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Comment by Volundr | Hacker News Reader

That's all well and good. Opting into that knowingly is a reasonable decision. Hopefully knowing you've opted into that you aren't then cursing Google when they don't support some functionality blocked by Apple, or when RCS is poorly supported, but instead recognizing this as a trade-off you made opting into the Apple closed garden.

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The reason Apple Maps even exists is because Google intentionally crippled their Maps app on iPhone in order to benefit their own OS.

The reason Google loves RCS is because they spectacularly failed 4 or 5 times at introducing their own iMessage competitors.

Competing companies often act in their best interests. And both Google and Apple offer OS’s which have very different value systems. I think that’s good for consumers. If I want open (and all the pros and cons that come with that) I can buy an Android phone. If I want closed (and the pros and cons that come with that) I can buy Apple. If they Apple starts to open up a bit and Google locks things down a bit we get the worst of both worlds and no true options.

The "closed" approach is way better when it involves guardrails rather than handcuffs. Pixels offer guardrails; they're just as secure as iPhones but offer a lot more freedom to power users. Android is a lot more than just Pixels though and some of the other OEMs don't provide security updates quite as timely, creating a bad reputation

I’m not sure I agree. I’ve seen tech illiterate family members screw up Pixels and Samsung devices in the same way they screwed up Windows systems in the past. Even the most tech illiterate family members have done nothing bad to their iPhones. In fact I know one that was still using an iPhone 7 until last year and it was very functional. Two year old top of the line Samsung phones are crawling after two years. All anecdotal of course.

What do you mean by 'screw up'?

Malware, for one

Except forget the Apple ID password, then it's game over

Not when you have a recovery contact.

There are like 10 grandmas in my extended family (in-laws etc), none of them know their Apple ID passwords, none have recovery contacts. They probably forgot because it never asks for that password except when they want to download a free app, cause for some reason that's a highly sensitive thing.

Recently setup a family member with a new iPhone and they had no idea what the password was. Password reset flow worked without any issue.

I forget why but it doesn't work, probably because it sends to some email they've never heard of.

It does work. As I said, I had to go through it with a family member a few months ago. It's hardly Apple's problem if a user forgets their password AND email address.

I don't expect Apple to get someone back into an account they've forgotten everything about, but you shouldn't need to do that just to download a free app. Grandma already knows her passcode, that should be enough.

i had the same problem with this behavior from google as i do from apple. i would be just as critical of google zealots blaming apple for google shortcomings as i am for apple zealots blaming google for apple shortcomings.

this is definitely an apple culture thing though. it's such a clear product choice to get apple users to pressure their friends into buying apple products.

RCS is supported per the standard. Google's implementation uses proprietary extensions. It's not the ivory tower you seem to think it is.

RCS on iPhone just sucks though. All I have is anecdotal evidence, but it feels like I only get late or out-of-order delivery from iPhones.

Plus iMessage doesn't allow you to send RCS messages from your laptop, whereas it's easy to do that with Google messages. That makes people with iPhones think RCS is worse than it really is. It's just iMessage that's intentionally hobbled. Not to mention the hostile UI decisions made by Apple, which seems to be the main knock against anything non-blue.

Arguably, that's more to do with the standard and Google's proprietary extensions. The colors thing has been discussed ad nauseum. SMS messages have been green from day one - see https://youtu.be/G8d7E26WLsY?t=1723. If colors were reversed, there'd be the same complaints. If the difference between iMessage and SMS were highlighted any other way, there'd be complaints too.

The standards issue is only relevant to E2EE. It has no bearing on the usability issues here. The E2EE issues should be fixed soon according to Apple. I'd bet a good amount of money the usability issues will remain.

It used to be black text on green: https://mobiforge.com/files/iphone-sms-1.jpg

The white-on-acid-green color combination would not make it through any accessibility review. It's literally impossible for a lot of color-impaired people to see, and objectively unpleasant otherwise.

Apple gets plenty of complaints about it. Just look at the Apple forums. Their literal advice to fix it is "make your friends buy an iPhone".

> It's literally impossible for a lot of color-impaired people to see

What form of color blindness doesn't let people differentiate between levels of brightness? I checked a couple color blindness simulators and it appears legible.

Heck, white on light green appears to be used in articles about good design for color blind accessibility without any indication that it there's anything wrong with it.

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/06/improving-color-acc...

As someone with strong deuteranopia (I struggle to differentiate shades of green and darker bluey-reds), I am extremely sceptical about that claim too. For what it's worth, I've never had a problem reading the white-on-green bubbles in Messages. I do agree that a contrast closer to WCAG's recommendation would be better (currently 2:1, recommendation is ~4.5:1), but this is a diversion. The point I was making is that no matter what Apple does here, there is visible differentiation, and people will complain about it.

Google provides a client and infrastructure, which they sell to carriers and which has a number of proprietary extensions, including E2EE if the message is Google to Google. If a carrier does not provide Universal Profile, Google provides it. If you send a message using Google Messages, it may default to Google's profile, which is not open and only available to Google Messages users, which is arguably no different to iMessage. Apple provides an RCS client which relies on carrier infrastructure. If there is no compatible profile AIUI, it falls back to MMS or fails.

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