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mikece

Is there any reason why iOS should adopt RCS?

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Because they want to improve the user experience of their product.

The next best reason would be “because they’ve been legally compelled to do do”, but we’re not there yet.

> Because they want to improve the user experience of their product.

I'm looking at years worth of conversations in Messages right now, with a healthy mix of iPhone-only conversations and mixed-platform conversations. How would my user experience be improved?

mattnewton laughed at “I'm looking at years worth of conversations in Messages right now, with a healthy mix of iPhone-only conversati…

paxys laughed at “mattnewton laughed at “I'm looking at years worth of conversations in Messages right now, with a healthy mix of iPhone-only conversati…

Okay, I lol’d.

The good news is that Google now supports reactions since they fall back to plain text.

https://www.macworld.com/article/610908/google-messages-andr...

Sure, but this is a brittle hack based on scraping text contents apple can change arbitrarily, and only a cosmetic one for the android user. The iPhones in a green bubble chat still see them last I checked, just, infuriatingly not the original sender who probably doesn’t realize how they are spamming the thread.

Fair enough, thank you!

Who is “they” and who is the “user” in this context?

A random Google Product Manager representing both sides seems not the way to go.

I think it strange that there is no conversation or talk about Android adopting iMessage -- is that something Apple has previously refused?

I mean if you're going to dictate a standard to a duopoly, you need both to agree. I haven't seen the opposite side of this discussion anywhere yet.

Well, iMessage isn't a standard, RCS is. Maybe Google could reverse engineer the iMessage protocol (if encryption and secret keys and whatnot doesn't get in the way), but they would have no guarantee that Apple wouldn't eventually change the protocol without notice or intentionally prevent unofficial clients.

Besides, the whole iMessage system is highly tied into the whole iCloud ecosystem, and I don't think either party wants Android users to have to create iCloud accounts to use the messaging app.

RCS is a standard that was designed by carriers, for carriers. As such it is unencrypted, depends on having a carrier and phone number, etc.

That may or may not be a good enough reason not to use RCS, but it doesn't affect anything of what I said.

Yeah, I just reread your comment and I think I was essentially replying to something along the lines of “RCS is standard so is perfect” which is very clearly not what you said :D

So communication with Android can be better without relying on some third party app.

Having participated in multiple group chats with a mix of iOS and Android users, the only time this becomes an issue is when some idiot tries to send everyone a large video file. Personally, I want that behavior punished, not enabled.

Yeah, those absolute morons, who want to send files over the internet. What a bunch of complete idiots.

Happily for me, MMS efficiently destroys the dreams of the kind of people who send long animated GIFs to group chats.

mattnewton liked “Having participated in multiple group chats with a mix of iOS and Android users, the only time this becomes an issue is when some idiot tries to send everyone a large video file…”

I personally prefer 3rd party apps -- ideally those which feature end-to-end encryption -- to SMS/RCS/iMessage.

I mean iMessage is end-to-end encrypted so conflating it with SMS and RCS is kind of BS in the context of your encryption comment.

Disliking the client apps themselves is of course perfectly reasonable, as some of them are annoying and/or have weird UI that seems to optimise for things other than "I'm talking to another person, not looking to use whatever your pet UI feature is"

Then next day news will say Apple is trying to kill 3rd party chat app by fencing it with Google using RCS.

Spammer’s life will be easier for bombing everybody, don’t see any other real benefits.

Imho if RCS ever takes over SMS it will eventually get to a point where it’s equally obsolete. RCS requires carriers to support the standard and manufacturers to build features upon it that its not guaranteed will work as expected on all the devices. As much as i hate private companies having monopolies over online communication on entire countries, at least their services are reliable, accessible from basically every device and constantly improving.

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