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Google and major mobile carriers want Europe to regulate Apple's iMessage platform
(www.engadget.com)
this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2023
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This feels a bit like asking MS Teams to play nice with Google Meet, or demanding that Apple’s office suite (Pages, Numbers, etc.) deliver the exact same product when files are saved in an OpenOffice format. This doesn’t seem to be an issue with any other products…
Apple have designed their product to work well with their devices. The Messages app still functions with non-Apple devices. SMS messages can be sent and received to anyone. The fact that pictures and whatever come through like crap is more an issue with the SMS platform than it is with Apple’s app.
Ultimately, Google dislikes the fact that there is a “green bubble” stigma (for lack of a better word) on Apple devices that encourages those who care about such things to prefer Apple devices. Because Google doesn’t have their own widely used iMessage equivalent, they can’t turn around and make messages outside their platform appear as red bubbles or something, so they are attacking from this angle instead.
Sent from my iPhone
That's hilarious
They're not joking. They use iPhone.
Yes but there is no green bubble stigma in Europe... We all use whatsapp and signal.
I mean, fuck, there's no green bubble stigma in the US either. I have never once heard people complain about it in the real world
You're lucky then, I hear people complain about it all the time
Exactly. It’s a complete non-issue in Europe.
Google are attempting to start this fight in Europe in hopes that they can push Apple to change in the US as well. The whole green bubble thing is US-only, but Google haven’t been even remotely successful in trying to force Apple to change, and Apple’s “remedy” to the issue is “Get an iPhone”.
Google is pushing RMS, which they would control, and is designed to push you ads and usage metrics back to them.
I haven't seen a valid reason to get rid of SMS though.
It's RCS not RMS and Google didnt even want control of it in the first place, it's well documented Google has been trying to get US carriers to stop dragging their feet on RCS for a long time. They never did until Google literally went "Fine, I'll do it myself then"
AND RCS is an open protocol, nobody really has "control" over it, Google runs some RCS servers but if it disappeared tomorrow (Or you changed the defaults) RCS itself would run just fine on whatever including if Apple supports RCS
ETA: Also SMS is absolute trash, it's from the early 90's (it's older than me FFS) it doesn't really support what we want out of it media wise today, and what it does support it was forced to. It'll send "video" but it'll be completely unrecognizable. It needs to be put to pasture already.
It will be an easier sell if Google manages to get their proprietary extensions to RCS into RCS version 10, rather than only being supported in Google Messenger
SMS takes less bandwidth and is perfect for large broadcast messages and works perfectly fine for text based messaging. The only major problems it has are security and media, which while are valid needs, are not a reason to get rid of one of the few universally accepted standards
SMS should have been a fallback years ago and nothing more, it's absolutely asinine that it's still in as much use as it is today
It doesn’t need to be a fallback. It’s still perfect for text messages, government alerts, mass notification of customers, etc.
It’s barely used today anyways. The only time it’s used on iPhone is if you’re messaging someone outside the iMessage ecosystem, which really isn’t a problem for 95% of Apple users.
I don't know why you insist on holding onto a 30+ year old protocol. It's not perfect and at times it can be downright unreliable. Once it's left your phone you have no idea if it was successfully delivered or not, there's no acknowledgement no retrys no retransmits. It just shoots it off and hopes for the best.
Group chats are laughably broken even among all SMS recipients (It was never intended for it anyway) and frankly the bandwidth required for text regardless of if it's over SMS or RCS is inconsequential, who cares if RCS messages need a bit more bandwidth to send text. The difference is negligible.
That’s why it works so well. What you see as problems with SMS I see as good design decisions. It’s an incredibly simple implementation that does exactly what it’s supposed to. You just want it to do more than it needs to.
Something will eventually replace it, but it sure as hell won’t be RCS. RCS is a defacto google standard now. Many features are locked out if you don’t use google servers. It’s not an open standard and it’s disingenuous to portray it as one.
Uh yea, because we do so much more on our phones, it might be well designed, but it was well designed for the 90s. That's why it makes a good fallback protocol, but by no means should it be the go-to.
RCS is the replacement, it's been the replacement for a long time in the EU. In fact, if the US carriers just implemented it when the EU did, this entire thread wouldn't even exist.
It's a standard until Google takes control of the GSM Association.
Here's a Wikipedia article on RCS : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services
Even has this blurb:
It’s still not a standard as long as you’re relying on google for the majority of features.
Like I said in the other comment, those features are all present in the Universal Profile which only lacks e2ee and those weird sticker things.
All the things we would want, file transfers, video, high quality pictures, real group chats etc are all present
Hardest of hard passes, even if I were on Android.
Again, Google don’t have their own iMessage that is widely used, so instead of compete on that level, they want to own the whole system.
Anybody remember Hangouts? Google’s iMessage that was better in every conceivable way than its Apple analog, integrated with Google voice, could be accessed anywhere you could get on Gmail etc? Dropping the ball on Hangouts to favor carrier pre-installed messaging Apps was such an incredible and short-sighted blunder. I concede that exactly like their many app deprecations/cut-and-runs that did not take the long-term sentiment of the end user into account and damaged their reputation and adoption. And now here we are… trying to grovel back into iMessage’s purview.
When they killed hangouts was when I think everyone stopped trying to adopt google products. What's the point, it will be killed.
I think you're right. I got some people to start using Hangouts and then Google killed it. I don't even bother to learn what Google has available now for chats because I know now there's no point to trying to get people to switch, no matter how good/bad it may be.
Name a better duo than Google and killing off products
https://killedbygoogle.com/
Yes, duo is on that list.
oof
*EA enters the chat
Wait you thought hangouts was good? Holy shit would that be one of the worst Google offerings of the decade if it wasn’t for the ten other Google chat and video systems they have made. My god I can’t think of a worse communication platform than hangouts. You might be the first person I’ve heard of liking it.
I don’t want to make assumptions, but your reply makes me think you arrived at Hangouts once it was already being deprecated by Google. Granted, being US based I didn’t need the coverage of WhatsApp (limited as they was even then to phone # accounts), the scant usage of Viber or the other innumerable messaging apps I touched in that time period. Hangouts integrated seamlessly with SMS, let me send media/stickers/map embeds to mixed-platform groups never worrying about quality downgrade. And did I mention that one could access Hangouts (and its SMS pass through server) from any machine in the world through Gmail? iMessage makes you jump hoops to do that shit today.
this was actually one of the things I hated the most about it. It doesn't really matter what features you provide when the product is so bad it can't even make up for it. I had no clue it had sms passthrough, it was just a shitty chat/voice client integrated into my email client, slowly making things slower and slower the more they added.
Bingo. This whole case is designed to make Apple look like the bad guy whilst Google hides their real agenda of forcing Apple to use a protocol Google controls and thus stamp out Google’s competition.
From what I've read, Google just owns the reference implementation. Apple could implement it themselves, but then lose out on certain non-cross-platform features, like e2e encryption.
I’ve read the specification. Google’s implementation is the only real implementation (raw RCS is basically a dead project) as Google have added a load of custom extensions to RCS that means, to be interoperable, you’d need to use Google’s (which I imagine requires licensing since it doesn’t appear to be open source).
That's basically what I said, but better.
You're like a lot of people on Lemmy: so eager to paint everything even tangentially connected to Google as some kind of grand conspiracy that you can't even get the most basic facts right.
It's quite literally well documented that Apple doesn't want to support RCS because it pressures people to get iPhones. SMS is an ancient garbage protocol, what Google is trying to do is get Apple to support SMSs 21st century replacement and RCS support will fix literally every issue iPhone users have texting Android users. Broken group chats, trash quality videos, ultra compressed images, no reactions or stickers, threaded chats etc etc
Google wants Apple to use Google’s proprietary extension of RCS, which runs on Google’s own servers as is precisely as open as iMessage. Effectively nobody uses the industry-standard version of it.
Where's the source for that? Last I read, Google was using the GSMA Universal RCS profile
Google does own and run the Jibe platform as an RCS vendor, but Apple doesn't need to use it. They can go with a different vendor or run their own RCS servers just as easily
Google's astroturf campaign for "RCS" promotes encrypted messages but RCS has no support for this. Google wants to force people to use its proprietary extension, which runs exclusively on Google's servers.
And absolutely nothing is stopping Apple from rolling its own RCS extensions that apps can support as well
So what’s the idea here? Apple rolls out another extended version of RCS that’s proprietary as well?
It might be proprietary, but at least any messaging app Android, iOS or some future third competitor will be able to implement it.
Unlike iMessage which is both proprietary and closed off from third party use
And yet, no developer other than Samsung has been granted access to Google’s version of RCS.
I’d love to see a truly standard, rich, secure messaging service, but I’m not convinced what Google is doing here is any better than Apple.
The difference is, you can choose not to use Googles RCS extension and opt for the Universal Profile standard instead and it will interop with people on other RCS profiles, even Googles, just fine.
iMessage doesn't do any of that, your choice is iMessage with other Apple users or a 30+ year old protocol. That's it.
Except that’s not what happened in reality before Google started rolling out their version of RCS.
The carriers implemented their own versions that didn’t weren’t interoperable with each other, and that was for the ones that even bothered with it at all.
And now they have even less incentive to try.
RCS is nice in theory, but no one is serious about implementing the universal profile.
SMS is like the minimum though, and not supporting all features that could be supported by the major ones somewhat counts as gatekeeping.
Legitimately can't tell if you're joking or not.