Excellent. The next step is for Google to release a free and open source way for Android developers to build apps that send RCS messages. Currently, the only messaging app on Android that fully supports RCS is Messages by Google, which is closed source and requires Google Play Services to activate RCS features.
Also, end-to-end encryption is not part of the RCS specification, but is a proprietary extension to RCS that Google has made exclusive to Messages by Google.[1] This feature should be made open and added to the actual RCS specification so that Apple and other vendors can make use of it.
(Notes: There is a proprietary RCS API which Google only allows Samsung apps to use to communicate with Messages by Google.[2] Verizon has an app called Verizon Messages or Message+ that uses RCS to some extent, but this is an incomplete implementation that only works on Samsung devices on the Verizon network with no cross-carrier compatibility.[3])
This is why I don't buy Google's bad faith shaming of Apple for not adopting RCS. The current version of it that people are using on Android isn't even a "standard" by any normal usage of the term, it's just another Google messaging service. No one can make their own app, and there's barely any carrier adoption, so Google is basically running the whole network.
Does this mean that now if you send a message to someone from an iPhone that doesn't go through iMessage, it will instead go through Google's servers? Sure the service will hopefully be better than SMS but at the cost of giving Google the keys to pretending they're a "standard."
That's the trap door in this. Apple is going to implement RCS exactly as the specification says it should be implemented, no more or no less. Any incompatibilities with Android will be laid at Google's door to resolve.
Having beaten Apple with the RCS stick for the last year, Google might find themselves now getting beaten back.
When you set up a new phone on Google Fi, the first thing Messages tells you to do is turn RCS off, because for whatever reason Google can't make Fi's native cross-device SMS[0] work with RCS. It's a damned shame.
[0] Google Fi integrates with Messages for Web to allow you to use your phone number even if your phone is damaged or destroyed. It's absolutely amazing. I've used this (back when it was Hangouts integration) to use my number on an iPod touch and it worked surprisingly well when I was waiting for a replacement on my Nexus 6P that I had shattered. I also have Messages for Web pinned to my iPad dock for similar reasons.
> This is why I don't buy Google's bad faith shaming of Apple for not adopting RCS.
But the point to me is that I don't care whether it's "bad faith" or not, just that (again, to me) it's actually the correct point of view. Messaging integration between iOS and Android, in the US at least, is not just fundamentally broken, but the presence of a single Android user in an iMessage group chat can break the experience for everyone (e.g. potato quality video), and if you are the "odd man out" on the Android people start resenting your presence in the chat (and, to be clear, I'm middle aged, not in middle school). For an example, see https://www.instagram.com/p/CwLKeGRLieb/
There is no reason for there to be such messaging incompatibility between iOS and Android. My feeling is that Apple knows the regulatory winds are shifting very much against anticompetitive behavior, and their iMessage incompatibility was just looking like the blatant protectionism that it is.
> This is why I don't buy Google's bad faith shaming of Apple for not adopting RCS.
Google is literally operating an RCS SaaS company for marketers and telcos, so I'd take any of their statements in support for RCS with a grain of salt: https://jibe.google.com/
RCS is still standardized and maintained by the GSMA, of which Google is a member. Google acquired Jibe in 2015 in order to get their RCS server and client architecture (Jibe was a leader in shaping the RCS-Standard).
Everyone can make his own app, it's just that he would need to develop a whole RCS-client for it to interact with (Google's or carriers') RCS-Servers as well. So what is missing is Google offering their RCS-client with open API's for other apps (than Google Messages) to use.
To be fair, maintaining interoperability of those apps with the underlying client would then be a huge endeavour, Google Messages itself is already updating quite frequently...
Google Messages app sends a lot of spam here in India if RCS is enabled. I confirmed this with some of friends who experienced the same thing.
Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has an app called DND which lets you register your phone number to opt out of marketing and promotional SMSes. It works really well and in case someone sends you a promotional SMS despite opting out, you can report them to your SIM provider (or carrier) and they are legally required to take an action.
But as soon as RCS is enabled, you will magically start receiving a lot of spam messages with rich text and link previews. Unfortunately, the DND app cannot see or detect those messages which means you cannot report them.
I have no insider knowledge here, but Google tried to go the high route of working with carriers for years before giving up on their intransigence.
I suspect that Google's RCS is proprietary as a blunt instrument to prevent carriers from trying to either (a) undermine e2ee in some weasely way or (b) have the ability to pick and choose the pieces of the implementation they want to support. You either get the whole thing, with e2ee that you don't control, or nothing.
Sadly the lesson from Google, Apple, and Whatsapp here appears to be "cooperating with telecom carriers is a fool's errand".
Google had the opportunity to own this space a decade ago when they made Hangouts the default SMS client on Android. It's exactly what Apple did with iMessage, but Hangouts was cross-platform.
It's absolutely bizarre to me they didn't iterate on that. I'm kind of glad they didn't.
I'd have much rather iMessage only open up interoperability with E2EE platforms like signal or even Whatsapp (because Facebook is somehow the lesser evil in this corner of the privacy world).
> the only messaging app on Android that fully supports RCS is Messages by Google
Plus, unless they fixed it, if you enable RCS and then regret it and disable it again, anybody who texted with you via RCS will no longer be able to text you at all. Things won't revert to SMS.
This bit me pretty hard, but I finally fixed it by changing my phone number.
This is similar to Apple's iMessage deregistration page.[1]
Google has been funneling RCS messages through its own servers to bypass wireless carriers, which were slow or unwilling to directly support RCS.[2] Unfortunately, this has centralized RCS communications through Google and allowed Google to make end-to-end encryption available to RCS users as a proprietary extension that Google never contributed back to the RCS Universal Profile specification.[3]
For RCS on Android to be decentralized again, your wireless carrier would need to support RCS on the network level and Android would also need to implement RCS in a way that does not require interaction with Google servers. This would make deregistration unnecessary.
> Plus, unless they fixed it, if you enable RCS and then regret it and disable it again, anybody who texted with you via RCS will no longer be able to text you at all.
On a relative's phone, the messages app simply enabled RCS automatically without asking (and displayed a screen proudly saying it did so). Does that means that this phone will never receive SMS again from RCS users, even though we have carefully always answered "no" when it asked whether it should enable RCS (and quickly disabled it again once it enabled automatically)?
> Plus, unless they fixed it, if you enable RCS and then regret it and disable it again, anybody who texted with you via RCS will no longer be able to text you at all. Things won't revert to SMS.
That same "bug" existed for years with iMessage, for anyone switching from an iPhone to a non-iPhone.
It still exists in some form, albeit less severely, because Apple finally implemented a timeout and a way to manually deregister a number, but it took years.
I personally trust more Google and apple than a spider web of random developers and potential malwares that might cause just security issues in the long run and reduce the overall security of the platform and ecosystem
Nothing is stopping you from using Messages by Google or Apple's Messages app if you prefer. Fear, uncertainty, and doubt over unnamed "security issues" is not a good reason to prevent other developers from creating clients for RCS, which is intended to be an open protocol to replace SMS and MMS, and not a closed "ecosystem" consisting of 2 apps from 2 of the largest tech companies.
IMHO RCS should have not being adopted unless it has encryption built in, or else it is just Google's iMessenger.
At this point, anything messaging platform or financial transaction platform that doesn't implement post-quantum encryption + classic computer encryption ECC (such as superdilithium) should NOT be consider as a standard for messaging for the public. All that ought to be part of the messaging protocol, so we don't end up with GSM 64 bit encryption mess.
>Also, end-to-end encryption is not part of the RCS specification, but is a proprietary extension to RCS that Google has made exclusive to Messages by Google.[1] This feature should be made open and added to the actual RCS specification so that Apple and other vendors can make use of it.
I thought it is based on Signal protocol? Maybe some commercial wrapper around it.
It’s based on Signal but the key management is completely proprietary. If you read their white paper it directly says that both parties have to be using Google Messages to use E2EE RCS.
Yes, generally. Especially if those randos are, for instance, me. RCS needs server coordination, and I don't want to use it if I can't bring that on-prem.
Google's RCS encryption scheme isn't really proprietary, it's the Signal e2ee scheme. Granted, it's bolted into RCS and not part of the standard, but it's not 100% closed either. It's like a standard added to another standard in a nonstandard way.
Google already announced that Messages will support MLS. One can only hope that Apple does as well with whatever this announcement brings, and that MLS becomes the defacto E2EE standard for RCS.
> Currently, the only messaging app on Android that fully supports RCS is Messages by Google, which is closed source and requires Google Play Services to activate RCS features.
And which prompts you every bloody time you open it to enable RCS, ignoring the last thousand times you clicked the tiny 'skip for now' font.
I also skipped that, but we won't have to worry about it anymore. They started enabling it by default. Recently got a toast notification that I barely got to read. Soon they'll probably make it mandatory. :o)
Third-party SMS and MMS messaging apps already exist on Android, such as the free and open source QKSMS[1] and Simple SMS Messenger.[2] Signal also used to support SMS and MMS on Android until last year.[3] There isn't a shred of evidence that these non-default SMS/MMS apps increase spam to any measurable extent compared to SMS/MMS apps that are preinstalled on Android phones.
This is something I never thought I'd see. I hope the GSM association moves fast to make robust E2EE a standard required for proper implementation for carriers. That would go a long way in making a huge improvement over SMS/MMS.
This is a win for RCS, ultimately. Maybe this will kick carriers into high gear to up their messaging standard support game and have standard interop.
I don't think this will lead to a decline in iMessage usage, nor do I think it will be catalyst enough to get people to move to Android, because there are still things RCS won't be able to support[0] but its a big step forward for a more pleasant experience between iOS and Android.
[0]: Memojis, reactions (tapbacks I think their called) and I'm curious about threaded messages. Also, at this time the actual RCS standard does not specificy that messages must be end to end encrypted. iMessage on the other hand has robust E2EE encryption (and you can get even more robust encryption by enabling Advanced Data Protection)
> I hope the GSM association moves fast to make robust E2EE a standard required for proper implementation for carriers.
This is pretty moot now. Google has effectively turned RCS into a proprietary protocol, they fully control the only relevant server implementation, carriers that want to interconnect have no choice but to deploy Jibe or use Jibe as a service.
This could possibly open an avenue for another party to show up around this. Google de facto having reign on this is because they're the only company in this space that cared enough about it to get it moving.
Apple supporting RCS could create enough interest that it breaks their de facto control of the standard
That's not true. Mavenir offers an RCS platform that T-Mobile has been using up until recently. A renewed interest in RCS due to Apple supporting it might end up with their platform being more sellable.
> I hope the GSM association moves fast to make robust E2EE a standard required for proper implementation for carriers. That would go a long way in making a huge improvement over SMS/MMS.
Can telcos actually offer E2EE given the various lawful intercept statutes that they are usually subject to?
Hopefully vendors start putting better fallback into their messaging clients when RCS isn't available.
It's been terrible for all the poor people I know who rarely have working data on their phones, but RCS enabled by default. They can't figure out why they're not sending or receiving any messages and I have to keep disabling it for them.
If you turn off RCS, Google Messages shows you a full screen prompt once a week to turn it back on. Indefinitely.
And of course the prompt has a large blue button to enable, and a very small text underneath to dismiss, making it easy to accidentally enable it. It happened to me a few times already.
It also tells you nothing about the downsides (that you need a data connection, mainly) that would make RCS unusable to certain people... So they trick users into subscribing then users begin experiencing difficulties receiving or sending texts and they don't understand why.
I thought the primary motivation for RCS was E2EE and secondary motivations were niceties like read receipts, reactions and HQ media. So far this thread has been very illuminating and shocking to me. Especially E2EE being an extension to a standard not a core part of it in 2023.
Yup. That's exactly what I predict Apple will do. RCS messaging will still have green bubbles. And it will continue to have the same psychological effect as SMS green bubbles do today. I think that's also why GP said there won't be a decline in iMessage usage.
I am fairly certain that it's illegal to sell the content of SMS messages in the United States at least. The metadata like who is messaging who and timestamps and best guess locations maybe is sold though. But the contents can be obtained by law enforcement. However, I think the contents are purged after some expiration time.
I was working on RCS systems back in 2012. It was the future back them - incredible low latency for messaging and gaming, rich messaging, and a decent SDK.
How did carriers fuck it up so badly that, a decade later, it's barely a blip on the messaging landscape? The were so desperate to stop OTT (over the top) services that they... locked everything down in the hope that customers wouldn't churn. It backfired spectacularly.
While its true that SMS used to cost per message (and outrageously at that) unlimited SMS/MMS (AKA, unlimited text) plans were cheaper (and on some carriers, predate) than unlimited data, often being only $10 a month or so as an add-on. Unlimited talk & text plans were relatively common as well.
In the EU for instance, the reverse was true. Particularly, unlimited data was cheap and affordable, where as SMS was quite costly (even more than in the US in some cases) so data heavy apps were easier to adopt. Hence, WhatsApp, Telegram etc. gaining so much popularity. iMessage was introduced much later to the rich messaging market than these apps in those countries (because mobile messaging apps were cheap to adopt in markets where mobile data is cheap).
There is much more competition in those countries with cheap mobile data in the rich messaging services space. In the US, unlimited data has had a more sordid history, and SMS / MMS had a much bigger adoption rate early on
Was that really a concern in the US? WhatsApp and iMessage require data plans, and as far as I can remember these have largely included unlimited SMS as well.
It was definitely a factor in the EU, though: SMS still aren't free on many prepaid plans there. WhatsApp was the first popular application supporting unlimited messaging on mobile phones for many.
I disagree, unlimited domestic SMS/MMS was common by iPhone 3G (summer 2008) I specifically remember getting an unlimited plan from ATT, which was novel.
However, international SMS/MMS was extremely expensive, and that was the main impetus for WhatsApp. It required no password or making accounts or remembering all of that, hence all non tech savvy people could easily use it. And it worked flawlessly, with zero exorbitant international charges, because you knew everything was going via data.
My recollection is that unlimited text plans became the standard around 2008ish, well before iMessage came out.
iMessage "won" because it was the default for iPhone users in the US. Similarly, Whatsapp is the default nowhere and I don't know anyone who uses it, but that might be a generational thing. Whatsapp has always struck me as common in Europe, but rare in the US. We just use text and FB Messenger.
By the time I message became big it was a non issue. SMS is a garbage standard in comparison. I send full pictures and movies via I message if there is a Android phone on the chat they all turn to garbage tiny images
Bingo. The cartel was so focused on trying to save their existing money printing machine they took their eye off the ball and refused to disrupt themselves.
The cable television industry did the exact same thing. If they’d been willing to go OTT a decade ago and not force agreements based on geolocation, a lot of the streaming services that exist wouldn’t even need to exist today.
Kinda but not really. The cable providers were and continue to be hamstrung by the networks who force the cable providers to buy channel packages. Cable never had the leverage to, say, tell Disney that they only want to offer ESPN but not the 10 other Disney branded networks being offered. It was often all or nothing.
The answer is that the carriers worked out a specification and both infra-vendors and device-vendors were left to develop the server/client based on that spec.
So each major device-vendor developed his client-app, and ended up with interoperability issues not only with the RCS-servers used by a given carrier, but also with devices of OTHER vendors. And that doesn't even begin to cover the issues on inter-carrier messaging...
The situation was only resolved after Google acquired Jibe Mobile (the biggest player in developing RCS server/client applications for carriers) and basically created a single RCS-client/server implementation using their Android Messages app and a Google-owned server.
But when you were working on RCS back in 2012, you may remember that at that time, RCS didn't even support store&forward (!!).
So if the receiving device was not available when a message was delivered (because it had no network or client wasn't running on a device, which happened alot especially on iOS because the client was in a constant fight with the OS), the message wasn't queued anywhere.
Apart from the obvious issue of missing messages, it caused the even worse UX-impact that the entire conversation looked different on sender/receiver.
--
Ah yes, and: RCS was originally designed with per-message billing in mind (of course). At the time it was launched it was finally clear to the carriers that those times are over, but the whole architecture had quite a chunk of billing architecture in it as well...
> The situation was only resolved after Google acquired Jibe Mobile (the biggest player in developing RCS server/client applications for carriers) and basically created a single RCS-client/server implementation using their Android Messages app and a Google-owned server.
Thank you for highlighting this. This important piece of information often gets lost in the "green bubble" discussion.
Google has significant incentives for pushing RCS for more than one reason.
Carriers supported it. Just Apple didn't, for a long time. The reason is obvious: To increase their market dominance in the US, where iMessage is common. Especially among US teens this was apparently successful. Teens didn't want to be the lame green bubble kids with reduced messaging features. They flocked to iPhones.
RCS is (was) the prime example of Apple's anticompetitive behavior, after the App Store exclusivity, preventing side loading, and disallowing alternative browsers.
It wasn't the carriers, it was Apple mostly winning the race in creating their walled garden, and everyone else being disinterested in an alternative in the phone race wars.
It's now some badge of shame Apple users discriminate against the blue vs green windows if a friend or relative doesn't have an i-thing, and Apple loves it all the way to the bank.
Apple only has dominant marketshare in the US. Everywhere else in the world people use Whatsapp. Why didn't they all hop on the RCS train? Because it sucks to implement and is a black box to use. Google was stuck with SMS because of their inability to implement a cohesive messaging app, despite owning and distributing an operating system. So what did they do? Pitched sob stories and got the europeans to threaten to regulate. Shitty move. They should have just built something good.
They used to love using SMS to take as much money as possible from their customers. Imagine texting "Hey" to a friend and getting charged $0.20 for it.
> Breaking: Apple will support RCS - the green bubble shame set to end
Note that the green bubble could be kept for other reasons: RCS is a major improvement over SMS/MMS, but there could still be functionality that isn't on par with a completely in-house system like 'iMessage'.
The green/blue distinction may still be useful for setting certain expectations on how things work.
If carriers can charge per RCS message like they do with SMS/MMS, usually after X amount used a month, Apple needs to make it a different color from iMessages which they provide for free.
People have to know if they are using free iMessages when talking to other people or if they are using up their SMS/MMS/RCS quota.
Edit: Maybe charging for SMSs is not a thing in your country but it is in mine. If I see a green bubble I would be mindful of the number of messages I send because after 200 SMSs I going to get charged per SMS.
Here in India the plans do include free SMS, but there was a government imposed limit of 200 SMSes per day from a single SIM (this applied to retail consumers, not institutions that may want to send transactional or marketing messages). [1][2] Beyond that, the per SMS charge gets expensive. Though that limit seems to have been removed in 2020, [3] I’ve only seen plans that allow 100 SMSes per day.
Almost everyone in India with a smartphone uses WhatsApp. SMS is for receiving OTPs, transaction messages, marketing messages, spam, phishing messages, etc.
Charging for SMS is a thing on some plans here in Brazil, but I don't know in other countries, RCS works completely for free as it works even on Wifi. You don't need mobile data or SMS plans.
If you are on mobile data, it just doesn't use your quota...
Yeah definetly would not expect it to be blue as 9 to 5 noted how Apple mentioned it won't be as secure as iMessage and iMessage will be separate. So presumably people texting will still want to know if they see blue they get full privacy where is if they see green or a new color it means yes they get lots of new features like iMessage, but not as secure as iMessage. But the green bubble (or whatever new color) will be less shameful, if users in general can group chat and chat easily without worrying about not being able to do most all the standard features they can with other iPhone users. Time will tell.
What a surprise! I'm quite sure RCS bubbles will be green though, and that's still going to be enough of a difference when it comes to teen groups and even adult dating.
The EU may mandate interoperability, but I don't see them mandating bubble color...
I’ve had a couple girlfriends in their 40s mildly judge me negatively for having an Android phone, but someone who would take that seriously enough for it to affect their relationship decisions is someone I’d rather not be involved with. Maybe it would be better to text people with a “beater” Android phone as a test for how shallow they may be, like the semi-cliche of a financially well-off person driving an old truck to a first date vs their fancy car.
It has nothing to do with finances. You can buy a perfectly good used iPhone for less than $100. It has to do with taste. Not wanting to date a guy with an Android phone is like not wanting to date a guy because he's a Weaboo.
>> The EU may mandate interoperability, but I don't see them mandating bubble color...
> I’ve had a couple girlfriends in their 40s mildly judge me negatively for having an Android phone […]
I have an iPhone but don't tie it into Apple services so every fellow iPhone users have green-bubble interactions with me. :)
Over the years/decades I've lived through ICQ, MSN Messenger, BBM, and probably some other proprietary systems. I've managed to avoid tying into any of them so far.
It will be interesting to see what color they choose for RCS. Right now, blue indicates an end-to-end encrypted message and green indicates not encrypted. Even when messaging between two Apple devices you can get a green bubble if, for some reason, the message is routed over SMS.
If it were up to me, encrypted RCS would be blue and not-encrypted RCS would be green.
Why do you think that blue represents E2EE and not simply iMessage? If data isn't available and the iPhone sends an SMS, like you mentioned, the bubble is green, but this doesn't necessarily have anything to do with encryption. For example, the satellite SOS messages are represented as gray. It seems more like the color represents the transport.
More than 10% of europeans use iMessage, enough for EU Digital Market Act to force Apple to adopt RCS and thereby trying to circumvent opening iMessage itself
I think the system should delineate between messages sent through different services. Maybe we'll end up with three colors (green == sms/mms, blue = iMessage, purple == rcs)
The EU is interested in fair competition. Apple has managed to provide a terrible cross-platform messaging experience to their own customers for years while successfully convincing everyone that the problem is due to every other phone besides theirs. I agree it's almost comical, but it certainly affects competition in a negative way.
The lede is quite cleverly buried here. Key sentence is "We will be adding support for RCS Universal Profile, the standard as currently published by the GSM Association"
So no end to end encryption and the bubbles will most still likely be green.
Even with the mutterings about improving security etc it's unlikely that the GSM Association will ever sign off on any encryption scheme that isn't weak or backdoored.
To be clear, based on what I've read: "no end-to-end encryption" simply means that Apple is not going to either a) develop their own, proprietary E2EE system for RCS, or b) pay Google for theirs.
And good grief, get over the bubble color thing. Of course RCS isn't going to have blue bubbles; those specifically indicate an iMessage message. Maybe they'll be green, or maybe they'll be purple, orange, or red, to differentiate them from SMS. That's all the different colors are for: a useful indication of what messaging system that user is currently using.
If Apple didn't color the bubbles differently, you'd see people moaning and complaining that there's no way to tell who you can and can't make a group chat with, or whether you can send them stickers and reactions.
I don't mind Apple adopting RCS the same way that SMS is implemented. I like that iMessage can add features at whatever pace Apple wants. RCS will at least fix the annoying group message problems that Android/iOS have.
Agreed. I don't mind them having their messaging platform. I don't mind it being technically superior to RCS.
I DO have an issue with them intentionally doing a shit job of integrating with a telecommunications standard and then slapping a green bubble on it to get their oblivious users to ostracize people's kids.
That would be an interesting chance: buy an iPhone and get it with the hardware, or download and app and pay Apple a subscription. I wonder how many Android users would be willing to pay the subscription?
As an Android user, it'd be nice if replying "No" to "Do you want RCS?" meant "Never ask me again" and wasn't just interpreted as "ask me again in next week and every week thereafter".
> and wasn't just interpreted as "ask me again in next week and every week thereafter".
It gets even worse; last week, on a relative's phone, after weeks of clicking "not now" it just force-enabled RCS, and displayed something like a "we automatically enabled RCS for you, here's what you should do if you want to disable it again" (completely confusing said non-technical relative). Needless to say, I quickly went into the settings and disabled it again; I just hope that it having been enabled for a few minutes doesn't mean it will no longer be able to receive messages from RCS users (like the rumors I heard many years ago of people who enabled iMessage and later changed back to Android no longer receiving any SMS from iMessage users).
A lot of people I know can't afford a data plan for their phones, so when RCS becomes enabled it just bounces all their incoming/outgoing messages and it is sometimes days or weeks before they realize.
For me, SMS is solely for receiving 2FA codes and sending message to my provider to check how much data allowance I have left for the month. I use Whatsapp for messages to people.
Companies have already begun using RCS as an opportunity to flood my phone with ads that take up way too much space in the notification shade. Also not from the US, so I can just use a 3rd party app
Yup it's completely disingenuous on Google's part.
Some people don't have data but Google doesn't care, they force clueless users to enable RCS anyway and then they're on their own to figure out why they don't receive messages anymore!
Readit News
Also, end-to-end encryption is not part of the RCS specification, but is a proprietary extension to RCS that Google has made exclusive to Messages by Google.[1] This feature should be made open and added to the actual RCS specification so that Apple and other vendors can make use of it.
(Notes: There is a proprietary RCS API which Google only allows Samsung apps to use to communicate with Messages by Google.[2] Verizon has an app called Verizon Messages or Message+ that uses RCS to some extent, but this is an incomplete implementation that only works on Samsung devices on the Verizon network with no cross-carrier compatibility.[3])
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/google-enables-end-t...
[2] https://www.xda-developers.com/google-messages-rcs-api-third...
[3] https://www.verizon.com/support/knowledge-base-222792/
Does this mean that now if you send a message to someone from an iPhone that doesn't go through iMessage, it will instead go through Google's servers? Sure the service will hopefully be better than SMS but at the cost of giving Google the keys to pretending they're a "standard."
Having beaten Apple with the RCS stick for the last year, Google might find themselves now getting beaten back.
[0] Google Fi integrates with Messages for Web to allow you to use your phone number even if your phone is damaged or destroyed. It's absolutely amazing. I've used this (back when it was Hangouts integration) to use my number on an iPod touch and it worked surprisingly well when I was waiting for a replacement on my Nexus 6P that I had shattered. I also have Messages for Web pinned to my iPad dock for similar reasons.
But the point to me is that I don't care whether it's "bad faith" or not, just that (again, to me) it's actually the correct point of view. Messaging integration between iOS and Android, in the US at least, is not just fundamentally broken, but the presence of a single Android user in an iMessage group chat can break the experience for everyone (e.g. potato quality video), and if you are the "odd man out" on the Android people start resenting your presence in the chat (and, to be clear, I'm middle aged, not in middle school). For an example, see https://www.instagram.com/p/CwLKeGRLieb/
There is no reason for there to be such messaging incompatibility between iOS and Android. My feeling is that Apple knows the regulatory winds are shifting very much against anticompetitive behavior, and their iMessage incompatibility was just looking like the blatant protectionism that it is.
Google is literally operating an RCS SaaS company for marketers and telcos, so I'd take any of their statements in support for RCS with a grain of salt: https://jibe.google.com/
Everyone can make his own app, it's just that he would need to develop a whole RCS-client for it to interact with (Google's or carriers') RCS-Servers as well. So what is missing is Google offering their RCS-client with open API's for other apps (than Google Messages) to use.
To be fair, maintaining interoperability of those apps with the underlying client would then be a huge endeavour, Google Messages itself is already updating quite frequently...
Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has an app called DND which lets you register your phone number to opt out of marketing and promotional SMSes. It works really well and in case someone sends you a promotional SMS despite opting out, you can report them to your SIM provider (or carrier) and they are legally required to take an action.
But as soon as RCS is enabled, you will magically start receiving a lot of spam messages with rich text and link previews. Unfortunately, the DND app cannot see or detect those messages which means you cannot report them.
That might be country dependent, in the UK the four largest networks do officially support RCS I believe (combined market share of around 85-90%).
Google did, Apple will, what stops other companies from doing it aside from effort and money ?
> and there's barely any carrier adoption
Expecting carriers to do adopt new technologies is usually a losing bet.
I suspect that Google's RCS is proprietary as a blunt instrument to prevent carriers from trying to either (a) undermine e2ee in some weasely way or (b) have the ability to pick and choose the pieces of the implementation they want to support. You either get the whole thing, with e2ee that you don't control, or nothing.
Sadly the lesson from Google, Apple, and Whatsapp here appears to be "cooperating with telecom carriers is a fool's errand".
It's absolutely bizarre to me they didn't iterate on that. I'm kind of glad they didn't.
Reminder that carriers have lawful intercept mandates through legal statutes: it may actually be illegal for them to implement E2EE.
I'd have much rather iMessage only open up interoperability with E2EE platforms like signal or even Whatsapp (because Facebook is somehow the lesser evil in this corner of the privacy world).
Plus, unless they fixed it, if you enable RCS and then regret it and disable it again, anybody who texted with you via RCS will no longer be able to text you at all. Things won't revert to SMS.
This bit me pretty hard, but I finally fixed it by changing my phone number.
https://messages.google.com/disable-chat
This is similar to Apple's iMessage deregistration page.[1]
Google has been funneling RCS messages through its own servers to bypass wireless carriers, which were slow or unwilling to directly support RCS.[2] Unfortunately, this has centralized RCS communications through Google and allowed Google to make end-to-end encryption available to RCS users as a proprietary extension that Google never contributed back to the RCS Universal Profile specification.[3]
For RCS on Android to be decentralized again, your wireless carrier would need to support RCS on the network level and Android would also need to implement RCS in a way that does not require interaction with Google servers. This would make deregistration unnecessary.
[1] https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage/
[2] https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/302020-google-will-bypass...
[3] https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/11/16/apples-flavor-of-...
Frankly, I expect Google to fix their mistake before the telecom support people figure it out. It'll be a nightmarish headache for all involved.
On a relative's phone, the messages app simply enabled RCS automatically without asking (and displayed a screen proudly saying it did so). Does that means that this phone will never receive SMS again from RCS users, even though we have carefully always answered "no" when it asked whether it should enable RCS (and quickly disabled it again once it enabled automatically)?
That same "bug" existed for years with iMessage, for anyone switching from an iPhone to a non-iPhone.
It still exists in some form, albeit less severely, because Apple finally implemented a timeout and a way to manually deregister a number, but it took years.
At this point, anything messaging platform or financial transaction platform that doesn't implement post-quantum encryption + classic computer encryption ECC (such as superdilithium) should NOT be consider as a standard for messaging for the public. All that ought to be part of the messaging protocol, so we don't end up with GSM 64 bit encryption mess.
I thought it is based on Signal protocol? Maybe some commercial wrapper around it.
What's the point of a standard that has 5 different ways it's fragmented on the same base platform?
Or maybe Apple will just implement it exactly as the spec says with no frills.
Why would you want to use another messaging app? Your data is more safe with some randos than Google?
The RCS proprietary encryption bit is very sad. Oh well.
And which prompts you every bloody time you open it to enable RCS, ignoring the last thousand times you clicked the tiny 'skip for now' font.
The reason why 3rd party native SMS/RCS don’t exist is mobile platform wanting to prevent spam.
Imagine a rogue 3rd party SMS app blasting all your friends unauthorized texts, from your device.
[1] QKSMS: https://github.com/moezbhatti/qksms
[2] Simple SMS Messenger: https://github.com/SimpleMobileTools/Simple-SMS-Messenger
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33179047
This is a win for RCS, ultimately. Maybe this will kick carriers into high gear to up their messaging standard support game and have standard interop.
I don't think this will lead to a decline in iMessage usage, nor do I think it will be catalyst enough to get people to move to Android, because there are still things RCS won't be able to support[0] but its a big step forward for a more pleasant experience between iOS and Android.
[0]: Memojis, reactions (tapbacks I think their called) and I'm curious about threaded messages. Also, at this time the actual RCS standard does not specificy that messages must be end to end encrypted. iMessage on the other hand has robust E2EE encryption (and you can get even more robust encryption by enabling Advanced Data Protection)
This is pretty moot now. Google has effectively turned RCS into a proprietary protocol, they fully control the only relevant server implementation, carriers that want to interconnect have no choice but to deploy Jibe or use Jibe as a service.
Apple supporting RCS could create enough interest that it breaks their de facto control of the standard
That's not true. Mavenir offers an RCS platform that T-Mobile has been using up until recently. A renewed interest in RCS due to Apple supporting it might end up with their platform being more sellable.
https://www.lightreading.com/mobile-core/mavenir-t-mobile-co...
Can telcos actually offer E2EE given the various lawful intercept statutes that they are usually subject to?
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/google-messa...
It's been terrible for all the poor people I know who rarely have working data on their phones, but RCS enabled by default. They can't figure out why they're not sending or receiving any messages and I have to keep disabling it for them.
And of course the prompt has a large blue button to enable, and a very small text underneath to dismiss, making it easy to accidentally enable it. It happened to me a few times already.
It also tells you nothing about the downsides (that you need a data connection, mainly) that would make RCS unusable to certain people... So they trick users into subscribing then users begin experiencing difficulties receiving or sending texts and they don't understand why.
Thank you, Google.
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RCS is such carrier-dependent crap.
Looking at / selling message contents is a large potential revenue source for all the other major players.
How did carriers fuck it up so badly that, a decade later, it's barely a blip on the messaging landscape? The were so desperate to stop OTT (over the top) services that they... locked everything down in the hope that customers wouldn't churn. It backfired spectacularly.
Yes, it was as ridiculous as it sounds. There used to be news articles about kids racking up hundreds of dollars on their phone bill.
Here's one from the same year the iphone was released:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/0...
In the EU for instance, the reverse was true. Particularly, unlimited data was cheap and affordable, where as SMS was quite costly (even more than in the US in some cases) so data heavy apps were easier to adopt. Hence, WhatsApp, Telegram etc. gaining so much popularity. iMessage was introduced much later to the rich messaging market than these apps in those countries (because mobile messaging apps were cheap to adopt in markets where mobile data is cheap).
There is much more competition in those countries with cheap mobile data in the rich messaging services space. In the US, unlimited data has had a more sordid history, and SMS / MMS had a much bigger adoption rate early on
It was definitely a factor in the EU, though: SMS still aren't free on many prepaid plans there. WhatsApp was the first popular application supporting unlimited messaging on mobile phones for many.
However, international SMS/MMS was extremely expensive, and that was the main impetus for WhatsApp. It required no password or making accounts or remembering all of that, hence all non tech savvy people could easily use it. And it worked flawlessly, with zero exorbitant international charges, because you knew everything was going via data.
US users quickly had access to unlimited SMS and calling on most phone plans, which is why Whatsapp never took root.
iMessage "won" because it was the default for iPhone users in the US. Similarly, Whatsapp is the default nowhere and I don't know anyone who uses it, but that might be a generational thing. Whatsapp has always struck me as common in Europe, but rare in the US. We just use text and FB Messenger.
The cable television industry did the exact same thing. If they’d been willing to go OTT a decade ago and not force agreements based on geolocation, a lot of the streaming services that exist wouldn’t even need to exist today.
Kinda but not really. The cable providers were and continue to be hamstrung by the networks who force the cable providers to buy channel packages. Cable never had the leverage to, say, tell Disney that they only want to offer ESPN but not the 10 other Disney branded networks being offered. It was often all or nothing.
So each major device-vendor developed his client-app, and ended up with interoperability issues not only with the RCS-servers used by a given carrier, but also with devices of OTHER vendors. And that doesn't even begin to cover the issues on inter-carrier messaging...
The situation was only resolved after Google acquired Jibe Mobile (the biggest player in developing RCS server/client applications for carriers) and basically created a single RCS-client/server implementation using their Android Messages app and a Google-owned server.
But when you were working on RCS back in 2012, you may remember that at that time, RCS didn't even support store&forward (!!).
So if the receiving device was not available when a message was delivered (because it had no network or client wasn't running on a device, which happened alot especially on iOS because the client was in a constant fight with the OS), the message wasn't queued anywhere.
Apart from the obvious issue of missing messages, it caused the even worse UX-impact that the entire conversation looked different on sender/receiver.
--
Ah yes, and: RCS was originally designed with per-message billing in mind (of course). At the time it was launched it was finally clear to the carriers that those times are over, but the whole architecture had quite a chunk of billing architecture in it as well...
Thank you for highlighting this. This important piece of information often gets lost in the "green bubble" discussion.
Google has significant incentives for pushing RCS for more than one reason.
RCS is (was) the prime example of Apple's anticompetitive behavior, after the App Store exclusivity, preventing side loading, and disallowing alternative browsers.
It's now some badge of shame Apple users discriminate against the blue vs green windows if a friend or relative doesn't have an i-thing, and Apple loves it all the way to the bank.
SMS revenues to hit $67B - 2007
https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/metric-sms-revenues-...
They used to love using SMS to take as much money as possible from their customers. Imagine texting "Hey" to a friend and getting charged $0.20 for it.
Note that the green bubble could be kept for other reasons: RCS is a major improvement over SMS/MMS, but there could still be functionality that isn't on par with a completely in-house system like 'iMessage'.
The green/blue distinction may still be useful for setting certain expectations on how things work.
People have to know if they are using free iMessages when talking to other people or if they are using up their SMS/MMS/RCS quota.
Edit: Maybe charging for SMSs is not a thing in your country but it is in mine. If I see a green bubble I would be mindful of the number of messages I send because after 200 SMSs I going to get charged per SMS.
Almost everyone in India with a smartphone uses WhatsApp. SMS is for receiving OTPs, transaction messages, marketing messages, spam, phishing messages, etc.
[1]: https://trai.gov.in/notifications/press-release/trai-extends...
[2]: https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/200-sms-per-day...
[3]: https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-techn...
If you are on mobile data, it just doesn't use your quota...
If they truly cared about sec, they would use something like Signal.
The EU may mandate interoperability, but I don't see them mandating bubble color...
> I’ve had a couple girlfriends in their 40s mildly judge me negatively for having an Android phone […]
I have an iPhone but don't tie it into Apple services so every fellow iPhone users have green-bubble interactions with me. :)
Over the years/decades I've lived through ICQ, MSN Messenger, BBM, and probably some other proprietary systems. I've managed to avoid tying into any of them so far.
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That’s ridiculous!
If it were up to me, encrypted RCS would be blue and not-encrypted RCS would be green.
I think they’re quite happy with “iMessage“ and “everything else“.
RCS will stay in the second bucket with the same green color.
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I personally see no limit to what arbitrary nonsense regulation the EU is willing to push.
So no end to end encryption and the bubbles will most still likely be green.
Even with the mutterings about improving security etc it's unlikely that the GSM Association will ever sign off on any encryption scheme that isn't weak or backdoored.
And good grief, get over the bubble color thing. Of course RCS isn't going to have blue bubbles; those specifically indicate an iMessage message. Maybe they'll be green, or maybe they'll be purple, orange, or red, to differentiate them from SMS. That's all the different colors are for: a useful indication of what messaging system that user is currently using.
If Apple didn't color the bubbles differently, you'd see people moaning and complaining that there's no way to tell who you can and can't make a group chat with, or whether you can send them stickers and reactions.
I agree it is stupid, but there most definitely is a "status thing" going on with the whole green vs. blue as well.
Very important.
I DO have an issue with them intentionally doing a shit job of integrating with a telecommunications standard and then slapping a green bubble on it to get their oblivious users to ostracize people's kids.
It gets even worse; last week, on a relative's phone, after weeks of clicking "not now" it just force-enabled RCS, and displayed something like a "we automatically enabled RCS for you, here's what you should do if you want to disable it again" (completely confusing said non-technical relative). Needless to say, I quickly went into the settings and disabled it again; I just hope that it having been enabled for a few minutes doesn't mean it will no longer be able to receive messages from RCS users (like the rumors I heard many years ago of people who enabled iMessage and later changed back to Android no longer receiving any SMS from iMessage users).
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Some people don't have data but Google doesn't care, they force clueless users to enable RCS anyway and then they're on their own to figure out why they don't receive messages anymore!