Didn’t Apple announce they were doing this last year?
I thought the only thing that was new this week was confirmation it would be in 18 as opposed to 18.1 or 17.6 or at some other time. But even then 18 seemed the most obvious anyway.
The WWDC keynote is mostly about new shiny stuff to tell people all the cool stuff coming to their phone and why they may want to buy a better one (Apple Intelligence this year).
As you pointed out it’s not new information. And “doesn’t suck as much” is not exactly high marketing copy. They put it on one of their slides of random features coming to the new OS so people would know it’s there but didn’t spend any time on it.
I agree with you, they weren’t trying to hide it. It just wasn’t that interesting compared to everything else they were doing that no one knew about (outside of perhaps the rumor mill).
The parent comment guesses they were avoiding saying Android, but, in analogy with imessage availability on both macos/ios, there's linux/android. But, yes, when I wrote "I think" i can't claim that's what they meant, just that's my reading of it.
"Text message" meaning "sends sms". RCS is (for all intents and purposes) an upgrade to SMS. How many Linux desktops have a phone number and a SIM card (or equivalent)?
Signal made the design choice to require a phone number to operate. Just as with Google Messages, Whatsapp, telegram, and most others, the desktop application for Signal requires you to auth via the app on your phone, which is authed to the network via your phone number.
iMessage is tied to an Apple ID and doesn't require you to have a phone at all.
Normal people don’t care about open standards. They only care about outcomes.
I know people who have wondered why texting to/from Android phones “doesn’t work” since pictures/video look terrible. This is a problem for their customers.
It wouldn’t surprise me if they would’ve done this without regulatory pressure, just perhaps not as soon.
Outside of small bubbles, it’s hard to believe that anyone really cares, since it’s a resolved problem in most of the world. Without exaggeration, every person I’ve met from Europe, LATAM, East/West/South Asia, Africa, and Australia has by default asked me, “Do you use WhatsApp (or its local equivalent)?” when we decided to keep in touch.
I agree it has some monopolistic tendencies in the US and Canada and signals “iPhone is better!” when someone is what they call “a green bubble.” However, in the end, every group chat just gets created in an OS-agnostic app if one of the users has an Android. So, from my perspective, it’s a wasteful allocation of resources if you’re trying to “make it a good experience for the customers to communicate with non-customers” since it doesn’t really get “much better” than what we have now.
As a person who has friends with Androids, I have no idea about the video quality through MMS. We just use WhatsApp, and although it affects the quality, it’s generally good enough.
My point isn’t that this upgrade isn’t useful. I meant, why would a private company allocate resources to fix a problem that barely affects their users?
> why would a private company allocate resources to fix a problem that barely affects their users
It doesn’t barely affect users. That’s the point. In the US 50% of people use android. In the rest of the world that numbers a lot higher. Anything that goes over MMS sucks. Having a single android person in a group chat means falling back to SMS/MMS and everything sucks.
RCS is a huge quality of life improvement when texting non-iPhones for people who do that on a regular basis.
Again, this argument ignores the existence of OS-agnostic apps like WhatsApp. Who uses MMS? I might be extremely wrong, as I couldn’t find numbers online. But just from personal experience as well, outside of US, WhatsApp and its alternatives are defacto standard over SMS/MMS. Significant chunk of countries offer free data for WhatsApp/Messenger usage, and SMS/MMS is still paid per text.
People are not going to switch to using SMS just because iPhone added RCS either.
I’m very curious about the numbers that Apple/Alphabet see internally, as I couldn’t find anything from quick searches. It’s just very hard to imagine that it’s an actual widespread issue. I can think of two demographics who experience this problem. First is older people (70+) who have never been exposed to apps, have an Android and text people on iOS. And the small groups of people that avoid “X, Y, Z” apps for ideological reasons, are on Android, but keep in touch with iOS users.
There is something to say about the platform setting the bar too low.
You're right that people move to third party clients, but the issue with Apple/Google screwing messaging is the third party services become de-facto while being sub-par.
In particular rival services don't get privileged access, which impacts either service quality (in particular conditions to receive a message) or user QOL (battery drain, core featuees implementation lag etc.). Line is a prime example of that, with a crazy wide audience in specific countries yet it became a pile of turd software wise, being optimal on neither platform.
The default messaging app being somewhat interoperable is IMHO a huge deal.
Green bubbles still stand and some people will look down at you. Few times those who make a good amount of money more then I said to me I hate green bubbles. These are adults / professionals ... im sure its worse for kids in school as an iPhone is an indicator of wealth/luxury brand and Apple knows and exploits such with the green bubbles. Maybe governments will come down on them for this too!
no sarcasm at all and this well documented (iPhones are more expensive then many Android phones.. it's a status symbol of being rich vs. not) i just never experienced until recently / this week ...went out with an anesthesiologist in early 40s who when i texted with my dating number (google voice) said "I hate green bubbles." I then texted them with my iPhone number and got the reply, "That's better."
Regardless that is a feature I been wanting for a long time. I don't really see myself switching to Android anytime soon, because I think the iPhone is the least bad option and I trust Apple ever so slightly more than Google. Still I do want to be able to send my dad photos larger than what MMS supports, and try as I might, he's not installing Signal.
As a long time Apple customer I couldn’t care less.
This is mainly to satisfy governments who are looking into Apples dominant position in the market. I doubt this was a big request from the apple community.
It’s like the new possibility to use non apple app stores. It’s mainly coming from people who don’t like Apple and use Android anyway.
> I doubt this was a big request from the apple community.
As a German I'm looking forward to this since iPhone market share isn't as big as it might be in America. In the end I might delete Signal and WhatsApp since media sharing is the only reason for me to use these apps.
I’m an Apple person and it’s not huge to me. The people I tend to trade pictures/etc with are also iPhone owners.
That said I personally know multiple people in my family who have run into “problems” sending pictures or especially video back-and-forth to Android phones because you get stuck with ancient MMS sizes that look like garbage. Images are bad but video is just atrocious.
It’s a good upgrade for iPhone users. I don’t think it’s the number one feature for anyone in my group, but I can easily be imagine being an iPhone person with a mostly Android family/friends network where this is going to be a big quality of life thing.
Messaging app fragmentation is a real issue, and I currently have to use ~4 different apps, because different people have different subset of these apps installed.
Situation gets even more complicated when you need to message a group of people, because you have to find an app that everyone in the group has it installed (usually, FB Messenger is the best candidate here).
RCS could finally (mostly) solve this in the near future, because practically everyone will have a phone with first-class support for it.
It’s a huge deal to me as an iPhone user- half my friends and family have android phones and I can’t see the videos, photos, and emojis they send me and vice versa.
I’m not sure how this would not be a big problem for any iPhone user? Do you not send or receive messages?
In the USA, iPhones send videos/photos over MMS when including Android phones in a group conversation. There is a quality degradation but they aren’t missing. This feature works fine for me with the Android users I know in real life.
I wonder if you or your Android counterpart have a cell network issue with the MMS server configuration. This would only appear in cross platform texts, I suppose.
That’s exactly the problem, and it’s why RCS users have reported so many problems, too. Cell companies just aren’t great at running servers, which has been good for Google’s Jibe business as carriers decide to outsource the infrastructure to someone good at it.
The quality degradation can be so severe the videos and photos are mostly useless. They aren't literally "lost" but I've seen videos and photos that looked like a mosaic of large pixels rather than an image or video.
Perhaps the images automatically scale down during poor connection events? That isn't an acceptable behavior, modern protocols just wait, and transfer when they have a good enough connection.
Other things like tapbacks are also not technically lost, but also become useless- it responds with text saying something like "thumbs up" but not which message the response attaches to- so the context is lost, often making it impossible to understand.
Only 2 of the people I regularly message use Android; nearly all of my friends and family use iPhone. Our friend group uses Messenger to accommodate the Android users and I doubt that will change just because of RCS.
This is such a strange type of assessment to me, not only of the announcement but of one's social life, I guess because it hasn't occurred to me since high school that I'd think of my social life as a static group, or what hardware platform any of them would be using to message me, unless I get a particularly blurry MMS message from someone who's always categorically been all in on iPhone. I don't at all mean to be critical of your perspective, everyone's in a different life context and that's why culture is interesting. I also do listen to Apple oriented podcasts, and presume the hosts might have a similar view to yours.
Even if I wasn't regularly meeting new people, I have a variety of long-term friends who travel in different flexible circles, and I just get messages from whoever independently on whichever platform we happen to have exchanged a message on that day. Everyone just has a black square in their pocket as far as I'm concerned; if they're recent immigrants they might use WhatsApp, some use Signal, lots just use whichever texting protocol (if it's on Android Messages it'll auto switch to RCS), some Messenger, some Instagram, some Google Chat. Off the top of my head I might be able to guess how someone would message me, but I would only know which phones only a tiny percentage of people have.
It might be a different messaging platform because of context, such as the recent exchanges I had with the same person on Steam and Instagram, but they have my number and would probably just call or text if we were meeting up.
Why not? You don't have to use one if you prefer to stay within the walls so why don't you want others who dare to venture outside of them to have the opportunity to do so? It is the same on Android where the majority uses the Google Play Store but some - like myself - choose to use alternatives like F-Droid.
I’m not sure they actually told us but you can bet they’re green.
Blue = iMessage, not encrypted. Everything else is green.
You’re right that RCS is not encrypted by default. Encryption can be added on top, that’s what Google has done on Android. But since it’s not part of the standard and it’s just something Google runs I wouldn’t expect Apple to do that.
yeah, Apple has previously said that green means not encrypted, implying that blue is encrypted. Where the SMS aspect of green is just happenstance, and again only implying that the blue of imessage is just happenstance too.
I think this phrasing is just a CYA thing. But I’m definitely curious.
But I think that’s just because SMS wasn’t encrypted. If it was they would just explain things differently.
I think the number one thing for them is features. Blue equals all the features, green equals whatever works.
So even if RCS were to be done encrypted, which I doubt, it wouldn’t support the message effects or text formatting or iMessage apps. So they would still use blue to differentiate.
As things exist today, encryption is simply what they think is most important so that’s what they lead with.
Presumably because Apple is all about privacy and this RCS won’t be encrypted and so any law enforcement or hackers may get access I like with SMS, I imagine they don’t want to boast about it.
The only RCS clients that are in use support axlotol ratchet encryption. Apple could literally take the MIT licensed implementation that Matrix wrote and got audited and slap that into their RCS implementation if they cared to support this interoperable feature.
I'm very curious what the state of specifications has been. Saying clients can do whatever encryption they want doesn't help anything, in my view. Something based around group communication standards like Message Layer Security would be good. But even that leaves a ton of implementation details & exchanges up to implementers.
It's really a pity GSMA has such a strong hold on this industry. It seems like there just aren't a lot of other forums for this kind of work. Or perhaps the forums are all, like GSMA pretty slow big business plodding institutions. Reading up on RSC Business Messaging (RBM) and why GSMA started doing this stuff; it quickly sours any illusion this was some noble effort. This is a way to start charging businesses more, it seems like, with fancy expensive differentiation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services#RC...
On the web it's so amazing how many enthusiasts & craftsfolk are empowered have such great forums to propose & get help trying to create standards. W3c and whatwg and wicg and tc39 and ietf are models we don't see repeated often, nor do there seem to be that many other empowered agents of progress helping championing & pioneering.
Google has an end-to-end encryption capability, no? Did they try to specify or standardize that anywhere? What are the efforts in the field here?
Android restricts RCS to Google’s proprietary Messages app. That supports encryption with what appears to be a reasonably open protocol BUT they restrict it to their key servers:
Apple could implement their own but unless Google is willing to open up their proprietary messaging system, nobody on Android would be able to use it. Oddly, they left they out of their deceptive PR campaign which tried hard to portray E2EE as an RCS feature.
It's probably more because they're pulled into this kicking and screaming, e.g by the EU, when for years they internally decided iMessage was the moat they'll never give up even a millimeter of.
If privacy was the primary motive trumping everything else they'd have ported it to android a decade ago to reduce sms use.
People complain when Apple doesn’t do a thing, and then when they do do it (even if it was for regulatory pressure) people complain that Apple didn’t hype up something they didn’t want to do in the first place (for the right or wrong reasons).
They’re a multi-trillion dollar company - of course they’re going to do whatever they believe will ensure their continued growth, this is how public companies work. I don’t get why people take it as such a personal insult.
TFA is sort of amazing. They seem stunned at the repercussions, but in reality, the repercussions are basically negligible. Every iPhone user has gotten along just fine (for the most part) communicating with android users so far, and they’ll continue to do so.
Maybe on the other side Android users get some nice benefits from iPhones playing along? But iPhone isn’t in the business of placating non-iPhone users. Why would it?
The feature set brought by RCS support is also, for the most part, not particularly interesting or consequential to most users, even those regularly conversing between android and iPhone.
> These are all great changes, but iPhone users won’t be able to use these features when chatting with someone on Android. And we don’t even know how the emoji created with Genmoji, Apple’s new AI emoji creation tool, will appear in texts sent to users on Android, either.
And why would they care? I’m not interested in Genmoji in the least, but it’s a boring world if Apple needs to check in with Google, Meta, Verizon, etc on every experimental feature they want to add to messaging.
i’d guess that a very very very large majority of people don’t know or care what RCS is. i certainly don’t. i can’t even remember the last time i used an sms or mms. most likely people use whatsapp or telegram or signal or whatever if they’re not using imessage
63 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadI thought the only thing that was new this week was confirmation it would be in 18 as opposed to 18.1 or 17.6 or at some other time. But even then 18 seemed the most obvious anyway.
1. Likely setting expectations. Expect: minimal, annoying, malicious, compliance
2. To relieve some regulatory pressure while actually accomplishing nothing
As you pointed out it’s not new information. And “doesn’t suck as much” is not exactly high marketing copy. They put it on one of their slides of random features coming to the new OS so people would know it’s there but didn’t spend any time on it.
I agree with you, they weren’t trying to hide it. It just wasn’t that interesting compared to everything else they were doing that no one knew about (outside of perhaps the rumor mill).
Signal made the design choice to require a phone number to operate. Just as with Google Messages, Whatsapp, telegram, and most others, the desktop application for Signal requires you to auth via the app on your phone, which is authed to the network via your phone number.
iMessage is tied to an Apple ID and doesn't require you to have a phone at all.
Because allowing communication with open standards allows more freedom for your customers?
I know people who have wondered why texting to/from Android phones “doesn’t work” since pictures/video look terrible. This is a problem for their customers.
It wouldn’t surprise me if they would’ve done this without regulatory pressure, just perhaps not as soon.
I agree it has some monopolistic tendencies in the US and Canada and signals “iPhone is better!” when someone is what they call “a green bubble.” However, in the end, every group chat just gets created in an OS-agnostic app if one of the users has an Android. So, from my perspective, it’s a wasteful allocation of resources if you’re trying to “make it a good experience for the customers to communicate with non-customers” since it doesn’t really get “much better” than what we have now.
I promise you people who have Android friends/family will enjoy this update.
My point isn’t that this upgrade isn’t useful. I meant, why would a private company allocate resources to fix a problem that barely affects their users?
It doesn’t barely affect users. That’s the point. In the US 50% of people use android. In the rest of the world that numbers a lot higher. Anything that goes over MMS sucks. Having a single android person in a group chat means falling back to SMS/MMS and everything sucks.
RCS is a huge quality of life improvement when texting non-iPhones for people who do that on a regular basis.
People are not going to switch to using SMS just because iPhone added RCS either.
This is probably true for you and me (actually everyone I know regardless of platform uses Signal) but not for many people it seems.
You're right that people move to third party clients, but the issue with Apple/Google screwing messaging is the third party services become de-facto while being sub-par.
In particular rival services don't get privileged access, which impacts either service quality (in particular conditions to receive a message) or user QOL (battery drain, core featuees implementation lag etc.). Line is a prime example of that, with a crazy wide audience in specific countries yet it became a pile of turd software wise, being optimal on neither platform.
The default messaging app being somewhat interoperable is IMHO a huge deal.
This is mainly to satisfy governments who are looking into Apples dominant position in the market. I doubt this was a big request from the apple community.
It’s like the new possibility to use non apple app stores. It’s mainly coming from people who don’t like Apple and use Android anyway.
As a German I'm looking forward to this since iPhone market share isn't as big as it might be in America. In the end I might delete Signal and WhatsApp since media sharing is the only reason for me to use these apps.
That said I personally know multiple people in my family who have run into “problems” sending pictures or especially video back-and-forth to Android phones because you get stuck with ancient MMS sizes that look like garbage. Images are bad but video is just atrocious.
It’s a good upgrade for iPhone users. I don’t think it’s the number one feature for anyone in my group, but I can easily be imagine being an iPhone person with a mostly Android family/friends network where this is going to be a big quality of life thing.
Situation gets even more complicated when you need to message a group of people, because you have to find an app that everyone in the group has it installed (usually, FB Messenger is the best candidate here).
RCS could finally (mostly) solve this in the near future, because practically everyone will have a phone with first-class support for it.
I’m not sure how this would not be a big problem for any iPhone user? Do you not send or receive messages?
I wonder if you or your Android counterpart have a cell network issue with the MMS server configuration. This would only appear in cross platform texts, I suppose.
Perhaps the images automatically scale down during poor connection events? That isn't an acceptable behavior, modern protocols just wait, and transfer when they have a good enough connection.
Other things like tapbacks are also not technically lost, but also become useless- it responds with text saying something like "thumbs up" but not which message the response attaches to- so the context is lost, often making it impossible to understand.
Even if I wasn't regularly meeting new people, I have a variety of long-term friends who travel in different flexible circles, and I just get messages from whoever independently on whichever platform we happen to have exchanged a message on that day. Everyone just has a black square in their pocket as far as I'm concerned; if they're recent immigrants they might use WhatsApp, some use Signal, lots just use whichever texting protocol (if it's on Android Messages it'll auto switch to RCS), some Messenger, some Instagram, some Google Chat. Off the top of my head I might be able to guess how someone would message me, but I would only know which phones only a tiny percentage of people have.
It might be a different messaging platform because of context, such as the recent exchanges I had with the same person on Steam and Instagram, but they have my number and would probably just call or text if we were meeting up.
will the bubbles go blue then?
I really just want another way to know the level of interaction I can have with someone at that point in time.
I think SMS is different enough than RCS to support a different way of realizing it. Whether message bubble color or something else
Blue = iMessage, not encrypted. Everything else is green.
You’re right that RCS is not encrypted by default. Encryption can be added on top, that’s what Google has done on Android. But since it’s not part of the standard and it’s just something Google runs I wouldn’t expect Apple to do that.
We’ll find out soon.
I think this phrasing is just a CYA thing. But I’m definitely curious.
I think the number one thing for them is features. Blue equals all the features, green equals whatever works.
So even if RCS were to be done encrypted, which I doubt, it wouldn’t support the message effects or text formatting or iMessage apps. So they would still use blue to differentiate.
As things exist today, encryption is simply what they think is most important so that’s what they lead with.
It's really a pity GSMA has such a strong hold on this industry. It seems like there just aren't a lot of other forums for this kind of work. Or perhaps the forums are all, like GSMA pretty slow big business plodding institutions. Reading up on RSC Business Messaging (RBM) and why GSMA started doing this stuff; it quickly sours any illusion this was some noble effort. This is a way to start charging businesses more, it seems like, with fancy expensive differentiation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services#RC...
On the web it's so amazing how many enthusiasts & craftsfolk are empowered have such great forums to propose & get help trying to create standards. W3c and whatwg and wicg and tc39 and ietf are models we don't see repeated often, nor do there seem to be that many other empowered agents of progress helping championing & pioneering.
Google has an end-to-end encryption capability, no? Did they try to specify or standardize that anywhere? What are the efforts in the field here?
https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf
Apple could implement their own but unless Google is willing to open up their proprietary messaging system, nobody on Android would be able to use it. Oddly, they left they out of their deceptive PR campaign which tried hard to portray E2EE as an RCS feature.
If privacy was the primary motive trumping everything else they'd have ported it to android a decade ago to reduce sms use.
EU has done mostly terrible things so far. I don’t expect this to change for the foreseeable future.
They’re a multi-trillion dollar company - of course they’re going to do whatever they believe will ensure their continued growth, this is how public companies work. I don’t get why people take it as such a personal insult.
Maybe on the other side Android users get some nice benefits from iPhones playing along? But iPhone isn’t in the business of placating non-iPhone users. Why would it?
The feature set brought by RCS support is also, for the most part, not particularly interesting or consequential to most users, even those regularly conversing between android and iPhone.
> These are all great changes, but iPhone users won’t be able to use these features when chatting with someone on Android. And we don’t even know how the emoji created with Genmoji, Apple’s new AI emoji creation tool, will appear in texts sent to users on Android, either.
And why would they care? I’m not interested in Genmoji in the least, but it’s a boring world if Apple needs to check in with Google, Meta, Verizon, etc on every experimental feature they want to add to messaging.