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Comment by eitally | Hacker News Reader

1. Kids care about it. Why? Because you can use iMessage via iPad without needing a phone number, and this is how lots of tweens get started with messaging.

2. Any Android users with iPhone friends trying to use iMessage for group chat cares about it. It's impossible to add Android users to an existing group chat... and any time you have a mixed iPhone + Android group chat it degrades a number of the iMessage group chat features normally accessible to iPhone users.

3. Any Android users receiving media over SMS/MMS from an iPhone user cares. They'll be receiving images & videos that look like they were shot with a potato.

The blue vs green color doesn't matter, but the effects mixed platform chatting has on both iPhone & Android users is significant.

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These are fantastic points, all of which I have personally experienced as an Android user with many iPhone family members.

Apple adopting RCS won't solve #1, and is unlikely to solve #2, but solving #3 is a great start, and if the Apple faithful continue to give feedback to Apple that they care about fixing #2, we might see it one day.

I agree. Solving #3 is terrific (because it frequently bites you when the sender is someone you don't know particularly well... certainly not well enough to ask them to resend using a third party messaging app). I don't really care about #1, although I guess Google's answer would be "use Chat", which is absolutely ridiculous since it no longer has an interface to SMS/RCS like Hangouts did. This is a gaping hole in their product strategy, imho. #2 could be solved by Apple if they want to, or else we'll just continue to struggle along with a need for several different messaging apps for different social contexts. It's not like Whatsapp, Telegram, Signal, etc don't work.

Another solution Google could perhaps pursue would be to license one or multiple of those to include in the default Android install, but I don't see that happening without regulatory interference.

I have a feeling with the EU's DMA this will just become more prevalent with every messaging platform forced to "open up"

FB Messenger will have a "green bubble" for messages to people using whatever other app they're forced to integrate. Same with Whatsapp, Telegram, etc...

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