I don’t think that was ever a thing outside the US. Seems consequently like a weird and distorted perspective to me.
- Android phones have a low end, and thus a lot of people associate them with being poor. It's simple status symbol showing off. This is stupid - I don't like it, but it's what people seem to think.
- A single Android user can "drag down" the conversation of a bunch of iPhone users. Group chats are a perfect example of this. Not to mention, reacts, rich media sharing, and threading doesn't work across platforms. This is really frustrating when it happens. You could argue that Apple should adapt RCS - I would argue that RCS is technically terrible, poorly designed, and Apple has a legitimate point of not adopting it on those grounds.
- "Green bubble" is also beyond just messaging. It's referring to the overall friction of the two ecosystems, such as file sharing, location sharing, payments, etc.
Because none of those are SMS features. They are features Apple introduced with iMessage, and then refused to scale across the rest of the industry. RCS is a response to iMessage being closed; if Apple can do better, nobody is stopping them from opening the iMessage specification.
..except they won't. Not because it's impossible, but because there's no money in improving the cross-platform user experience, even if it makes your users happy.
I think there are actual, material reasons why Apple won't integrate with RCS until they're forced to, but also opening up iMessage is a very difficult proposition. Here is my speculation:
> refused to scale across the rest of the industry.
iMessage was not designed to be a decentralized chat protocol, RCS was. iMessage was not designed to work well with carrier UIs, RCS was. They are extremely different things. "scaling it" is much easier said than done.
> nobody is stopping them from opening the iMessage specification
iMessage is tied closely to apple accounts and centralized auth. It'd take a huge amount of engineering effort to open iMessage up, for zero benefit to Apple.
iMessage uses per-device-keys as a mechanism of spam control, and will blacklist physical devices. One of iMessage's key spam controls would be wrecked if it was "completely open". This means that android devices would have to be certified for imessage, to ensure that they have unique device keys, and that the manufacturer is actually operating in good faith.
They'd probably have to negotiate with individual device vendors for enrollment. How would you feel if iMessage was on Samsung devices only? Anyways, it's a huge amount of work that only yields negative strategic benefit.
Anyways,
Porting iMessage to Android is extremely non-trivial. RCS is a piece of shit (it really is, go look at the spec, the carriers put their hands all over it and it's rough).
Stop trusting major vendors, use signal or self host your chat.
Your response here is a very measured take that boils down to "don't trust iMessage either", which defeats the purpose of promoting any improvement over SMS. If we're just going to promote cross-platform software anyways, why should we not encourage our software vendors to work together? What do we stand to lose?
2. What people want is decent cross platform chat.
3. The iMessage model makes an open interface a difficult proposition, for the reasons mentioned plus additional ones. I would describe it as a technical deficiency, and not a sustainable solution.
4. I think SMS and carrier-provided messaging is a dead end. Frankly, they're defacto authn providers, and I don't like that either.
5. Only one phone OS software vendor provides a compelling E2EE solution, and that's Apple - and they've made their choices, quite clearly. I don't trust the major phone os vendors to do the right thing - they've had a decade to figure it out and they still haven't.
In other markets other messaging apps like WhatsApp dominate (and for those it’s irrelevant what platform you are on).
Also, "Green Bubble" is not at all about (any and all) friction between platforms. That makes no sense. It’s fundamentally about a specific kind of friction relating to network effects and and an obvious display of difference.
My friends and I all use Find My Friends, I have heard some refer to our android-having friends as not being able to share location because they have "green bubbles".
It's become a term that means more than just chat.
Settings > Messages > Text Message Forwarding.
You may have to enable syncing on the messaging app on macos as well
Cheers!
Do you want to tell Apple?
edit: lol, guess everyone really loves their status symbols here. Congrats on having your chats be the "right" color!
Not to mention, they'd have to continue to support iMessage. It's a requirement, since it's the underpinning of some of their other successful ecosystem products.
The correct solution, imo, is to get your friends on something like Signal. Cross platform, easy, E2EE messaging - it's not perfect, but it's better than vendor lockin or RCS
It's a proprietary add-on by Google and since it's not part of the spec will simply be banned by many countries.
It would take the entire industry back to the 90s where governments, carriers and rogue actors had free reign to access any data they wanted.
You sure about that? https://www.gsma.com/futurenetworks/wp-content/uploads/2019/...
It's an international standard, supported by carriers and everyone not-Apple. Google pushed it forward, but did so in coordination with standards bodies. I'm not sure how you arrive at the above conclusion when the history is not in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services#Hi...
Do you just mean carriers and Google? That leaves out in your apparent definition of “Apple” a bunch of things I thought were “not-Apple”: LINE, WeChat, KakaoTalk, Kik, WhatsApp, Viber, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, Skype, Telegram, Signal, Discord, Slack, Teams and basically every single app with some form of DMing.
RCS might have made sense in a different world, but in this one it’s just another protocol among many and without any compelling reason to support it other than it’s “not SMS”. There’s a lot of “not SMS” out there and iMessage and RCS are just two among many; you’re going to need something a lot more compelling than that.
The same people who standardized SMS. We're talking telephony, it's widely standardized, and it has nothing to so with WeChat or Discord et al. These are telecom standards issued by the same telecom standards bodies that run everything else in your phone. I've provided sources linking to this.
I'm surprised how controversial this seems to be with Apple users.
So of course Apple users are not keen on messaging being a worse experience for them.
So which is it? You keep changing your argument here.
My language was precise, it just doesn't agree with the notions of Apple users.
Nobody is “confusing” anything. My argument was that the distinction was irrelevant on a modern smartphone and the “telephonic” standard was simply irrelevant. You can choose not to engage that part of my argument, but don’t misrepresent it. Telephone networks do everything over IP as of LTE, and RCS isn’t especially relevant for the reasons it’s proponents claim that it is now when it’s just a protocol among many accessible via an app among many, so you would need to make a stronger case for it elsewhere.
We're not kicking them out of the party, but everyone in-the-know will roll their eyes when they see Apple drinking from the punch bowl.
Encryption is not a joke in the era we live in today.
Vanilla RCS in general is a bit of a crapshoot, especially when you start considering multiple countries and varied carrier support.
So let’s say hypothetically Apple did implement RCS support in iMessage thus introducing a fourth messaging protocol into the mix (SMS, MMS, iMessage) and we just ignore that it’s more “standard” than standard and is probably only properly implemented by exactly Google anyway, and we disregard the dozens of cross platform alternatives to RCS, SMS and iMessage: why wouldn’t Apple just make the bubbles for RCS yellow or orange or red or something? The actual visual style is a holdover from iChat which you could visually theme (and those were options) and bringing blue bubbles in was intended to visually distinguish which protocol you were sending a message down the virtual wire on so you knew not to try and use iMessage features with someone that could only receive SMS and MMS messages.
Is the concern the color of the bubbles, or is the concern the lack of RCS?
The lack of compliance and interop with internationally accepted standards by Apple, which should be of surprise to exactly nobody. It's kinda their thing.
You can try all you want to spin this as Apple being in the right, but it's Apple vs everybody on this one.