I’m not a fan of the “war” between Android and Apple when it comes to SMS/texting. The rest of the world doesn’t use SMS/RCS/iMessage as much as WhatsApp and the like, so the US is pretty much lagging behind everyone else on this anyway.
That being said, I have to admit Android did a good job with this!
What a weird dig coming from Google. Who is Google to complain about outdated messenger tech when they don’t even built RCS into Android? The RCS Google wants you to use (the one with encryption) is part of their messenger, not part of the operating system itself. It’s not even standardised.
The iMessage/SMS situation is stupid, but Google isn’t exactly doing much better here.
Give google a break, its hard for them to keep track of what message backend is in which app. They have created and killed 5 messaging apps in the time I wrote out this comment, how can you expect them to know whats going on?
Google is taking the “monkeys with typewriters” approach to messaging apps, if they release enough of them they’ll eventually stumble across a messaging app that’s compatible with iMessage.
And then cancel it two weeks later.
I miss Hangouts 🥲
I miss shouting and whispering with Allo
Wheres my Google circle crowd at? Y’all move over to Wave?
I miss Messenger with XMPP
This kind of shit is why I’ve been working on replacing things, and leaving their ecosystem. There are 57 ways to do everything, and nothing ever works properly.
I am all about tweaking and changing things, or adopting something new, but that’s all under the assumption that it works. One of the reason why people like iMessage is because they don’t have to fuck with thirdparty apps, half of which can’t even receive a text message without issues
I’m not using RCS until it is available with no vendor lock-in. Call me when third-party apps like Textra can use it, and I don’t need to use Google’s relay.
Google’s relay is a requirement for carriers who don’t host their own RCS infrastructure. Google set up a fallback server because outside of a few specific carriers, nobody bothered implementing RCS in their networks. In theory your carrier could set up a server and you wouldn’t need Google at all.
In theory apps could build an RCS implementation and take control of your RCS account.
I trust my carrier even less than Google, which is saying something.
The nice thing about E2EE is that you don’t need to trust your carrier. You could write your messages on a billboard along the highway if you can keep the message’s secret key to yourself and the recipient(s).
Annoyingly, that does require someone to actually implement Google’s RCS encryption protocol (which is really just Signal + MLS but over RCS) and publish the source code (and provide reproducible builds to prove nothing’s been messed with).
When RCS first came out, my carrier provided their own app to use it lol
Canadian carriers did, but they since have started moving towards Google’s RCS servers instead. Probably realized it wasn’t worth hosting a server, and then maintaining it. I remember some carriers wouldn’t update their servers, so not all RCS features would be available to them.
It should just be an API that any text messaging app can use on Android, with the ability to define your own relay if desired.