Comment by isodev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by isodev | Hacker News Reader

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These days it’s good marketing to blame Apple for everything.

First, RCS is not a very modern or practical standard. It was created in 2008 by carriers (GSMA!!) for their SMS/MMS centric (at the time) platforms. So is it a good idea to adopt this more than a decade later? I don’t think so.

Second, it’s really not Apple’s fault that Google has failed to come up with a messaging solution. Google has released 13 separate messenger apps since 2011!

“Right now, Google runs three mainline messaging apps: Besides this Google Messages/RCS platform, there's also Google Chat, which is a more traditional over-the-top messaging service, and Google Voice, which is a Google-provided phone number with SMS. Google Hangouts is technically still around as the fourth messaging app, though that's shutting down in November. There are also siloed messaging apps built into Google Maps, Google Photos, Google Stadia, Google Pay, Google Assistant, and Google Phone, and none of them talk to each other.

Google's head of messaging also quit last month, so there's no telling what the future of Google messaging holds until someone takes the reins. I would suggest Google get its house in order before it starts throwing rocks at Apple.” https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/new-google-site-begs...

So Apple should stick to en even older standard (SMS/MMS)?

All that Google is asking is for the fallback to be at least in the current century, is that too much to ask.

Isn’t that the safest fallback, if you know they aren’t using iMessage? The other phone could be a phone that can’t accept RCS or iMessage.

Fallbacks can be layered. For a company that claims go all-out for its consumers privacy, using SMS as the default fallback in the 21st century is pretty sus.

There’s over a dozen different versions of RCS, hand who knows which carrier supports which parts. It’d be more fall-through (the cracks) than fall back.

Yes it seems that RCS is actually not a real fallback, it is a request to support yet another modern(ish) system.

I personally think they should adopt something brand new and not evil. I'm not saying that RCS is evil, but from what I can tell, while it has federation, Google seems to be gaining a monopoly on RCS (sorry, I don't remember what article I read that in). My pick would be something like Matrix or even XMPP to make sure that there's a definite standard that is federated by design; however, you'd have to trust your carrier/software to not dump your messages onto Google's server instead of using a different server.

>First, RCS is not a very modern or practical standard. It was created in 2008 by carriers (GSMA!!) for their SMS/MMS centric (at the time) platforms. So is it a good idea to adopt this more than a decade later? I don’t think so.

Is a standard from the 90s acceptable then? Do we say Apple shouldn't migrate to USB-C since it's old-ish? A standard being around a long time is a good thing, but when a better one comes along I don't see what excuse Apple has to not migrate (besides anti-competitiveness, which is a really good reason I suppose).

>Second, it’s really not Apple’s fault that Google has failed to come up with a messaging solution. Google has released 13 separate messenger apps since 2011!

The argument in the article could be made irrespective of Google. The article isn't saying "Apple isn't playing nice so use our stuff instead", it's a critique of an obvious attempt by Apple to build a walled garden around messaging. Google is arguing for a standard adopted across the industry, not one of their many messaging apps.

The point of that specific complaint is that the market has evolved significantly since RCS was first created. Things we now take for granted were not built into the standard because they didn’t exist.

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