this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2023
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Samsung has released a new video in support of Google’s #GetTheMessage campaign which calls for Apple to adopt RCS or “Rich Communication Services,” the cross-platform protocol pitched as a successor to SMS that adopts many of the features found in modern messaging apps... like Apple’s own iMessage.

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[–] Encode1307@lemm.ee 109 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Unless the EU makes them, they're not adopting rcs. I could see them putting out an imessage app for Android though. Probably ad supported to make the experience extra shitty for us. They'd quickly own the messaging market, at least in the US.

[–] Dran_Arcana@lemmy.world 133 points 1 year ago (17 children)

Internal memos explicitly stated execs were worried that if they brought iMessage to android, poor families might buy their kids cheap android phones instead of iPhones.

You can't make this stuff up

https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22406303/imessage-android-eddy-cue-emails-apple-epic-deposition

[–] EddieTee77@lemdro.id 34 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The audacity of parents trying to buy something less expensive in these crazy inflated times

[–] stevehobbes@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

That was from 2013.

[–] someguy3@lemmy.ca 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Ok I'll ask, how is iMessage fundamentally any different from texting (other than this RCS stuff)? You can still text. Or is it that weird color thing or checkmark that kids are social pressured into?

[–] eletes@sh.itjust.works 34 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The color is one part, the other is that it breaks functions in iMessage. So the elitism doubles up

[–] someguy3@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can you tell me what functions? Emojis?

[–] knexcar@kbin.social 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Images are a lot lower resolution (and no “live” photos which are cute if your mom takes a pic of their pet bunny), you can’t add people to group chats or rename them, you can’t see if someone’s read or typed your message, you can’t “like” texts without them appearing like the above post, I think there are even sound bites, little games but I haven’t played with them.

[–] micka190@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Are "custom stickers" (or whatever they're called) a thing on Android? My dad's been having a blast taking a bunch of goofy pictures of himself and making stickers out of them. We get a good laugh out of them whenever he sends us a pic of himself leaning into the screen giving us the finger.

[–] krakenx@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah, they are built into Gboard and work even animated over MMS.

[–] asteriskeverything@lemmy.world 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Iphone users keep sending me long horribly compressed videos i can't see at all because it's not a problem between iPhones. And something about group chats?

That's all I know of based on my experience.

[–] DarthBueller@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago (4 children)

And Android users send me postage-stamp sized videos I can't see at all. Not gunning, just saying it's a problem in both directions (and apple's fault). Also, Android doesn't have the same easter eggs, like automatic confetti filling my screen when someone writes the word "congratulations!" in iMessage. Oh, right - iMessage gives me in-line replies and the ability to give a thumbs up/down/heart etc. response to a single message. Don't know if android has this feature, but android users just get a blank text if I "thumbs up" a comment, for example.

[–] c0mbatbag3l@lemmy.world 18 points 1 year ago

Yes, we literally have all of that including normal quality images if Apple would just play fucking ball outside of their own ecosystem.

[–] DNU@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago

Reactions are a thing in most messengers. It's just apple using proprietary code.

[–] PlantJam@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Some android messaging apps have the ability to interpret emoji reactions and display them correctly. The issue with photo and video quality is infuriating, though.

[–] Goose306@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Google Messages (RCS app) does that. It even works from iMessage to Android but that is just because Google parses the SMS text that says they reacted that iMessage passive-aggressively sends and makes it appear correctly. It's not following RCS protocol, it's basic text parsing is all.

Incidentally, Google also started sending the same pass-aggressive reacted SMS messages to iPhone users for those using those RCS features, so now Apple gets the messages Android users had to deal with for years (and still do, if they aren't using Messages). I don't know is Apple is doing the same parsing or not as Google, if they aren't then somewhat ironically to Apple's intention Android now has the better react experience.

[–] whofearsthenight@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's a lot of things, and Apple kinda backed into the lock-in aspect I think by mistake. At the time it debuted, you mainly used SMS when mobile texting, and SMS is garbage. It's not encrypted, was limited to a small number of characters, etc. Picture/video messaging also isn't part of the standard, so MMS was tacked on with massive limits, because the thing about SMS is that it wasn't really designed with it's own bandwidth in mind and instead piggybacked on the carrier signal in idle time (I'm real fuzzy on the details because it's been so long, if someone knows exactly that would be helpful context.) Most importantly, in the US at least, SMS was a fee carriers absolutely scalped you for. When iMessage came out, carriers were still charging absolutely stupid prices for a package of like 200 texts and per text after, and receiving also counted towards that.

Apple says "hey we have the internet on this thing, let's make it a feature that when you send to other iPhone users it doesn't count against your text package" and then built a "modern" text platform. E2E, rich image/video support, the stuff you mention, etc. They made it so that you didn't have to worry about whether your friend was on iPhone, you could send a message to their number and Apple would figure it out. The green bubble thing initially was just "btw you're paying for this one." The reason I say they kinda backed into the lock-in thing is because obviously the idea here was "buy an iPhone and stop paying stupid carrier fees" which is obviously a lock-in strategy, but that aspect of the carrier plans basically collapsed as Facebook released Messenger that same year, so it quickly became "unlimited for $20" and then just "it's all in your plan (which we're just being less obvious bout gouging you on.)"

The green bubble thing sticks around though in the US largely because the US is one of the few places where iMessage becomes a major player in the messaging space, probably because the US market sees a larger share of iPhone sales due to economics and Apple not really having a low-end strategy except "buy an older iPhone." Other places go to WhatsApp or WeChat or whatever, but Apple continues to grow (I think around 55% in the US?) and now it's an annoyance for everyone. I don't think I've ever really seen anyone care about the green bubble other than "shit now I have to figure out how to send them this video of the whatever." At least for younger generations, this just means that the primary text method becomes Snap (me and my wife are about the only people my kids open the Messages app instead of Snap for) while the olds all use Facebook Messenger, and those who refuse just spend more of their day annoyed.

Anyway, it was a nice convenience when it launched. Personally, I think Apple has little reason to develop and process messaging for free for Android and businesses don't do things to be nice, but they're all about service revenue, so I think they should release an Android app, and make it easy to buy stickers and shit like that, send money via Apple Pay, etc. iMessage has already subtly shifted that direction on iPhone and I know at least in my friend/family group we pass money around like that all the time, and this becomes another thing that's sort of annoying when we hang out with someone who isn't on iOS. also, probably obviously, but it's not even like "oh we're hanging out with the poor friend on Android" or anything, he is also holding a $900-$1200 phone, so the lack of interop on these types of things that should probably just be a protocol is annoying af.

[–] float@feddit.de 4 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Wikipedia sais WhatsApp was released 2009, two years before iMessage. So the idea wasn't new and they most likely didn't lock out Android users by accident.

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[–] DarthBueller@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes, having to figure out how to send a video is super annoying. The easiest default is FB messenger because everyone has it, but fuck I don't like giving my private messages to meta.

[–] whofearsthenight@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

My go-to is just to send an iCloud link. I technically have a Facebook account, but for various social reasons I don't tell anyone and basically only use it for occasionally browsing marketplace. Even that is more data than I like to give Facebook.

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[–] GenEcon@lemm.ee 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Since not even iPhone users in Europe use iMessage I highly doubt anyone would use it outside the US.

[–] Z4rK@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I feel Europe is a lot more diverse than you think. In Norway, which have a fairly high percentage of iPhone users, iMessage is the most used - or at least I don’t know anyone who doesn’t use it by default.

A few friends chat are on Messenger or Snapchat. Signal / Telegram / WhatsApp etc are extremely rare.

[–] vodka@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And also as a Norwegian I don't know a single person that uses iMessage.

Everyone I know are using Facebook messenger, Snapchat or WhatsApp.

[–] Z4rK@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well but I’ll guess most of those you know use Android while most of who I know use iPhone?

[–] vodka@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

Mostly iPhones actually, they do use a lot of facetime to be fair, but almost all chatting is Facebook messenger

[–] DAMunzy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I tried using the Apple app on Android for tracking the tracking thingies. Horrible, horrible app. I will not be trusting anything put out by Apple for Android unless they do a Microsoft and go all in. Otherwise, they will always have a reason to make the Android experience worse than the iPhone experience.

[–] Cosmocrat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] DAMunzy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 year ago

It's built into my phone now. But thanks

[–] rmuk@feddit.uk 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Under new EU laws, Apple will be forced to allow interoperability with iMessage in the future. That doesn't necessarily mean them adopting RCS or bringing iMessage to non-Apple platforms, but it does mean they'll need to at the very least publish an API allowing external software or services to use iMessage.

[–] Encode1307@lemm.ee 5 points 1 year ago

I just expect them to make the interoperability as shitty as possible

[–] HeavyRaptor@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 year ago

I think they found imessage not to be a leading platform so AFAIK this isn't the case for now. Maybe if more people start using it they'll revisit the question.

[–] netchami@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

RCS isn't a good solution. As long as all RCS implementations are proprietary and Google doesn't even include an RCS client in AOSP and doesn't let you use a third-party client it's just as shitty as iMessage. Just use Signal, it's FOSS, cross-plattform and stores as little data about you as possible. It's also not run by some garbage big tech corporation.

[–] Encode1307@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (3 children)
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[–] clgoh@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Unless carriers deprecate SMS/MMS.

[–] smileyhead@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 year ago

Phone carriers should be deprecated.

[–] hackitfast@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This is what I believe Google is actually trying to get carriers to do, and I suspect carriers (in some shape or form) will actually do this, just not in the way you think.

RCS will eventually become the dominant messaging standard, however, I think they're actually working on a backwards compatibility for SMS and MMS in some capacity. In this way, phones (like the iPhone or older Android phones) will still be capable of sending and receiving SMS and MMS in typical elitist walled-garden fashion, but the carrier will receive it as an RCS message and relay it to an RCS-compatible device as an RCS message.

In this way, group chats with four Android users and two iPhone users will still allow those Android users to benefit from RCS from each other (typing indicators, reactions, potentially some level of E2E, support for large media, etc), while the iPhones in the group chat will actually be the ones having a negative experience (no typing indicators, reactions appearing as text messages, no E2E, obnoxious green bubbles) since Apple refuses to integrate RCS into their Messaging application. Of course Apple will continue to gaslight their customers through high contrast green bubble dark patterns, and continued refusal of adopting RCS or creating iMessage for Android. As they've made clear, they don't care about giving their customers the best possible experience, and prefer to maintain market control for as long as possible.

The #GetTheMessage ads are likely gearing up for the eventuality of this change, and the Pixel x iPhone ads are all "buddy buddy, kill them with kindness" so they can out Apple as the hostile ones when they refuse to acknowledge the existence of other smartphones either through its aggressive marketing, or through refusal to adopt open standards.

If this were all to happen, depending on how well the RCS backwards compatibility worked and its ability to out Apple as the shut ins that they are, I could (crazy talk) foresee Apple creating a standalone iMessage app to, at the very minimum, keep Android users talking within their iMessage ecosystem.