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Comment by tallanvor | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone explain why I should be interested in RCS, though? It seems like it's more designed to let carriers try and stem the flow of customers switching to other options, and I don't really see what benefits it offers me.

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Years ago 1998ish(?), there was a fight to open up chat applications AIM, ICQ, YIM, etc. We had to have 20 apps to chat with each other.

Fast forward 20 years, and here we are again, FB Messenger, Kik, WhatsApp, Allo, Signal, Telegram, SMS, Slack, etc.

At least this appears to be a "standard" that everyone can use again.

Why would any of those products get onboard, unless they’re already failing?

They wouldn't. And so I have to have 20 apps to chat with all my friends. And that makes me a sad panda.

I think I'm going to start a 21st app that implements a new protocol that unifies the other protocols...

https://xkcd.com/927/

https://xkcd.com/927/ Relevant xkcd.

Not really; the proliferation has been due to proprietary protocols, not due to efforts to create standard unifying ones.

To be honest, in the fine print in of that XKCD it says "See: ..., instant messaging".

I'm a bit tired of people pulling out this comic each time a new standard appears.

Whatsapp, Telegram, FB, iMessages are NOT standards. They're closed systems controlled by a single company.

XMPP is a standard from the days of ICQ, AIM, MSN, etc. Unfortunately it failed.

SMS is a standard for mobile phone text communications. It's too limited now.

RCS is the evolution of SMS.

I don't think RCS is a redundant standard, it's a necessary evolution of SMS. It's a standard for a decentralized system. I know Americans hate their carriers to the point they'd rather have everyone's data in a single SV company, but the solution is to fix your carriers. Not to give all your data to a company (Facebook) that had been proved to be less than trustable about it.

> Whatsapp, Telegram, FB, iMessages are NOT standards. They're closed systems controlled by a single company.

That's what the term "Defacto Standard" is for.

Not really. A de-facto standard is when multiple implementations from multiple parties agree on some behavior without it being described in a formal specification. Whatsapp does not have multiple implementations from multiple parties.

Xmpp didn’t fail - the major companies who all built their messaging platforms on it just turned off federation.

RCS is still focussed on phones only, so it’s a non starter IMO. But it’s driven by the same companies that charge the equivalent of $1000+/mb for sms delivery, so it’s unsurprising that customer needs are not really their first priority.

RCS is a standard on which development started in 2008 and was built upon the core of another standard called IMS, which started development in 1999. The same year the jabber.org project was announced.

But it doesn't really seem to be a standard that everyone can use. Like others have pointed out, FB and Google both originally built their products on XMPP, and only later decided to lock out competing options.

With SMS I know that I can send a text to anyone. With RCS, I don't know what would be supported by each carrier.

> With SMS I know that I can send a text to anyone.

Unless their phone is turned off, or in a different room, or they’re in a different country, or they’re outside cell coverage and have wifi only.

I’m not arguing googles shit is good, but sms is a fucking woeful alternative.

I send most “messages” from my laptop, and about 1/3 are “international”.

I suppose if their phone is turned off outside cell coverage long enough then yes, they won't get it, but the rest of it isn't really an issue I've had to deal with. And with carriers determining RCS functionality, I'm not sure I see how having your laptop but not your phone is likely to make a real difference.

My point was to compare to something not controlled by people who for their own financial gain, push the idea that a phone is the only way to communicate.

Xmpp, iMessage, etc are just data over an ip network - no inherit tie to a mobile phone and its network.

So if I'm out of cell coverage, or my phone is flat, or whatever - I can get iMessage/XMPP/whatever messages on my laptop or iPad or whatever other device I have.

That is how having a laptop but not my phone makes a real difference.

I've been using jmp.chat recently for this (SMS sent over XMPP and phone calls via SIP). I actually liked it so much I ported my old number and got a data only plan, now I can launch Dino or something and get SMS on my desktop. I really wish one of the big carriers would embrace something like this.

The thing that actually worked was a multi-protocol messaging client, like Pidgin.

Which I still use all the time, because most of the chat clients I have to develop against have introduced asinine restrictions that force their official clients to run in single-instance mode, so your other alternative is spinning up entire VMs in order to have two accounts signed in to talk back and forth on the same machine.

no, you didn't, there was Miranda and later Trillian and Imo.im combining all these messengers in one app

I remember around 2012 it was also great time, I could chat with my Skype, Facebook and Gtalk contacts from within Outlook.com website thanks to XMPP, the best part was it acted like proxy so i could reach the people even though these services were blocked in China, then Goggle and Facebook decided to kill it and I stopped using messaging in outlook.com

The closest thing to a standards-based, non-walled-garden option that has the possibility of widespread adoption?

Only being deprecated 1.5 years later?

Like XMPP that Google abandoned? The solution is hardly to create a new standard, but improve in existing, perhaps rewrite them to address fundamental issues. But if it's meant to be used collaboratively, it should be developed collaboratively.

XMPP is already that, and Google Talk supported it until they found it inconvenient/got enough userbase and removed the gateway & support.

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