Hacker News Reader

Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

Hard for me to see Google as the good guys in this RCS situation when Google Chat is separate from Messages and Google Voice is almost totally neglected.

View on HN

That’s cuz they’re not. Nobody is. RCS is a crap standard, but it is a crap standard that the PRC, one of Apple’s larger markets, is requiring in new handsets going forward (something that The Verge reporter overlooked). I’m still curious what the compatibility story even is given Google has their own encryption standard but Apple is sticking to the GSMA spec and in their original announcement said they were going to be working with the GSMA to improve the security and privacy and all the carriers seem to just use Google’s software to run the backend.

Do you have an article on this? This is interesting news to me. Here I was thinking "oh, the big stink Google made about Apple not supporting RCS must have actually moved the needle."

But if it's simply a legislative requirement, there's no mystery. That must be why.

Here you go: https://www.reddit.com/r/UniversalProfile/comments/153rrwl/c...

The original article is a PRC government document in Chinese so this is the relevant translation.

That's interesting, because that's not exactly what the Chinese text says. It just says vendors need to implement 5G standards.

The reddit translation interprets "relevant industry standards for 5G messages" as including RCS. I'm unfamiliar with this, but apparently GSMA claims that "the 5G standards mandate the implementation of RCS in 5G networks and devices". ( https://www.gsma.com/solutions-and-impact/technologies/netwo... )

So if I'm reading this correctly, any vendor who claims to have 5G support needs to implement RCS?

Unfortunately I can’t read the original text myself but the machine translation I looked at used the phrase “5G messages” so I interpreted what the Redditor was doing as providing clarification as to what that is in context (“RCS”). Per the document you pulled up, I can see why it would just be called 5G Messaging or something like that, not technically true, but may as well be true as I didn’t realize the GSMA had also mandated it for what they’re calling their “Universal Profile”.

> Operators are free to decide whether or not to implement RCS within their 4G networks. However, the 5G standards mandate the implementation of RCS in 5G networks and devices.

Exactly.

Given this, I'm amazed it took a roundabout detour into Chinese mobile phone regulations to arrive at the conclusion that apparently GSMA mandated RCS for 5G...

I wholeheartedly agree!

I worked with the IMS (the standard on which the RCS standard is based) in grad school and the best article I read on it was called something like : "IMS, a useless subsystem"

> Apple is sticking to the GSM spec and in their original announcement said they were going to be working with GSM to improve the security and privacy

One of the aspects of RCS that was supposed to be a feature but turned into a problem is the spec supports varying profiles which include a bunch of different capabilities. The GSMA publishes a "Universal Profile" with a base set of features but notably absent is E2EE.

Google runs their own RCS infrastructure that Android phones can use but not all do. It becomes a shit show when a Google RCS user sends a message to a carrier RCS user. While they might get the nice RCS features, the conversation is not E2EE since the carrier doesn't/can't implement Google's custom RCS profile with E2EE.

If Apple hosts their own RCS infrastructure they could make a custom profile allowing E2EE between Apple RCS users but not between Apple and Google or Apple and a carrier. Unless the GSMA includes E2EE in the Universal Profile and gets carriers to actually implement it, RCS is just MMS with better quality.

RCS is such a crap standard, it is very much the sort of standard you'd expect from telecom carriers. There's no E2EE built into the core service and its use requires a SIM. Sender verification is also limited to business messaging so there's no inline mechanism to verify messages from normal users.

Shh, don't mention Google Voice or they might remember it exists and kill it. I can't think of a Google service that's been more useful in my life, and hate to think what I'll have to do when they kill it.

This! Google is beating the drum about RCS, but Google Voice, their own service, does NOT support RCS.

How is that relevant? Text messages have historically (and technically) been separated from standalone chat applications, so it makes perfect sense that Google Chat is separate from Messages.

On the contrary, merging the two is a "bad guy" move since it causes vendor lock-in (case in point, Apple).

I have faith in Google.

They will surely create and shit-can a dozen texting apps in the next decade. One may even fit my purposes until it too is shit-canned.

Nobody has more experience in building text apps than Google.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com