Comcast had offered its own YouTube TV style service in 2012 (something Intel tried to do in late 2013 before it was summarily canceled — I almost took a job on that team and dodged a bullet), rather than hoping against hope that cord cutting wouldn’t take off? You’d probably have a bunch of Comcast subscribers to this day who were satisfied that they could watch all their TV live and on demand whenever they wanted.
No idea what kind of poor purchasing decisions would lead to that. You can't get any form of cable package for less than $150 a month last time I checked. I don't pay anywhere near that for Internet + a couple of streaming services.
Was that really a concern in the US? WhatsApp and iMessage require data plans, and as far as I can remember these have largely included unlimited SMS as well.
It was definitely a factor in the EU, though: SMS still aren't free on many prepaid plans there. WhatsApp was the first popular application supporting unlimited messaging on mobile phones for many.
I'm 39 and SMS not being unlimited was a huge thing. I never thought it would be unlimited, when that happened (Suncom? I forget who started it) it was huge. This was a LONG time ago though, long before WhatsApp. Probably 15-18 for me.
I remember a lot of conversations in high school going "My plans maxed out can you text $friend?" IIRC you had to specifically turn off receiving texts or they'd charge you for each one and we were broke HS kids.
edit: Oh that article posted above is 2007. I guess it lasted way longer than I thought.
Yes, I think I got my first iPhone around 2010, and at the time I was still on limited text message plan. I don't think I got unlimited texts until 2014 or something.
There were big variations by carriers - that certainly wasn’t ubiquitous by the time the iPhone was released, because iMessage sidestepping it was important to enough people that everyone mentioned it in their reviews. For example:
> Besides ease of use, there's another side benefit to this seamless integration. If you send messages regularly to iOS 5 users, you may be able to switch to a cheaper texting plan from your carrier. Assuming you send messages exclusively to iOS 5 users, you may one day be able to ditch a texting plan altogether.
I don't doubt that SMS were not always unlimited in the US.
But the question here is: Were there any (reasonably popular) plans that provided data for smartphones, but not unlimited texting? If not, that couldn't have been a factor in the adoption of iMessage in the US.
True, but at least in the case of iMessage, that would also mean not being able to text all while not within Wi-Fi coverage (since Apple absolutely refuses to let people actually send an SMS to a number it considers to be participating in iMessage).
No; the iPhone launched with data plans. It just wasn't unlimited, nor were the texts. Sending an iMessage cost a lot less than ten cents of data; you could send/receive a lot more of them within your plan without overages.
(IIRC, my plan with Cingular didn't have any texts built-in, so they were 10¢ a pop, in each direction. I could send many thousands within the data plan's couple of gigabytes.)
It’s not a factor at all. By the time smartphones and data plans came out, they all included unlimited texts. I’m sure there was a small carrier here and there but AT&T didn’t offer it with the first iPhone. This is US specific.
Back in my day, you used to pay per minute for calls. Then they moved to a few hundred minutes free and the new SMS system cost a few cents per text. Then it was like 1500min/100sms free. Eventually it became unlimited minutes and texts but data cost some cents per kb or mb, then eventually that ratcheted up to “unlimited” everything with some “reasonable limits”.
As a kid I used to make a collect call to my mom and when they asked who was calling I’d say, “pick me up” and hang up. Free short messages even in the 90’s!
> Back in my day, you used to pay per minute for calls.
Hello, fellow graybeard!
This is something I pull out every once in a while to let kids these days know how rough we had it: we had to pay 10-25 cents per minute for any in-state phone calls that weren't "local", where "local" was an arbitrary boundary on the map not even related to area code.
If we had to call out of state, charges started at $1 per minute. Every year at Christmas, we'd have an event where the local family would gather to make phone calls to out-of-state family. Because the cost was so high, we had to strictly ration time. Each kid (I was a kid then) got 3 minutes talk time.
This was late '70s/early '80s, and the figures are not adjusted for inflation.
And early 'unlimited' cell plans required the user to be 'local' usually in a city. Leave the city and boom, back to charge per minute because of 'roaming'.
RCS requires a data plan, and certainly Google's Messages app doesn't handle it well when there is no data. I know a lot of people who are too poor to afford data on their phones and they are regularly losing all their messages because of RCS.
> WhatsApp and iMessage require data plans, and as far as I can remember these have largely included unlimited SMS as well.
The reason why WhatsApp was huge internationally (like, 10^8 users huge) was because many teclos in developing countries included data usage in their plans but SMS was extra (and talking minutes were finite), so people used WhatsApp for all comms.
WhatsApp's had a free tier, but their basic plan was (IIRC) $1/month, and they many (tens/hundreds) of millions of users that paid it.
> Evidently, Zuckerberg lied to the European and American trade commissions. It was in fact possible to interface Facebook and WhatsApp platforms to mine data. Facebook has been doing it since day one of its acquisition. As always, Zuckerberg admitted to the misdeed, apologized and paid the fine. He got away scot-free.
> Months later, co-founder Jan Koum discovered that Facebook’s management weakened WhatsApp encryption system to make it easier for them to mine data. Koum resigned too.
> Fast forward to today and Zuckerberg continues to mine our data through Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram (which he acquired in 2012). Facebook has become a surveillance behemoth – arguably the biggest surveillance organization in the world.
While its true that SMS used to cost per message (and outrageously at that) unlimited SMS/MMS (AKA, unlimited text) plans were cheaper (and on some carriers, predate) than unlimited data, often being only $10 a month or so as an add-on. Unlimited talk & text plans were relatively common as well.
In the EU for instance, the reverse was true. Particularly, unlimited data was cheap and affordable, where as SMS was quite costly (even more than in the US in some cases) so data heavy apps were easier to adopt. Hence, WhatsApp, Telegram etc. gaining so much popularity. iMessage was introduced much later to the rich messaging market than these apps in those countries (because mobile messaging apps were cheap to adopt in markets where mobile data is cheap).
There is much more competition in those countries with cheap mobile data in the rich messaging services space. In the US, unlimited data has had a more sordid history, and SMS / MMS had a much bigger adoption rate early on
My recollection is that unlimited text plans became the standard around 2008ish, well before iMessage came out.
iMessage "won" because it was the default for iPhone users in the US. Similarly, Whatsapp is the default nowhere and I don't know anyone who uses it, but that might be a generational thing. Whatsapp has always struck me as common in Europe, but rare in the US. We just use text and FB Messenger.
I disagree, unlimited domestic SMS/MMS was common by iPhone 3G (summer 2008) I specifically remember getting an unlimited plan from ATT, which was novel.
However, international SMS/MMS was extremely expensive, and that was the main impetus for WhatsApp. It required no password or making accounts or remembering all of that, hence all non tech savvy people could easily use it. And it worked flawlessly, with zero exorbitant international charges, because you knew everything was going via data.
By the time I message became big it was a non issue. SMS is a garbage standard in comparison. I send full pictures and movies via I message if there is a Android phone on the chat they all turn to garbage tiny images
The answer is that the carriers worked out a specification and both infra-vendors and device-vendors were left to develop the server/client based on that spec.
So each major device-vendor developed his client-app, and ended up with interoperability issues not only with the RCS-servers used by a given carrier, but also with devices of OTHER vendors. And that doesn't even begin to cover the issues on inter-carrier messaging...
The situation was only resolved after Google acquired Jibe Mobile (the biggest player in developing RCS server/client applications for carriers) and basically created a single RCS-client/server implementation using their Android Messages app and a Google-owned server.
But when you were working on RCS back in 2012, you may remember that at that time, RCS didn't even support store&forward (!!).
So if the receiving device was not available when a message was delivered (because it had no network or client wasn't running on a device, which happened alot especially on iOS because the client was in a constant fight with the OS), the message wasn't queued anywhere.
Apart from the obvious issue of missing messages, it caused the even worse UX-impact that the entire conversation looked different on sender/receiver.
--
Ah yes, and: RCS was originally designed with per-message billing in mind (of course). At the time it was launched it was finally clear to the carriers that those times are over, but the whole architecture had quite a chunk of billing architecture in it as well...
> The situation was only resolved after Google acquired Jibe Mobile (the biggest player in developing RCS server/client applications for carriers) and basically created a single RCS-client/server implementation using their Android Messages app and a Google-owned server.
Thank you for highlighting this. This important piece of information often gets lost in the "green bubble" discussion.
Google has significant incentives for pushing RCS for more than one reason.
The situation was resolved by Google taking effort to unify the Android landscape and maintain a single client for that OS, instead of carriers (like Orange Group) developing one client, Samsung, LG, Sony, Huawei, ZTE each developing other clients
Google doesn't own the RCS-specification, the spec is still defined and maintained by GSMA, with Google just having one of the seats at the table (along with carriers and device manufacturers).
Apple is also a member of GSMA, them adopting RCS means that they just take another seat at the table of the RCS working group.
--
> Google has significant incentives for pushing RCS for more than one reason.
I don't know if you mean to imply some hidden Agenda. The incentive is to standardize "rich communication" across mobile platforms. "Green bubble" is one manifestation of the bigger issue that 27 years after the creation of SMS there is still no other universal method for me to send a text to your phone number today.
The main reason for that is, that several players still hope to own this communication channel to the user with their proprietary app, become the "Western WeChat" and sell access to the users.
RCS could be an universal non-proprietary method, open to be adopted by Apple, Facebook, WhatsApp and whoever wants to build a Message ecosystem. It has the potential to end this hassle and allow me to send a text to your number and reach you regardless of your OS and application of preference.
Agreed. I hate that we pretend Google is somehow altruistic with their support of RCS. They have many, many incentives and pretending otherwise is naive and obtuse.
> They have many, many incentives and pretending otherwise is naive and obtuse.
Okay. The main incentive is to create a competitive method for messaging which allows rich communication with everyone, regardless of platform or ecosystem just via their phone number.
Running a messaging gateway means Google gets all that sweet metadata at the very least and message content in the many cases where E2EE isn't enabled. That's a lot of data to build advertising derivatives all linked to a specific identity.
In best case for Google they can operate the RCS-server for Android devices. Google already owns the Messaging CLIENT for SMS/MMS/RCS on nearly all Android devices as well as the underlying OS itself.
There is little new information to gain for them, no matter how Android users communicate with Apple users right now.
There is however a lot to gain for them if a unified rich communication standard is established in the market, because apart from finally being able to replace SMS, it would drive platform-agnostic innovation in this area.
Google and Apple agreeing on a standard could disrupt the ecosystems of Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Vibr, Zoom, MS Teams etc.
> There is little new information to gain for them, no matter how Android users communicate with Apple users right now.
The client and the OS don't really give them any metadata or message content. Operating the server infrastructure would.
SMS doesn't touch their servers (except possibly for people that use Google's Messages app and/or backup service); RCS does.
> There is however a lot to gain for them if a unified rich communication standard is established in the market, because apart from finally being able to replace SMS, it would drive platform-agnostic innovation in this area.
Absolutely, but that open standard will hopefully not be RCS. It's way too coupled to the 3GPP/ITU model of doing things.
I trust the organizations in charge of the web and Internet (who brought us email and XMPP/Jabber!) a bit more than those who still somewhat yearn for the days in which OTT players did not exist and telecommunication was charged by the mile and minute or message.
> The client and the OS don't really give them any metadata or message content.
The client includes a spam protection service which allows them to send message data to a server for scanning. Every other messaging app uses the Notification service to send the message and its relevant metadata to the OS. So as far as conspiracy goes, Google has all the means to get the data already today.
Carriers supported it. Just Apple didn't, for a long time. The reason is obvious: To increase their market dominance in the US, where iMessage is common. Especially among US teens this was apparently successful. Teens didn't want to be the lame green bubble kids with reduced messaging features. They flocked to iPhones.
RCS is (was) the prime example of Apple's anticompetitive behavior, after the App Store exclusivity, preventing side loading, and disallowing alternative browsers.
the green buble is not for the Android users, it's for the iOS users to know that there may be some taxes for sending the message. even on iOS you get a green bubble if you disable imessage. i don't understand what's in it for you guys for repeating that rethoric about the punishment.
I can't add cellular service for my Apple Watch, at all.
Enabling MMS requires a somewhat convoluted set of changes to the phone's cellular settings, and despite having done them correctly I periodically get a "we couldn't send you all your texts, fix your settings" warning SMS from Google.
I'm pretty happy about this, I don't think Apple should be forced to open up iMessage, but not adopting the RCS standard always seemed a bit underhanded to me. Even if it sucks, better cross-platform messaging is a win for everyone.
What if the social pressure, is in part, a result of the better experience one gets with iMessage?
Photos, videos, group messaging are all a significantly better experience with iMessage in my experience. This is not to say that other apps don't offer a similar experience, you can achieve much of the same functionality on Telegram or WhatsApp. It's just that it's built into the phone.
Google might have achieved similar success with their own messaging platform had they'd not constantly thrown it under the bus and created a new one every month. Allo, Duo, Meet, Google+, Google Chat etc....
Mobile messaging should be either be interoperable or cross platform. And any messaging platform that is tied to one mobile operating system is user hostile.
I received my first piece of spam on iMessage last week (used it since 2011) and it was deleted instantly by Apple. I presume because they identified and removed the account's iMessage privileges.
Any messaging app that permits spam is user hostile. Spam takes up more of my time than I would ever want to give on Whatsapp/Messenger/Text. iMessage has prevented me from contacting precisely zero people. If I were to walk away from my iPhone I would lose nothing after exporting some messages.
The barrier to entry to other potential users of $100s is well worth it for me.
Wouldn't worry at all. It's a cool feature if it works. The value in that blue bubble is less about the features of iMessage and more about social capital, not that I personally care.
It is about the features though. Apple users snob Android users because group messaging doesn’t work well, media features are not supported, etc.
RCS offers such a rich environment that Apple could finally truly integrate most stuff transparently with iMessage. Send a video to the group chat? Everyone gets it at full quality. Make a poll? Everyone can vote.
You're both right. The features matter, but so does the social stigma of bubble color.
Nothing will still have a feature and an edge by offering a "blue bubble" on Android, but this announcement would reduce my excitement a little bit if I were them.
The features Apple could not integrate with RCS will be very few, like watching an AppleTV show together or create a FaceTime call without having visible links in the chat.
The social stigma stems from iMessage giving Apple users advanced and integrated messaging for free since the very beginning, which “spoiled” people into not wanting to deal with pure SMS chats.
This is something I never thought I'd see. I hope the GSM association moves fast to make robust E2EE a standard required for proper implementation for carriers. That would go a long way in making a huge improvement over SMS/MMS.
This is a win for RCS, ultimately. Maybe this will kick carriers into high gear to up their messaging standard support game and have standard interop.
I don't think this will lead to a decline in iMessage usage, nor do I think it will be catalyst enough to get people to move to Android, because there are still things RCS won't be able to support[0] but its a big step forward for a more pleasant experience between iOS and Android.
[0]: Memojis, reactions (tapbacks I think their called) and I'm curious about threaded messages. Also, at this time the actual RCS standard does not specificy that messages must be end to end encrypted. iMessage on the other hand has robust E2EE encryption (and you can get even more robust encryption by enabling Advanced Data Protection)
I am fairly certain that it's illegal to sell the content of SMS messages in the United States at least. The metadata like who is messaging who and timestamps and best guess locations maybe is sold though. But the contents can be obtained by law enforcement. However, I think the contents are purged after some expiration time.
They definitely sell things like your real-time location (you can opt out by turning your phone off, or if they're legally obligated to let you), who you contact, what websites you visit, what DNS entries your phone looks up, your subscriber information (assuming they can link it to an advertising ID that other apps are using), and what TV shows you watch, joined with all the stuff you use your broadband and phone for.
As for communications content, it's fuzzy.
My reading of it says that they can aggregate that all together in a way that is only personally identifiable to their internal marketing team and their partners (i.e., anyone that pays them and also signs a contract), so I guess it's not "for sale"? So, for instance, they could take all the RCS messages in the US, cluster them, and sell the cluster to, say, meta. Then, meta could use it for ad targeting of third party ads, but they wouldn't be able to resell the raw data unless they first de-anonymized it.
I could be wrong though. The privacy policy is very long and incredibly vague. Maybe they don't share the contents of your private communications with their "trusted partners" or internal advertising division yet.
The only way this sort of crap will get better is if the US passes a right to privacy constitutional amendment. (Of course, congress is more likely to pass laws that somehow make it worse.)
They don’t need to sell the content: imagine if they ran a classifier on everything and added it to the information they send to advertisers? They’d be able to say they sold the actual messages, just the profile they’d built of your interests.
> I hope the GSM association moves fast to make robust E2EE a standard required for proper implementation for carriers. That would go a long way in making a huge improvement over SMS/MMS.
Can telcos actually offer E2EE given the various lawful intercept statutes that they are usually subject to?
The telcos don’t actually provide E2EE. That layer is offered by Google itself, and RCS carries encrypted data, last I checked. Not sure if Apple is going to interoperate with it.
The last time I checked was in 2021 when they launched the feature, and it was only for 1:1 chats. Google might have extended e2ee to group chats (I would hope so).
Pretty sure everyone would still have to use Google Messages.
Ok, it's still absurd to me that RCS or Google Messages weren't E2EE from day 1 given even iMessage was doing E2EE group chats almost 5 years before the RCS "universal" profile was released so its not like they didn't have time. Similarly even when google's message platform did add encryption the fact that it wasn't always on is unconscionable.
How does google messages (gMessage?) indicate which messages aren't secure?
Yup. That's exactly what I predict Apple will do. RCS messaging will still have green bubbles. And it will continue to have the same psychological effect as SMS green bubbles do today. I think that's also why GP said there won't be a decline in iMessage usage.
Very much not a trope. I personally know multiple people who refuse to text green bubbles, to the point of refusing dates from people who have Android.
It sort of becomes a people problem as people use messaging to communicate and organize events and exclude you because you'll break group chats.
Probably not a big issue if you already have a solid social circle of old tight friends who don't care about you breaking chats as they can also call you, but it can be huge issue when you move to a new city and trying to make new friend, as any extra friction you add to groups lessens your chances of being accepted and invited further.
Yeah, people can be quite lazy and petty even about such trivial things, when they don't know you and don't have any attachment to you yet, and you breaking group chats won't improve your first impressions and chances of being accepted. Hence the ever increasing loneliness crisis we're facing.
Thank fuck I live in Europe where nobody uses iMessage for group chats. Honestly fuck Apple for creating that unnecessary friction, it's not like they couldn't have accommodated blue bubbles to not break group chats but it's more profitable to emotionally extort people to buy your iJunk by making them feel outsiders.
Pretty much. Peer pressure is an insanely powerful thing when you're young and trying to fit in and Apple knows teens aren't gonna die on the "stick to an Android to stick it to them" hill.
I was assuming this discussion was about adults, not children. Teenagers have always found petty reasons to reject others, but they usually grow up and learn better. This seems no different, so that part doesn't concern me much. If adults are doing it, though, that's entirely different.
People rightly criticise social media companies for the behaviour their platforms encourage, and iMessage encourages this behaviour as much as twitter encourages outrage.
On Twitter you can easily curate Twitter lists of people to follow without being forced to use the generated feed. I'm rarely if ever outraged or otherwise emotionally charged when I'm using it. (Maybe except when I come across reply-bots)
And as I said elsewhere in the thread, I've never experienced that problem with any friend groups when it comes to iMessage.
And I know multiple people who refuse dates from
those who have a zodiac sign that is “incompatible” with theirs. I think we can safely disregard that as a factor, despite how relatively not-that-rare it could be.
Yeah but bubbles sound like a class difference, astrology is just pseudoscience. People seldom get mocked for being a libra, but they often get prejudiced for having less money.
There’s literally no difference in price. The only difference is that people more receptive to retail sales pitch buy androids as the reps get spiffs to move them.
I mean, the argument isn't that they should accept the date (on the contrary, these signs are actually beneficial for staying the fuck away from these people), the argument, or rather statement is that this sort of "tech jewelry" is very embedded in modern society, with Apple being the frontrunner.
And this has real effects. For example, Im forced to use a piece of shit Macbook at work, where literally everything else in our cloud runs on linux, because the company issues Macs as a way of attracting talent since "tech" people also want tech jewelry.
I mean the comment I replied to mentioned refusing dates from people with green text bubbles.
If it's a boss or someone I love and they want to ignore my messages that's on them. If it's a work issue possibly HR could be involved as discrimination or outright ignoring messages based on device wouldn't really fly.
> Those people don't sound like people worth knowing.
My boss could be refusing dates from people that have green bubbles, but not ignoring my messages. Same with a family member for example. Your comment says they aren't worth knowing either way.
I mean, sure if they are not ignoring your messages and you need or want to know them that's fine, but if they are still being that judgy for something so petty they seem like shitty people regardless.
Someone you love? If the affection is mutual they're not going to cut off communication with you because your phone doesn't run their favorite chat app.
A good friend doesn't have phone number for reasons that important to her.
She's not "cut off", but it requires a conscious effort to contact her. So while I may be keeping a group of people up to date or inviting folks for a bbq, open house, etc casually, I need to specifically invite her via some other channel.
Sometimes I forget. Feelings are hurt. I'm a single parent with a demanding job. Low friction rules the roost for me, and our group of friends all sort of support each other with these types of things and do alot of ad-hoc stuff.
Not having a phone number is much more unusual than having a phone that can do SMS but not iMessage. It adds considerably more friction; e.g. it makes some of the most popular third-party messaging apps like Signal and WhatsApp difficult or impossible to access as well.
If your boss refuses to talk to you because of something as petty as imessage bubbles, they're petty enough to fire you for any number of reasons. That person is a horrible boss no matter what you do.
It’s more than that. Videos and pictures sent via SMS absolutely suck because they were designed for 2004 era quality standards.
I agree RCS will stay green. It will have text, good quality media, maybe read receipts.
And that’s it. No E2EE or other extensions. Apple is fixing one issue (bad media quality) and taking away a disingenuous Google talking point. Perhaps this is also an argument to legislators that they don’t need to open iMessage.
They’re never going to go out of their way to make it preferable in any way.
Media quality would be a start, at least. The only other thing I'd love for them to "fix" is the inability to add non-iPhone users to existing group chats. With those two things I -- and probably most Android users -- would be at a "don't care, this is good enough for me" state.
You can “add” SMS users to iMessage groups, if the group consists entirely of phone numbers and you’re on a device that supports SMS.
The newly created SMS group doesn’t replace the thread associated with the original group, though, so it’s easy for the group to fork when this happens.
I live in America and literally nobody I know cares about this.
Unfortunately I think it's just the typical remnant of the old Mac vs Windows haters who come out of the woodwork online to make it sound like a problem.
I care, actually a fair bit, but only because I work in a building that has two areas that are complete dead zones for cellular reception, and our IT department blocks WiFi calling (but not iMessage data). Blue bubbles can message me in those areas; green cannot.
It's not at all unusual for my phone to explode in dinging when I leave one of those areas.
I wish they didn't block WiFi calling, because my cellular reception at home isn't great, and I'd use it there. We have an internal WiFi network separate from the public one, with per-user authentication, so you don't have to worry about visitors overloading the infrastructure (it's a hospital, lots of families and patients in addition to the staff).
I'm one guy. Six years ago, there were two of us out of ~30 that used Android. Both of us switched in the next year or so because nobody else would use a different app just to talk to us. So we were missing out on fairly critical information, and forget anything time-sensitive.
On Android, it wasn't an issue to use Signal, because it will communicate securely if it can and by SMS if it can't. So you can still text anyone from the app. On iOS, not so much.
I'd stay away from Whatsapp just to keep away from Meta.
> I'd stay away from Whatsapp just to keep away from Meta.
This seems prejudiced. If one company supports end-to-end encrypted chats with everyone, and the other only with people who buy their devices, I think it's clear who cares more about privacy.
It is prejudiced. I assume Meta is going to make me the product.
Signal does E2EE. They have not yet done anything to jeopardize the trust they have earned. Some do not like them, and that’s fine. I have a different view.
Apple is right now making you the product in a way that limits your privacy, telling other people that they have to buy an apple device if they want encrypted communications with you.
1. Kids care about it. Why? Because you can use iMessage via iPad without needing a phone number, and this is how lots of tweens get started with messaging.
2. Any Android users with iPhone friends trying to use iMessage for group chat cares about it. It's impossible to add Android users to an existing group chat... and any time you have a mixed iPhone + Android group chat it degrades a number of the iMessage group chat features normally accessible to iPhone users.
3. Any Android users receiving media over SMS/MMS from an iPhone user cares. They'll be receiving images & videos that look like they were shot with a potato.
The blue vs green color doesn't matter, but the effects mixed platform chatting has on both iPhone & Android users is significant.
These are fantastic points, all of which I have personally experienced as an Android user with many iPhone family members.
Apple adopting RCS won't solve #1, and is unlikely to solve #2, but solving #3 is a great start, and if the Apple faithful continue to give feedback to Apple that they care about fixing #2, we might see it one day.
I agree. Solving #3 is terrific (because it frequently bites you when the sender is someone you don't know particularly well... certainly not well enough to ask them to resend using a third party messaging app). I don't really care about #1, although I guess Google's answer would be "use Chat", which is absolutely ridiculous since it no longer has an interface to SMS/RCS like Hangouts did. This is a gaping hole in their product strategy, imho. #2 could be solved by Apple if they want to, or else we'll just continue to struggle along with a need for several different messaging apps for different social contexts. It's not like Whatsapp, Telegram, Signal, etc don't work.
Another solution Google could perhaps pursue would be to license one or multiple of those to include in the default Android install, but I don't see that happening without regulatory interference.
I have a feeling with the EU's DMA this will just become more prevalent with every messaging platform forced to "open up"
FB Messenger will have a "green bubble" for messages to people using whatever other app they're forced to integrate. Same with Whatsapp, Telegram, etc...
I care. It's fucking annoying when someone joins a group chat on Android and all of a sudden I can no longer access it from my computer, iPad or over WiFi.
Because everyone uses WhatsApp, because Apple did not reach enough market share early enough to push iMessage. That's lucky, I don't think europeans would be less susceptible to this kind of psychological manipulation.
To be frank, a lot of my WhatsApp-using friends were very upset that it was bought by Facebook. Fortunately they generally transitioned to Signal or Telegram, not iMessage due to significant Android market share.
The important thing (to me) isn't the bubble color, but that conversations between Android and iOS users with RCS won't degrade media down to Game Boy Color quality. At least, that's what I hope the outcome of this move is.
> I hope the GSM association moves fast to make robust E2EE a standard required for proper implementation for carriers.
This is pretty moot now. Google has effectively turned RCS into a proprietary protocol, they fully control the only relevant server implementation, carriers that want to interconnect have no choice but to deploy Jibe or use Jibe as a service.
This could possibly open an avenue for another party to show up around this. Google de facto having reign on this is because they're the only company in this space that cared enough about it to get it moving.
Apple supporting RCS could create enough interest that it breaks their de facto control of the standard
Yes maybe. While I understand Google's frustration, the number of carriers that implemented Universal Profile independently was not zero though, and in the end it was for nothing.
I know from a friend that Facebook was looking into integrating RCS to Messenger (not Whatsapp somehow) and willing to be part of the Google federated RCS network, that also fell through, but I don't why.
I've been trying to gain some insight on why Google is not making it easy (possible?) to implement a third-party RCS app for Android and was reading about these APIs (clearly intended for OEMs).
> This means that third party apps aren't allowed to access RCS single registration APIs as they require carrier certification on the device.
Could just be Google passing the buck here, but this does sound like something the carriers would do, if given the chance.
That's not true. Mavenir offers an RCS platform that T-Mobile has been using up until recently. A renewed interest in RCS due to Apple supporting it might end up with their platform being more sellable.
You're proving my point. T-Mobile had to switch to Jibe.
I work at a carrier that deployed a solution provided by WIT. Then around 2019-2020 Google decided they weren't interested in an open and interconnected RCS backend anymore.
I thought the primary motivation for RCS was E2EE and secondary motivations were niceties like read receipts, reactions and HQ media. So far this thread has been very illuminating and shocking to me. Especially E2EE being an extension to a standard not a core part of it in 2023.
Hopefully vendors start putting better fallback into their messaging clients when RCS isn't available.
It's been terrible for all the poor people I know who rarely have working data on their phones, but RCS enabled by default. They can't figure out why they're not sending or receiving any messages and I have to keep disabling it for them.
If you turn off RCS, Google Messages shows you a full screen prompt once a week to turn it back on. Indefinitely.
And of course the prompt has a large blue button to enable, and a very small text underneath to dismiss, making it easy to accidentally enable it. It happened to me a few times already.
It also tells you nothing about the downsides (that you need a data connection, mainly) that would make RCS unusable to certain people... So they trick users into subscribing then users begin experiencing difficulties receiving or sending texts and they don't understand why.
Indeed. Currently using an Android 13 Motorola until my Sony is fixed. It's not labeled RCS, but one of the first things I did was disable Messages Settings -> Chat Features -> Enable chat features - Use WiFi or data for messaging when available ...which disabled a bunch of other things. While I don't recall what appeared originally, the Send button for messages is labeled either SMS or MMS, so I suppose that did the trick. No nagging.
I did just find and disable the RCS Config Service, too, and testing that everything still works.
The problem with developers is that we are often isolated from whole sections of the world. The people on the Android team, probably working in SF, have perhaps never been into the hood. Out here there are guys on every street corner stood next to the drug dealers (often it's the same guy) trying to get you to take a free smartphone or a tablet. They get paid some sort of kickback if they can get you to take it -- it comes from this free federal plan:
The problem is that the phones generally only come with 15GB of data a month, and an average web page can easily run to 200MB now, so usually by the third day of the month they are all out of data.
There is a better federal plan for poor people called ACP which allows you to get your own phone and plan, but it isn't as well-known.
As a tourist? No. You need to give your national ID (Social Security Number) to the salespeople so they can check you are receiving some sort of government assistance already.
I'm curious how you can have a phone connection but not a data connection in 2023. I don't think that's happened to me since the days of Edge. Is this a weird American thing? Do you guys still have 2G?
> Breaking: Apple will support RCS - the green bubble shame set to end
Note that the green bubble could be kept for other reasons: RCS is a major improvement over SMS/MMS, but there could still be functionality that isn't on par with a completely in-house system like 'iMessage'.
The green/blue distinction may still be useful for setting certain expectations on how things work.
Yeah definetly would not expect it to be blue as 9 to 5 noted how Apple mentioned it won't be as secure as iMessage and iMessage will be separate. So presumably people texting will still want to know if they see blue they get full privacy where is if they see green or a new color it means yes they get lots of new features like iMessage, but not as secure as iMessage. But the green bubble (or whatever new color) will be less shameful, if users in general can group chat and chat easily without worrying about not being able to do most all the standard features they can with other iPhone users. Time will tell.
iMessage, in practice, is not e2ee as devices escrow their “Messages in iCloud” cross-device sync keys to Apple in the non-e2ee iCloud Backup.
Even if you turn on e2ee for iCloud (“Advanced Data Protection”), your endpoint keys will stop being escrowed in a way readable to Apple in your backup, but the endpoint keys for everyone you message with will still be escrowed because they have not enabled Advanced Data Protection (because it’s off by default), so Apple will still be able to read all of your iMessage traffic.
99.9%+ of iMessages pass through Apple servers encrypted with keys that Apple has copies of (thanks to the insecure non-e2ee default nature of iCloud Backup). If the middle transit service has the private keys, it’s not e2ee.
I think it’s become status, but there are genuine reasons as to why people don’t like “green bubbles” in their chats. SMS breaks a lot of functionality that iMessage provides in group chats.
I don’t expect Apple to graduate RCS to a blue bubble, as it’s advantageous to keep the blue bubble “special”. I’ll be interested to see if society adapts and starts treating whatever RCS gets categorized as as “acceptable” or if we’re too far down the classism path for that to happen.
Unfortunately Signal makes it hard to backup photos people send you, and I know a few people who lost all their Signal chats and photos after switching phones (including myself).
If carriers can charge per RCS message like they do with SMS/MMS, usually after X amount used a month, Apple needs to make it a different color from iMessages which they provide for free.
People have to know if they are using free iMessages when talking to other people or if they are using up their SMS/MMS/RCS quota.
Edit: Maybe charging for SMSs is not a thing in your country but it is in mine. If I see a green bubble I would be mindful of the number of messages I send because after 200 SMSs I going to get charged per SMS.
Charging for SMS is a thing on some plans here in Brazil, but I don't know in other countries, RCS works completely for free as it works even on Wifi. You don't need mobile data or SMS plans.
If you are on mobile data, it just doesn't use your quota...
Here in India the plans do include free SMS, but there was a government imposed limit of 200 SMSes per day from a single SIM (this applied to retail consumers, not institutions that may want to send transactional or marketing messages). [1][2] Beyond that, the per SMS charge gets expensive. Though that limit seems to have been removed in 2020, [3] I’ve only seen plans that allow 100 SMSes per day.
Almost everyone in India with a smartphone uses WhatsApp. SMS is for receiving OTPs, transaction messages, marketing messages, spam, phishing messages, etc.
I hope they continue the green bubble shaming. Apparently RCS (at least as implemented in practice) still doesn't support end to end encryption.
In particular, they should color messages green if they can be forged by intermediaries / collected for bulk surveillance / used for ad targeting / sold to third parties by your carrier / etc.
Unlikely. This is most likely due to regulatory pressure of the EU. The Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act both hit Apple pretty hard.
Though the real losers here are potentially WhatsApp, Telegram and other third-party services (assuming that Apple will implement E2E encryption). Since iPhone is not as dominant in other countries as the US, WhatsApp and some other messaging services have become dominant outside the US. They are not really necessary anymore once there is a proper standard across platforms.
Telcos should be utilities. They supply the pipes that deliver services and applications.
RCS is unfortunately a step backwards from that idea.
And regarding Google's motivations for that campaign: They have acquired a company offering RCS services to telcos and marketers... https://jibe.google.com/
> Telcos live in the Stone Age. A little disruption is well overdue.
I thought RCS was still a Telco-based service? Don't you have to have a telephone number to use it, at least? I keep hoping we go away from POTS, instead of continuing to invent reasons to be stuck with it.
> This will work alongside iMessage, which will continue to be the best and most secure messaging experience for Apple users," said an Apple spokesperson.
I could be wrong but I don’t see anything here to suggest non-iMessages will no longer have the “green bubble” like the author assumes.
it will remain green, which means the signaling effect will also remain. the funny thing is everyone claims it's down to quality but guessing it won't matter, plus no 8ball/facetime will still push people towards iphones.
especially w young ppl, where i think like 90% have iphones. if i had a nickel for every time a gal mentioned green bubbles give her the ick, i wouldn't be rich but could probably buy a solid steak dinner off it.
It’s not that they would reject you if they already had some sort of a connection formed with you or that they consider having “green bubbles”to be an absolute dealbreaker. But if you have 5 similarly good on paper dating candidates, you are in the very initial stage of the process with them, and you need to narrow down the list, I don’t think it is that unreasonable to do so based on “the ease of texting.” You gotta narrow down somehow, and if doing so based on “green bubbles” eliminates 1-2 max out of 5 in the very initial stage, it is kind of a not that terrible of a metric. If it was eliminating half or more, it would be a bit more questionable.
Of course, eliminating someone for “green bubbles” after you had already developed some interest in is way too much and is indeed a trait that would make one not worth pursuing.
I suspect “work alongside“ is in that sentence to make it clear they are not replacing iMessage.
I agree with you that they’re likely to have green bubbles. Green equals not iMessage, blue equals iMessage. It seems unlikely they would introduce a third color and it would never be blue because it doesn’t support all the same features.
The current status iirc is that Google built its own e2e solutions in Android Messages, first for one-on-one conversations and as of August 2023 for group chats as well. They released technical papers but I don't think the implementations are part of the official spec. I think this section is basically Apple saying that they are going to push for that standardization:
> Finally, Apple says it will work with the GSMA members on ways to further improve the RCS protocol. This particularly includes improving the security and encryption of RCS messages.
I doubt anything has changed since 2020 in terms of China, Cuba, Iran or Russia but I couldn't find any news one way or the other
I'm betting the non-Apple bubbles will remain green... and remain a bit stigmatized.
It was never about the resolution of pictures and even technical limitations around group chat was just part of it. It's a social thing and the technical protocol is incidental.
Dr. Seuss probably explained it best in The Sneetches.
> It was never about the resolution of pictures and even technical limitations around group chat was just part of it.
It can be about both. It’s really nice to know when the images you sent are gonna be potato-quality and you need to find some other channel to send them, or that message reliability and capabilities in general are being limited to SMS (or RCS!) levels. I don’t give a shit about the social aspects, it’s valuable as a UI affordance.
I love when people comment on the color of a text message.
It makes it real easy to know who to block, because they worry about entirely the wrong things.
Personally, I'm happy to be left out of those, groupchat via MMS is awful. But then I'm not a teen, and when I was a teen, I was happy to be left out of a lot of things too.
> If you socially exclude someone because they care about the color of text message bubbles, don't you care at least as much as they do?
The grandparent comment is talking about excluding people for wasting their time going on rants about message bubble colors, not about excluding those with a “wrong” message bubble color.
And no, caring about not having to waste time on listening to someone who cares entirely too much about message bubble colors doesn’t mean that you care as much as they do about it.
I hate racists and hating racists doesnt make me a bad person.
I hate people who judge others based on $1000 dollar Veblen goods. Also I make more money than them, so I'm very aware that the person who cares about bubbles is being exploited by Apple's psychology and marketing department. So... maybe I don't hate them, maybe we should feel sorry for them.
Or maybe we need to hate them because its a deterrent against corporations exploiting insecurities.
First, just an aside: you don't have to hate anyone. It doesn't make you a bad person to hate others, but you could be living better, that's for sure. The thing is, it usually mainly impacts the hater, making them unhappy and angry.
But your analogy doesn't fit here... the issue with blue and green bubbles is the social pressure to have the "better" bubble color, to show you're part of the "better" group. That is, the negative social pressure comes from the threat of social exclusion via lower social standing. But the previous poster is also threatening social exclusion, but a more complete exclusion, and based on nearly the same thing. So it would be more like showing your objection to racism by expressing racist ideas or taking racist actions. Doesn't make sense, of course. That's my point.
The previous poster made a decision to exclude based on the other party's actions, namely giving someone shit about the color of a text box.. lol
Why would I want to burden myself with clowns like that?
I wear clothes because they are comfortable and look nice. I don't wear clothes because of the branding and those that are overly concerned about the branding, would be the same.
Edit: also, I'm now apparently the same ilk as racists, since I choose not to deal with idiots that worry about the color of text boxes. That's cool.
I don't think you're following the thread correctly. I guess re-read it, if you want to understand what is being said (probably a waste of time though).
Your response doesn’t address the content of the thread coherently. What else can I say? We need to actually be talking about the same things to have a discussion.
No, because my action is based on their behavior, and shitty attitude, not the color of their text messages.
I do not care what color the message is. If I could read it, mission accomplished. People who worry about the color of an SMS are not folks I
care to deal with. They are overly concerned about the wrong shit.
The moment you have a contact from any other country than your own, you'll quickly learn that green = huge carrier fees and blue = free texting that even works on wifi with data roaming off. Quadruply so for group chats.
Yes, there is no way they give up Green vs Blue. I'm sure they'll make up some excuse why it makes sense to keep the distinction.
But the reality is that the Millennial and Gen Z bubble culture has been a big driver behind their market share increase in the US. And if Gen Alpha adopts the same culture (and doesn't rebel against norms created by prior generations like young people tend to do) then Apple will have a near monopoly in in the US in 15 years.
"Nah, green bubble is a point of pride. You didn't fall for Apple's marketing tricks, you are the edgy person who Thinks Different." This concept alone will make it so it never reaches 100%.
Not to mention, Apple's security is so terrible, I imagine corporations are going to be banning iphones. Its never going to be a monopoly or a near monopoly.
Apple's positioning is targeted to people who buy Veblen goods. As long as there is a market for phones that are high quality, Apple will never get a 'near' monopoly.
>>It was never about the resolution of pictures and even technical limitations
Sure, to some degree, but I'm not convinced all or most of the shame is only the iphone cachet -- the quality is incredibly bad, like shockingly bad. It's unusable, particularly for videos. As those things change, I can't help but feel like the shame moderates.
But I don't have a teenager, so I don't have that perspective first hand.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 315 ms ] threadVery important.
I DO have an issue with them intentionally doing a shit job of integrating with a telecommunications standard and then slapping a green bubble on it to get their oblivious users to ostracize people's kids.
RCS is a suboptimal standard, and while it's good that Apple will support it to try to de-jank mixed-platform group messaging, I'd expect it also to be a different color because RCS in turn introduces its own jank that iMessage doesn't have. So people who want to make up an Apple to get mad at will still have their chance, I guess.
Can you talk a bit more about how iMessage is fundamentally diferent than SMS on the functionality level? Is it like "Signal" different or is it like "different" different?
Edit: bonus points if you can offer why iMessage is able to be the skeleton key into your iPhone, as often it and WebKit seem to be behind most of the serious 0-days...
It integrates with sharing my location and I can tell when someone is actually typing
It's different in the same way every messaging app is different from SMS:
* Group chats, with custom group names and icons
* High quality images/videos
* Reactions
* Stickers
* Rich link previews
* Threads
* etc. etc.
> why iMessage is able to be the skeleton key into your iPhone
I don't think a lot (any?) of the vulnerabilities are unique to iMessage. It's more about the fact that SMS/iMessage is a means for someone to send you data that's then parsed/decoded immediately by the system.
Kind of important to be able to tell if you are burning up your SMS quota.
I don't know much about how iMessage communication is implemented but it does offer end to end encryption and supports richer interaction and content than plain SMS does. that was one of the reasons that Apple marked SMS clients with the green bubbles to indicate not to expect the same interaction with them. It was some little shits that turned that into an anti-status symbol.
Its a boundary and we all need to get real better at understanding and being respectful thereto.
Only issue is if you want them more than they you, there's a bit of a dance to navigate . If the like Musk, send them to all his endorsementz. At the end of the day, it will have to be a negotiation at play and its more of a toughlove ultimatun purely for the area of which messenging platforms to engage with.
"It's not what we all already use."
There's exactly one person I know who uses Signal on a consistent basis. I don't turn on notifications for anything, so I don't see their messages on a consistent basis, but Signal offers me no incentive to use limited social credibility to try to encourage others to use its awkward affordances and non-native interface over either a native interface with reasonable security (iMessage) or a much better non-native interface without (Discord, Slack).
"There's no excuse not to use the one I like" is Linux-on-the-desktopping and is not responsive to how normal human beings actually operate in life and society. You might put picky conditions on your interactions, but most people meet others where they are--because network effects are real and humans matter more than technology.
Has all the features of anything else without the bullshit and lack of credibillity/hazard to their own users.
If people respect themselves and their data enough, they will find a way. I've had zero problem with my closest friends cuz they trust I don't assign them random bullshit for shiggles. Maybe you need to reevaluate your relationships and the extent to which you place primacy on being able to communicate freely and without crap that works against you (or at least isnt built to work with you rather than rat you out about everything controversial you privately express)
Just don't get it man, maybe they're more the Telegram type. Nothing's more advanced or private than a Telegram for sure. Stop.
At some point, perhaps it will enter your consideration that talking about things like "people respect[ing] themselves and their data enough" is alienating to anybody who has a job and a mortgage and things they care about more than your minority choice of a messaging platform. Normal people don't care because normal people don't have governments, etc. in their threat models because normal people are boring. If you want to interest normal people, you have to be better than the BATNA--better than non-use. And saying "privacy" or "just get your friends to use it too" is a fail state.
Linux-on-the-desktop failed, too, when the only tool in the box was hectoring. (He said, from a Linux desktop.)
Lockdown mode rejects unknown sources, and doesn't autoplay content types.
So they don't have to any more, it's up to the user.
Actuvate LockDown, and its all gone. Indefinitely cuz it blocks the original sin. And there's basicaly 0-downsides.
I currently have an iPhone 15 Pro Max and have also used Android devices in the past. I like to switch each time I get a new phone.
Apple definitely picks an ugly color to make you feel uncomfortable texting with a non iPhone user. They should at least let users choose the color (which will never happen).
Trying to claim that Apple picked an "ugly color to make you feel uncomfortable" is simply false.
To be fair the blue they choose is also not ideal, but it is a lot better than the green.
https://medium.com/@krvoller/how-iphone-violates-apples-acce...
iOS 5 (introduction of iMessage) : https://i.imgur.com/v2Wths4.png
iOS 7: https://i.imgur.com/7k8QL3z.png
Yes, it was green before, but it didn't look so vile. Since the redesign of iOS in 7 the difference of green vs blue is a difference in legibility.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/277597847631822848/11...
You can turn on high contrast mode in Messages settings which gives you a forest green color that's imo pretty nice to look at.
But what's Apple's motivation? Making me feel uncomfortable reading an Android user's messages does little to influence that Android user into buying an iPhone.
That said, I don't know why Apple thinks the transport protocol (iMessage vs SMS) is so important that users want to see a color indicator for every message.
It’s important users can tell if they are using SMS so they don’t get a giant phone bill at the end of the month.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoreceptor_cell#/media/File...
That's RGB lit up contrasted with just G lit up. One of the only worse pairings would be white on yellow, which would be RGB vs RG lit up, with the only distinguishing signal coming through blue, which we have the lowest resolution of.
White on blue is RGB vs B, all the visual difference in RG which we have the highest resolution of.
This is why you generally want different color schemes for light vs dark terminals, if the color saturation is high (saturated blue text on black is bad, saturated blue text on white is fine and vice versa for green and yellow).
The green bubble is there because in the past, when telcos charged money for individual SMS messages, green meant money. I.e., greenbacks, US dollars.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenback
* https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/263943/meaning-o...
Blue meant no charge for the message, since it went over the data plan and through Apple's servers.
The tribal/clan split of iPhone/no-iPhone came later.
They actually seemed to be working on it, but Apple was quickly hit with a patent suit from some company over FaceTime. I believe they had to re-architect how it worked to get around the patent.
They haven’t done anything about it since then. I wonder if they simply can’t because of patents. Either way by now I think they’ve decided it’s a strategic advantage and they wouldn’t do it by choice.
I do not know anyone who uses RCS who didn't end up on WhatsApp or Telegram pretty quickly afterwards.
I am a millennial though.
But that said, how do you know nobody stopped talking to you because of it? One of my friends (who is early 40s) said his family started leaving one of their family members out of the group chats because it "degraded the whole experience" and I doubt he ever told the person he was being left out, let alone why. I would imagine it's kind of like telling somebody that you aren't going to date them anymore because they're not attractive enough. Not something you want to admit, and even though it obviously happens, I've never heard of somebody actually being told this.
But, yeah, who knows. Probably nothing lost.
So far, yeah I have been. Android users don't seem to use RCS for anything advanced, they use WhatsApp. Anyway, iPhones already let you toggle MMS, so RCS might be togglable too.
Besides, some of the examples you mention I'd rather have via email instead of text for record-keeping purposes.
It worked just fine.
or if you're like my parents, and pay for a plan with plenty of data but leave it switched off at all times just because you don't want to accidentally go over your cap.
and you can also add your plumber or realtor on whatsapp. there's no reason not to. it's just a messaging app, i've got all kinds of customers and vendors on my whatsapp.
I would absolutely not want to do business with a contractor that uses an android phone. That's a serious red flag for someone doing work on a (usually very expensive) home to be using cheap tools.
Also, you realize there are android phones that are plenty expensive right?
The first one is that, despite the EU’s blatant attempt to carve the rules around the likes of Apple while simultaneously trying to shield EU companies, they've overestimated the amount of iMessage users, excluding iMessage from the DMA rules.
The other one, which is more important in this discussion, is that the EU kept the definitions of services rather broad to the degree that Apple’s adoption of RCS will automatically fulfill the interoperability requirement.
I wouldn't say "never". DMA is inherently political at its heart and designed to target US big techs precisely. Apple is not immune and EU gave the regulation board enough flexibility to target all of US big techs. Apple knows this and they decided to support RCS for this exact reason to gain public supports.
> The other one, which is more important in this discussion, is that the EU kept the definitions of services rather broad to the degree that Apple’s adoption of RCS will automatically fulfill the interoperability requirement.
EU already has defined iMessage as a separate core platform service from iOS and Apple hasn't argued against it because it would give them a chance to exclude iMessage from the scope of the regulation. Hence, OS level support for RCS won't cover iMessage if it's also designated as a gatekeeper.
[1]: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Category:xkcd_Pho...
Or at least, they don't care enough about it to vote with their wallet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei_Mate_60
Removable storage NM card 256GB
SIM
Card slot 1: NANO-SIM
Card slot 2: Choose one of the two NANO-SIM or NM memory card"
Though AFAIK, it's only on the Moto G family, which isn't a flagship series, so it won't be as capable as a Galaxy, Pixel, or iPhone.
I tried to find info for example about RCS in Australia, and saw a piece about Telstra launching RCS in 2017... but now it's apparently turned off and customers are expected to use the Google RCS service?
Apple has no reason to change the color from green and let users know that they shouldn't care as much as they used to.
Keeping SMS green would be good for purely transactional type SMS messages, and using another color for RCS would be good.
How did carriers fuck it up so badly that, a decade later, it's barely a blip on the messaging landscape? The were so desperate to stop OTT (over the top) services that they... locked everything down in the hope that customers wouldn't churn. It backfired spectacularly.
It's now some badge of shame Apple users discriminate against the blue vs green windows if a friend or relative doesn't have an i-thing, and Apple loves it all the way to the bank.
This, but with Apple. Whether or not Google whined about it, iMessage was never going to last. It was never a matter of if iMessage would be forced to reconcile itself with the interoperable protocol it replaced, but when.
So... Apple should have been ready. They should have been drafting absurd standards centered around their own servers, and taunting Google into adopting it. They could have even charged a license fee for the software. But instead they played high and mighty, and now they have to contend with the law. Frankly, I'm glad Google summoned Shai Hulud.
It's hard to imaging you sincerely think this would have been better. It seems like you want them to engage in dishonesty.
> But instead they played high and mighty, and now they have to contend with the law.
iMessage isn't going anywhere. They're just going to add RCS support in the same way that SMS is supported, because now there is momementum for carrier support. This is really a storm in a teacup.
Isn't the situation in the EU that they're looking to force Apple to allow others to use the iMessage protocol? So why would Apple work on getting Google to support iMessage, when Google is putting in work to get access to it?
If they'd simply added a "WhatsApp/iMessage mode" to Google Chat in 2015 (i.e. allow Google account based users to seamlessly communicate with phone number based users), I think we might be seeing a very different messaging landscape today.
They'd have been sued by WhapsApp and Apple if they did that since they're proprietary protocols.
iOS /iPadOS (and by extension, iPhone and iPad) however, has slim-to-major majorities in most lucrative markets[0] and even in markets where iOS is not a majority, its well known in the mobile industry that iOS / iPadOS customers are far more lucrative
[0]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ios-vs-android-market-share-1...
Japan: 65.88%
Denmark: 64.04%
Norway: 61.94%
Canada: 57.84%
Australia: 57.47%
United States: 56.74%
Switzerland: 55.92%
Sweden: 55.33%
United Kingdom: 51.63%
Taiwan: 51.32%
from: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/iphone-ma...
Also surprising as I always thought Android was more popular because there is more variety and cheaper options.
It's still a race war, apple (rich folk) vs. everyone else. Some middle ground probably, but not much - apple folks are obviously the richer targets.
I know who to target with spyware and otherwise get rich quick schemes, ransomware, kidnapping, almost any other major crimes. The best demographic with 1200 to spend on a phone.
It's not a "race war" if you need to clarify that apple <=> "rich folk". I might give you "class war", except there is no "war" part and no need to include it.
Not really. It's dominant in some regions but definitely not a huge chunk of Asia.
SMS revenues to hit $67B - 2007
https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/metric-sms-revenues-...
They used to love using SMS to take as much money as possible from their customers. Imagine texting "Hey" to a friend and getting charged $0.20 for it.
The cable television industry did the exact same thing. If they’d been willing to go OTT a decade ago and not force agreements based on geolocation, a lot of the streaming services that exist wouldn’t even need to exist today.
Kinda but not really. The cable providers were and continue to be hamstrung by the networks who force the cable providers to buy channel packages. Cable never had the leverage to, say, tell Disney that they only want to offer ESPN but not the 10 other Disney branded networks being offered. It was often all or nothing.
But if you want to see someone that appeals to the whole populace, then you will have to compete with the whole populace.
TicketMaster is a textbook example of a consumer-harming monopoly, and yet they have gone unprosecuted for decades. No excuse.
Pathetic.
Ticketmaster isn't the true price-gouger. It's actually the artist + promotor + venue that collectively set the high prices. Ticketmaster is just the administrative computer system to implement the high prices that the artist/promoter/venue want to charge.
For example, top artists can negotiate to get 105% of ticket's face value from the concert promoter. Indeed, people have speculated that Taylor Swift had so much leverage in negotiating the terms of the Eras tour that she got 110% of the ticket's face price.[1]
If Taylor gets 110% of the ticket money, how does that leave anything left for the promoter and the venue?!? With those artists' financial demands, you now have a math problem: where to get the extra +5% or +10% and also pay the promoter+venue without taking a loss? By charging extra fees.
It's a very clever bit of financial sleight-of-hand. The artist/promoter/venue can all charge more money but hide the blame by embedding it in Ticketmaster's "convenience fees", "service fees", "order processing fees", etc, etc. In this way, Ticketmaster is perceived as the parasite.
Your question where Ticketmaster is already assumed to be the "bad guy" means Ticketmaster's deliberate manipulation of public perception is working exactly as designed.
[1] https://archive.is/J5Eg3
Yes, but when other promoters (not Live Nation) book artists at non-LN venues and use Tickemaster as the ticketing agent, all the extra convenience fees are still there.
E.g. Taylor Swift's promoter for Eras Tour was AEG, not Live Nation. And in Dallas, she performed at AT&T Stadium which is a venue owned by City of Arlington, not Live Nation. Ticketmaster was only the agent selling tickets for that Dallas show and it still had all the extra TM service fees padding out the price. In that case, Taylor Swift + AEG + AT&T Stadium got their slices of the pie by using Ticketmaster fees as the "bad guy".
Live Nation acquiring Ticketmaster in 2010 doesn't fundamentally change what Ticketmaster is designed to do: take the public relations blame for artists, etc charging the higher prices.
The networks ruined their own businesses too — even if some were smarter than others (HBO being the smartest and also why it was the most valuable asset of the AT&T acquisition and the Discovery acquisition) — but I chose to focus on the cable companies b/c they are dumb pipes the same way wireless carriers are and they refused to disrupt themselves.
And the networks were already offering online access to their content via TV Everywhere. They didn’t want to do the geolocation thing, that was all requirements of the cable companies (the issues with the network broadcasters like ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox are much more complex).
In fact, you could (and I would) argue that it was the cable companies insistence on maintaining their defacto monopolies on who could get what service where (because there was never consumer choice in who your cable provider is, unless you count satellite, which I do not) that pushed the networks hands into creating their own competing OTT services based on the content they owned. Because as people cut the cord, the networks weren’t going to watch their businesses completely go up in flames. Now, should they have done that sooner and more aggressively (HBO did it best and earliest with HBO Now as a companion to HBO Go — a move that earned them the ire of the cable industry, the same industry who often refused to let HBO Go subscribers who paid the cable companies directly for HBO, do things like access the service on an Xbox b.c they didn’t like the idea of people not paying a $5 a month fee for an extra box), yes. 1000%
But let’s not pretend like the cable companies were without leverage. If they’d acted decisively and disrupted themselves early enough, they were the ones with the direct relationship with the customer, not the networks. They were the ones who could have created their own bundles of OTT content. But no, they refused until it was too late and got to see the whole industry bleed itself and for live content to essentially die.
People didn’t quit cable because of price. They did it because of price to perceived value. As has been shown with the current state of streaming services, it isn’t actually cheaper to cut the cord. But what you do get is a lot more flexibility.
Imagine if Comcast had offered its own YouTube TV style service in 2012 (something Intel tried to do in late 2013 before it was summarily canceled — I almost took a job on that team and dodged a bullet), rather than hoping against hope that cord cutting wouldn’t take off? You’d probably have a bunch of Comcast subscribers to this day who were satisfied that they could watch all their TV live and on demand whenever they wanted.
No idea what kind of poor purchasing decisions would lead to that. You can't get any form of cable package for less than $150 a month last time I checked. I don't pay anywhere near that for Internet + a couple of streaming services.
Oh, and the $30 a year or whatever for a VPN.
Yes, it was as ridiculous as it sounds. There used to be news articles about kids racking up hundreds of dollars on their phone bill.
Here's one from the same year the iphone was released:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/0...
It was definitely a factor in the EU, though: SMS still aren't free on many prepaid plans there. WhatsApp was the first popular application supporting unlimited messaging on mobile phones for many.
I remember a lot of conversations in high school going "My plans maxed out can you text $friend?" IIRC you had to specifically turn off receiving texts or they'd charge you for each one and we were broke HS kids.
edit: Oh that article posted above is 2007. I guess it lasted way longer than I thought.
> Besides ease of use, there's another side benefit to this seamless integration. If you send messages regularly to iOS 5 users, you may be able to switch to a cheaper texting plan from your carrier. Assuming you send messages exclusively to iOS 5 users, you may one day be able to ditch a texting plan altogether.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/06/more-upcoming-ios-5-...
But the question here is: Were there any (reasonably popular) plans that provided data for smartphones, but not unlimited texting? If not, that couldn't have been a factor in the adoption of iMessage in the US.
(IIRC, my plan with Cingular didn't have any texts built-in, so they were 10¢ a pop, in each direction. I could send many thousands within the data plan's couple of gigabytes.)
Are you sure? I remember iMessage falling back to SMS if for some reason it can’t get through on iMessage.
I can also remember killing my data plan browsing Instagram while skipping my French class ... So about 7 years ago?
As a kid I used to make a collect call to my mom and when they asked who was calling I’d say, “pick me up” and hang up. Free short messages even in the 90’s!
Hello, fellow graybeard!
This is something I pull out every once in a while to let kids these days know how rough we had it: we had to pay 10-25 cents per minute for any in-state phone calls that weren't "local", where "local" was an arbitrary boundary on the map not even related to area code.
If we had to call out of state, charges started at $1 per minute. Every year at Christmas, we'd have an event where the local family would gather to make phone calls to out-of-state family. Because the cost was so high, we had to strictly ration time. Each kid (I was a kid then) got 3 minutes talk time.
This was late '70s/early '80s, and the figures are not adjusted for inflation.
The reason why WhatsApp was huge internationally (like, 10^8 users huge) was because many teclos in developing countries included data usage in their plans but SMS was extra (and talking minutes were finite), so people used WhatsApp for all comms.
WhatsApp's had a free tier, but their basic plan was (IIRC) $1/month, and they many (tens/hundreds) of millions of users that paid it.
Facebook bought WhatsApp for $20B:
* https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-whatsapp-idUSKCN...
> Evidently, Zuckerberg lied to the European and American trade commissions. It was in fact possible to interface Facebook and WhatsApp platforms to mine data. Facebook has been doing it since day one of its acquisition. As always, Zuckerberg admitted to the misdeed, apologized and paid the fine. He got away scot-free.
> Months later, co-founder Jan Koum discovered that Facebook’s management weakened WhatsApp encryption system to make it easier for them to mine data. Koum resigned too.
> Fast forward to today and Zuckerberg continues to mine our data through Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram (which he acquired in 2012). Facebook has become a surveillance behemoth – arguably the biggest surveillance organization in the world.
* https://www.philstar.com/opinion/2023/04/05/2256935/real-rea...
US users quickly had access to unlimited SMS and calling on most phone plans, which is why Whatsapp never took root.
In the EU for instance, the reverse was true. Particularly, unlimited data was cheap and affordable, where as SMS was quite costly (even more than in the US in some cases) so data heavy apps were easier to adopt. Hence, WhatsApp, Telegram etc. gaining so much popularity. iMessage was introduced much later to the rich messaging market than these apps in those countries (because mobile messaging apps were cheap to adopt in markets where mobile data is cheap).
There is much more competition in those countries with cheap mobile data in the rich messaging services space. In the US, unlimited data has had a more sordid history, and SMS / MMS had a much bigger adoption rate early on
iMessage was free once you had a smartphone plan.
And no, smartphone plans didn’t automatically come with unlimited SMS. I had to “upgrade” for that.
Unless you went over your data limit.
Start sending any kind of media and all bets are off.
iMessage "won" because it was the default for iPhone users in the US. Similarly, Whatsapp is the default nowhere and I don't know anyone who uses it, but that might be a generational thing. Whatsapp has always struck me as common in Europe, but rare in the US. We just use text and FB Messenger.
However, international SMS/MMS was extremely expensive, and that was the main impetus for WhatsApp. It required no password or making accounts or remembering all of that, hence all non tech savvy people could easily use it. And it worked flawlessly, with zero exorbitant international charges, because you knew everything was going via data.
So each major device-vendor developed his client-app, and ended up with interoperability issues not only with the RCS-servers used by a given carrier, but also with devices of OTHER vendors. And that doesn't even begin to cover the issues on inter-carrier messaging...
The situation was only resolved after Google acquired Jibe Mobile (the biggest player in developing RCS server/client applications for carriers) and basically created a single RCS-client/server implementation using their Android Messages app and a Google-owned server.
But when you were working on RCS back in 2012, you may remember that at that time, RCS didn't even support store&forward (!!).
So if the receiving device was not available when a message was delivered (because it had no network or client wasn't running on a device, which happened alot especially on iOS because the client was in a constant fight with the OS), the message wasn't queued anywhere.
Apart from the obvious issue of missing messages, it caused the even worse UX-impact that the entire conversation looked different on sender/receiver.
--
Ah yes, and: RCS was originally designed with per-message billing in mind (of course). At the time it was launched it was finally clear to the carriers that those times are over, but the whole architecture had quite a chunk of billing architecture in it as well...
Thank you for highlighting this. This important piece of information often gets lost in the "green bubble" discussion.
Google has significant incentives for pushing RCS for more than one reason.
Google doesn't own the RCS-specification, the spec is still defined and maintained by GSMA, with Google just having one of the seats at the table (along with carriers and device manufacturers).
Apple is also a member of GSMA, them adopting RCS means that they just take another seat at the table of the RCS working group.
--
> Google has significant incentives for pushing RCS for more than one reason.
I don't know if you mean to imply some hidden Agenda. The incentive is to standardize "rich communication" across mobile platforms. "Green bubble" is one manifestation of the bigger issue that 27 years after the creation of SMS there is still no other universal method for me to send a text to your phone number today.
The main reason for that is, that several players still hope to own this communication channel to the user with their proprietary app, become the "Western WeChat" and sell access to the users.
RCS could be an universal non-proprietary method, open to be adopted by Apple, Facebook, WhatsApp and whoever wants to build a Message ecosystem. It has the potential to end this hassle and allow me to send a text to your number and reach you regardless of your OS and application of preference.
Okay. The main incentive is to create a competitive method for messaging which allows rich communication with everyone, regardless of platform or ecosystem just via their phone number.
Name five more.
There is little new information to gain for them, no matter how Android users communicate with Apple users right now.
There is however a lot to gain for them if a unified rich communication standard is established in the market, because apart from finally being able to replace SMS, it would drive platform-agnostic innovation in this area.
Google and Apple agreeing on a standard could disrupt the ecosystems of Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Vibr, Zoom, MS Teams etc.
The client and the OS don't really give them any metadata or message content. Operating the server infrastructure would.
SMS doesn't touch their servers (except possibly for people that use Google's Messages app and/or backup service); RCS does.
> There is however a lot to gain for them if a unified rich communication standard is established in the market, because apart from finally being able to replace SMS, it would drive platform-agnostic innovation in this area.
Absolutely, but that open standard will hopefully not be RCS. It's way too coupled to the 3GPP/ITU model of doing things.
I trust the organizations in charge of the web and Internet (who brought us email and XMPP/Jabber!) a bit more than those who still somewhat yearn for the days in which OTT players did not exist and telecommunication was charged by the mile and minute or message.
The client includes a spam protection service which allows them to send message data to a server for scanning. Every other messaging app uses the Notification service to send the message and its relevant metadata to the OS. So as far as conspiracy goes, Google has all the means to get the data already today.
RCS is (was) the prime example of Apple's anticompetitive behavior, after the App Store exclusivity, preventing side loading, and disallowing alternative browsers.
The teenage market share is 87% currently. just a couple more years is all they need.
Enabling MMS requires a somewhat convoluted set of changes to the phone's cellular settings, and despite having done them correctly I periodically get a "we couldn't send you all your texts, fix your settings" warning SMS from Google.
Photos, videos, group messaging are all a significantly better experience with iMessage in my experience. This is not to say that other apps don't offer a similar experience, you can achieve much of the same functionality on Telegram or WhatsApp. It's just that it's built into the phone.
Google might have achieved similar success with their own messaging platform had they'd not constantly thrown it under the bus and created a new one every month. Allo, Duo, Meet, Google+, Google Chat etc....
Any messaging app that permits spam is user hostile. Spam takes up more of my time than I would ever want to give on Whatsapp/Messenger/Text. iMessage has prevented me from contacting precisely zero people. If I were to walk away from my iPhone I would lose nothing after exporting some messages.
The barrier to entry to other potential users of $100s is well worth it for me.
Edit: it was not an acquisition but a partnership
https://nothing.community/d/2968-introducing-nothing-chats
RCS offers such a rich environment that Apple could finally truly integrate most stuff transparently with iMessage. Send a video to the group chat? Everyone gets it at full quality. Make a poll? Everyone can vote.
Nothing will still have a feature and an edge by offering a "blue bubble" on Android, but this announcement would reduce my excitement a little bit if I were them.
The social stigma stems from iMessage giving Apple users advanced and integrated messaging for free since the very beginning, which “spoiled” people into not wanting to deal with pure SMS chats.
But I do wonder if the timing is completely coincidental.
This is a win for RCS, ultimately. Maybe this will kick carriers into high gear to up their messaging standard support game and have standard interop.
I don't think this will lead to a decline in iMessage usage, nor do I think it will be catalyst enough to get people to move to Android, because there are still things RCS won't be able to support[0] but its a big step forward for a more pleasant experience between iOS and Android.
[0]: Memojis, reactions (tapbacks I think their called) and I'm curious about threaded messages. Also, at this time the actual RCS standard does not specificy that messages must be end to end encrypted. iMessage on the other hand has robust E2EE encryption (and you can get even more robust encryption by enabling Advanced Data Protection)
Looking at / selling message contents is a large potential revenue source for all the other major players.
There will be some ridiculous loophole like leasing will be allowed of all vowels on Mondays, and all consonants on Tuesdays.
https://www.verizon.com/about/privacy/full-privacy-policy
They definitely sell things like your real-time location (you can opt out by turning your phone off, or if they're legally obligated to let you), who you contact, what websites you visit, what DNS entries your phone looks up, your subscriber information (assuming they can link it to an advertising ID that other apps are using), and what TV shows you watch, joined with all the stuff you use your broadband and phone for.
As for communications content, it's fuzzy.
My reading of it says that they can aggregate that all together in a way that is only personally identifiable to their internal marketing team and their partners (i.e., anyone that pays them and also signs a contract), so I guess it's not "for sale"? So, for instance, they could take all the RCS messages in the US, cluster them, and sell the cluster to, say, meta. Then, meta could use it for ad targeting of third party ads, but they wouldn't be able to resell the raw data unless they first de-anonymized it.
I could be wrong though. The privacy policy is very long and incredibly vague. Maybe they don't share the contents of your private communications with their "trusted partners" or internal advertising division yet.
The only way this sort of crap will get better is if the US passes a right to privacy constitutional amendment. (Of course, congress is more likely to pass laws that somehow make it worse.)
Can telcos actually offer E2EE given the various lawful intercept statutes that they are usually subject to?
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/google-messa...
Only if both users in a 1:1 chat are using Google Messages. E2EE is not possible even with Samsung Messages, so I highly doubt it.
Pretty sure everyone would still have to use Google Messages.
How does google messages (gMessage?) indicate which messages aren't secure?
Green bubbles matter in group chats. You can’t easily change participants and stuff like reactions generate junk messages.
Probably not a big issue if you already have a solid social circle of old tight friends who don't care about you breaking chats as they can also call you, but it can be huge issue when you move to a new city and trying to make new friend, as any extra friction you add to groups lessens your chances of being accepted and invited further.
Yeah, people can be quite lazy and petty even about such trivial things, when they don't know you and don't have any attachment to you yet, and you breaking group chats won't improve your first impressions and chances of being accepted. Hence the ever increasing loneliness crisis we're facing.
Thank fuck I live in Europe where nobody uses iMessage for group chats. Honestly fuck Apple for creating that unnecessary friction, it's not like they couldn't have accommodated blue bubbles to not break group chats but it's more profitable to emotionally extort people to buy your iJunk by making them feel outsiders.
Meh. I'm not interested in being part of a social circle that is as petty as that.
Seems like a completely different situation.... and really, again, a people problem.
On Twitter you can easily curate Twitter lists of people to follow without being forced to use the generated feed. I'm rarely if ever outraged or otherwise emotionally charged when I'm using it. (Maybe except when I come across reply-bots)
And as I said elsewhere in the thread, I've never experienced that problem with any friend groups when it comes to iMessage.
And this has real effects. For example, Im forced to use a piece of shit Macbook at work, where literally everything else in our cloud runs on linux, because the company issues Macs as a way of attracting talent since "tech" people also want tech jewelry.
Only a very specific demographic, though. Such companies are missing out on a lot of talented tech people.
Those people don't sound like people worth knowing. Ignorant and judgy to say the least.
If it's a boss or someone I love and they want to ignore my messages that's on them. If it's a work issue possibly HR could be involved as discrimination or outright ignoring messages based on device wouldn't really fly.
My boss could be refusing dates from people that have green bubbles, but not ignoring my messages. Same with a family member for example. Your comment says they aren't worth knowing either way.
She's not "cut off", but it requires a conscious effort to contact her. So while I may be keeping a group of people up to date or inviting folks for a bbq, open house, etc casually, I need to specifically invite her via some other channel.
Sometimes I forget. Feelings are hurt. I'm a single parent with a demanding job. Low friction rules the roost for me, and our group of friends all sort of support each other with these types of things and do alot of ad-hoc stuff.
The people who were refused dates dodged bullets, then.
Sounds like not dating them is dodging a real bullet if they're that shallow.
I agree RCS will stay green. It will have text, good quality media, maybe read receipts.
And that’s it. No E2EE or other extensions. Apple is fixing one issue (bad media quality) and taking away a disingenuous Google talking point. Perhaps this is also an argument to legislators that they don’t need to open iMessage.
They’re never going to go out of their way to make it preferable in any way.
The newly created SMS group doesn’t replace the thread associated with the original group, though, so it’s easy for the group to fork when this happens.
Unlikely this will change with RCS.
Unfortunately I think it's just the typical remnant of the old Mac vs Windows haters who come out of the woodwork online to make it sound like a problem.
It's not at all unusual for my phone to explode in dinging when I leave one of those areas.
I wish they didn't block WiFi calling, because my cellular reception at home isn't great, and I'd use it there. We have an internal WiFi network separate from the public one, with per-user authentication, so you don't have to worry about visitors overloading the infrastructure (it's a hospital, lots of families and patients in addition to the staff).
They can, but one or both parties is refusing to use any of the numerous alternative messaging options like WhatsApp.
On Android, it wasn't an issue to use Signal, because it will communicate securely if it can and by SMS if it can't. So you can still text anyone from the app. On iOS, not so much.
I'd stay away from Whatsapp just to keep away from Meta.
This seems prejudiced. If one company supports end-to-end encrypted chats with everyone, and the other only with people who buy their devices, I think it's clear who cares more about privacy.
Signal does E2EE. They have not yet done anything to jeopardize the trust they have earned. Some do not like them, and that’s fine. I have a different view.
2. Any Android users with iPhone friends trying to use iMessage for group chat cares about it. It's impossible to add Android users to an existing group chat... and any time you have a mixed iPhone + Android group chat it degrades a number of the iMessage group chat features normally accessible to iPhone users.
3. Any Android users receiving media over SMS/MMS from an iPhone user cares. They'll be receiving images & videos that look like they were shot with a potato.
The blue vs green color doesn't matter, but the effects mixed platform chatting has on both iPhone & Android users is significant.
Apple adopting RCS won't solve #1, and is unlikely to solve #2, but solving #3 is a great start, and if the Apple faithful continue to give feedback to Apple that they care about fixing #2, we might see it one day.
Another solution Google could perhaps pursue would be to license one or multiple of those to include in the default Android install, but I don't see that happening without regulatory interference.
FB Messenger will have a "green bubble" for messages to people using whatever other app they're forced to integrate. Same with Whatsapp, Telegram, etc...
RCS is such carrier-dependent crap.
This is pretty moot now. Google has effectively turned RCS into a proprietary protocol, they fully control the only relevant server implementation, carriers that want to interconnect have no choice but to deploy Jibe or use Jibe as a service.
Apple supporting RCS could create enough interest that it breaks their de facto control of the standard
I know from a friend that Facebook was looking into integrating RCS to Messenger (not Whatsapp somehow) and willing to be part of the Google federated RCS network, that also fell through, but I don't why.
I've been trying to gain some insight on why Google is not making it easy (possible?) to implement a third-party RCS app for Android and was reading about these APIs (clearly intended for OEMs).
> This means that third party apps aren't allowed to access RCS single registration APIs as they require carrier certification on the device.
Could just be Google passing the buck here, but this does sound like something the carriers would do, if given the chance.
Working against a single server implementation with a standardized client provisioning mechanism is much easier too.
That's not true. Mavenir offers an RCS platform that T-Mobile has been using up until recently. A renewed interest in RCS due to Apple supporting it might end up with their platform being more sellable.
https://www.lightreading.com/mobile-core/mavenir-t-mobile-co...
I work at a carrier that deployed a solution provided by WIT. Then around 2019-2020 Google decided they weren't interested in an open and interconnected RCS backend anymore.
It's been terrible for all the poor people I know who rarely have working data on their phones, but RCS enabled by default. They can't figure out why they're not sending or receiving any messages and I have to keep disabling it for them.
And of course the prompt has a large blue button to enable, and a very small text underneath to dismiss, making it easy to accidentally enable it. It happened to me a few times already.
It also tells you nothing about the downsides (that you need a data connection, mainly) that would make RCS unusable to certain people... So they trick users into subscribing then users begin experiencing difficulties receiving or sending texts and they don't understand why.
Thank you, Google.
It doesn't do this on my phones.
I did just find and disable the RCS Config Service, too, and testing that everything still works.
https://www.fcc.gov/general/lifeline-program-low-income-cons...
The problem is that the phones generally only come with 15GB of data a month, and an average web page can easily run to 200MB now, so usually by the third day of the month they are all out of data.
There is a better federal plan for poor people called ACP which allows you to get your own phone and plan, but it isn't as well-known.
Wait, what? How did it come to that? I thought it was more like 50 MB if not even less. Thank God we have ad blockers.
> guys on every street corner trying to get you to take a free smartphone or a tablet with 15GB of data a month
Would it be possible to get it as a tourist?
Note that the green bubble could be kept for other reasons: RCS is a major improvement over SMS/MMS, but there could still be functionality that isn't on par with a completely in-house system like 'iMessage'.
The green/blue distinction may still be useful for setting certain expectations on how things work.
If they truly cared about sec, they would use something like Signal.
Why do you feel Signal is better security wise?
Even if you turn on e2ee for iCloud (“Advanced Data Protection”), your endpoint keys will stop being escrowed in a way readable to Apple in your backup, but the endpoint keys for everyone you message with will still be escrowed because they have not enabled Advanced Data Protection (because it’s off by default), so Apple will still be able to read all of your iMessage traffic.
99.9%+ of iMessages pass through Apple servers encrypted with keys that Apple has copies of (thanks to the insecure non-e2ee default nature of iCloud Backup). If the middle transit service has the private keys, it’s not e2ee.
I don’t expect Apple to graduate RCS to a blue bubble, as it’s advantageous to keep the blue bubble “special”. I’ll be interested to see if society adapts and starts treating whatever RCS gets categorized as as “acceptable” or if we’re too far down the classism path for that to happen.
People have to know if they are using free iMessages when talking to other people or if they are using up their SMS/MMS/RCS quota.
Edit: Maybe charging for SMSs is not a thing in your country but it is in mine. If I see a green bubble I would be mindful of the number of messages I send because after 200 SMSs I going to get charged per SMS.
If you are on mobile data, it just doesn't use your quota...
Almost everyone in India with a smartphone uses WhatsApp. SMS is for receiving OTPs, transaction messages, marketing messages, spam, phishing messages, etc.
[1]: https://trai.gov.in/notifications/press-release/trai-extends...
[2]: https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/200-sms-per-day...
[3]: https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-techn...
In particular, they should color messages green if they can be forged by intermediaries / collected for bulk surveillance / used for ad targeting / sold to third parties by your carrier / etc.
Telcos live in the Stone Age. A little disruption is well overdue.
Though the real losers here are potentially WhatsApp, Telegram and other third-party services (assuming that Apple will implement E2E encryption). Since iPhone is not as dominant in other countries as the US, WhatsApp and some other messaging services have become dominant outside the US. They are not really necessary anymore once there is a proper standard across platforms.
RCS is unfortunately a step backwards from that idea.
And regarding Google's motivations for that campaign: They have acquired a company offering RCS services to telcos and marketers... https://jibe.google.com/
I thought RCS was still a Telco-based service? Don't you have to have a telephone number to use it, at least? I keep hoping we go away from POTS, instead of continuing to invent reasons to be stuck with it.
I could be wrong but I don’t see anything here to suggest non-iMessages will no longer have the “green bubble” like the author assumes.
especially w young ppl, where i think like 90% have iphones. if i had a nickel for every time a gal mentioned green bubbles give her the ick, i wouldn't be rich but could probably buy a solid steak dinner off it.
I mean, I guess I would be grateful to have such an earlier indicator that someone is not worth pursuing. Truly, who cares.
Of course, eliminating someone for “green bubbles” after you had already developed some interest in is way too much and is indeed a trait that would make one not worth pursuing.
i didn't say they were directed at me
Blue: RCS
<blink>Red</blink>: SMS/MMS
I agree with you that they’re likely to have green bubbles. Green equals not iMessage, blue equals iMessage. It seems unlikely they would introduce a third color and it would never be blue because it doesn’t support all the same features.
Also, will iMessage support for RCS include e2ee?
Governments and their intelligence organisations are what matters.
And countries like UK will be pushing as hard as possible to make E2EE optional.
> Finally, Apple says it will work with the GSMA members on ways to further improve the RCS protocol. This particularly includes improving the security and encryption of RCS messages.
I doubt anything has changed since 2020 in terms of China, Cuba, Iran or Russia but I couldn't find any news one way or the other
https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf?sj...
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9420/
Proposed.
And it's both ridiculous and sad that in 2023 we are going to see a messaging standard without E2EE built into the spec.
AIUI, what Google/Android does is have their own extension, with the Content-Type of the message being "application/vnd.google.rcs.encrypted":
* https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf
This is kind of like, with (E)SMTP/IMAP, having your own capability of "X-GOOG-ENCRYPT" if the standards-based "STARTTLS" was not around.
So while RCS gives many other improvement over SMS/MMS, encryption is not one of them.
(Personally I have an iPhone, but don't conect 'iMessage', and generally stick with SMS/MMS.)
https://thehackernews.com/2023/07/google-messages-getting-cr...
E2EE is like both sending and receiving parties agreeing to use PGP. The servers aren't involved with the details; they just move the opaque bytes.
I'm betting the non-Apple bubbles will remain green... and remain a bit stigmatized.
It was never about the resolution of pictures and even technical limitations around group chat was just part of it. It's a social thing and the technical protocol is incidental.
Dr. Seuss probably explained it best in The Sneetches.
It can be about both. It’s really nice to know when the images you sent are gonna be potato-quality and you need to find some other channel to send them, or that message reliability and capabilities in general are being limited to SMS (or RCS!) levels. I don’t give a shit about the social aspects, it’s valuable as a UI affordance.
So are most people who prefer iMessage over MMS (aka “green bubbles”), which is kind of the point.
More, probably, because if they just mention it and you block them, that's disproportionate.
The grandparent comment is talking about excluding people for wasting their time going on rants about message bubble colors, not about excluding those with a “wrong” message bubble color.
And no, caring about not having to waste time on listening to someone who cares entirely too much about message bubble colors doesn’t mean that you care as much as they do about it.
I hate people who judge others based on $1000 dollar Veblen goods. Also I make more money than them, so I'm very aware that the person who cares about bubbles is being exploited by Apple's psychology and marketing department. So... maybe I don't hate them, maybe we should feel sorry for them.
Or maybe we need to hate them because its a deterrent against corporations exploiting insecurities.
But your analogy doesn't fit here... the issue with blue and green bubbles is the social pressure to have the "better" bubble color, to show you're part of the "better" group. That is, the negative social pressure comes from the threat of social exclusion via lower social standing. But the previous poster is also threatening social exclusion, but a more complete exclusion, and based on nearly the same thing. So it would be more like showing your objection to racism by expressing racist ideas or taking racist actions. Doesn't make sense, of course. That's my point.
Maybe because I'm good looking and make a lot of money, I don't have to care about green bubbles?
Maybe this is important if you are a poor person.
Why would I want to burden myself with clowns like that?
I wear clothes because they are comfortable and look nice. I don't wear clothes because of the branding and those that are overly concerned about the branding, would be the same.
Edit: also, I'm now apparently the same ilk as racists, since I choose not to deal with idiots that worry about the color of text boxes. That's cool.
Where is that claim made?
"So it would be more like showing your objection to racism by expressing racist ideas or taking racist actions"
This is stating that, for example, if you dislike racists and choose not to associate with them, you're acting like a racist. lol
That's not racism...at all. It's not even bigotry. The choice is based on actions, not class, religion, color, etc.
ok..
I do not care what color the message is. If I could read it, mission accomplished. People who worry about the color of an SMS are not folks I care to deal with. They are overly concerned about the wrong shit.
But the reality is that the Millennial and Gen Z bubble culture has been a big driver behind their market share increase in the US. And if Gen Alpha adopts the same culture (and doesn't rebel against norms created by prior generations like young people tend to do) then Apple will have a near monopoly in in the US in 15 years.
Not to mention, Apple's security is so terrible, I imagine corporations are going to be banning iphones. Its never going to be a monopoly or a near monopoly.
Apple's positioning is targeted to people who buy Veblen goods. As long as there is a market for phones that are high quality, Apple will never get a 'near' monopoly.
Sure, to some degree, but I'm not convinced all or most of the shame is only the iphone cachet -- the quality is incredibly bad, like shockingly bad. It's unusable, particularly for videos. As those things change, I can't help but feel like the shame moderates.
But I don't have a teenager, so I don't have that perspective first hand.
That’s just the quality of pictures/video MMS carries.