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iPhone 16 is here, but I’m hyped for just one reason: RCS on iOS 18 (chromeunboxed.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Listen, I'm happy for everything that makes communicating easier but to paint Google and Android as some champions of messaging is just straight up crazy.

I was an android user since the beginning of modern smart phones (and before that I used Windows Mobile 6.5 😵‍💫) and messaging has been an absolute shit-show on android for almost the entire time. Google finally had a good solution with Hangouts (circa 2014) but they killed it and spawned so many messaging clones that I lost count.

The reason why we have such fragmentation and so many different apps we have to juggle to communicate on android is because of the clear lack of vision and leadership in that area in Google.

Even RCS is freaking fragmented as well. Take for example E2E encryption, that doesn't work unless you go through google's servers which you can't really guarantee so you're getting a different "RCS" UX depending on who you're texting and what servers are being used on the backend.

After I switched to iPhone from Android it was like a slap in the face on how much better just communicating to people was on iPhone. Google isn't the fucking hero here.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Isn’t RCS an example of Google doing a Microsoft style Embrace, Extend, Extinguish? It was open until Google started fucking with it.

[–] kinkles 20 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I swear Google promised to open up their implementation of RCS to third-party app developers like 5 years ago and it still hasn’t happened.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Google tells lots of lies. They're no longer a trustworthy company. Actually, they're explicitly an untrustworthy company.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

That whole “don’t be evil” mantra is long dead now.

Be evil if it makes money.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

RCS features just completely stopped working for me one day. I can see people are typing or if they saw my message, but that's it. I cannot reply to a specific message anymore, and a couple other things are broken too. I've signed in and out, cleared the app cache, and even did a hardware reset. Nope! I just doesn't work anymore. It also won't let me receive messages from a specific group chat. I can message the people individually, I can participate in other group chats, but a group chat with those two people refuses to work. It's far from a perfected program.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

I like android but iPhones are just better communication devices. Period.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

IIRC, Apple implemented the original spec for RCS too, so none of the Google features like e2e will even work.

I’m disabling that shit day 1, I don’t need my messages sent over Google servers - not even if they were encrypted.

I don’t even know why telecoms in Europe even bothered, and neither do they. (I asked the RCS lead at one of them, and they agreed it was kind of pointless with signal, whatsapp, …. existing)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It’s not like your SMS messages are any more secure. If you message someone using Google’s RCS servers they’re going to be using Google Messages and it’s being read by Google either way. At least with RCS you can send pictures that don’t look like ass and sidestep all the reliability issues that SMS causes

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

No, they're not, but Google won't get them (unless, as you state, they use google's messaging app) Less Google, more better, in my opinion.

MMS hasn't been a thing at my provider for years now, so want to send me an image? Use Signal or whatsapp (begrudgingly). I already rarely receive or send SMS, so not enabling RCS isn't a big loss for me, I don't get added to Google's statistics (which they are so very proud off), and I won't really miss any of its features.