
Google changes its messaging strategy again: Goodbye to Allo, double down on RCS - Garbage
https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/19/google-changes-its-messaging-strategy-again-goodbye-to-allo-double-down-on-rcs/
======
m52go
Didn't Google have messaging figured out with Google Talk? Everyone was on
Gmail all day (as many still are) and people actually used it.

Then they let it wither, came out with Hangouts, and it's been a downhill
train wreck from there.

Google Talk had the potential of being one of the biggest messengers in the
world...they own Gmail and Android (!!!!!). Are you kidding me? There's really
no good reason for them NOT to be in a hugely dominant position here.

But instead they screwed it up & left a gaping hole in the marketplace.

~~~
jayd16
It's a pretty simple explanation. Google talk was XMPP which is just not a
good mobile protocol.

~~~
donbox
Could not they just replace the XMPP protocol with whatever better protocol,
while keeping the GTalk alive.

~~~
delecti
They kinda did exactly that. GTalk became Hangouts which is no longer quite
XMPP.

~~~
orbitur
Well, not only did they change the protocol, they ruined the UI too.

------
eigenvector
RCS is an improvement to SMS but it does not address the core limitations: it
is owned and controlled by carriers, so your ability to contact someone is
entirely dependent on that user's carrier. It is tied to a single, physical
device. WhatsApp shot to popularity because it was the opposite of SMS: an
entirely over-the-top service that _everyone_ could use, on any platform,
without the consent, extra billing or buggy implementation of their carrier.
As an app, it could be installed on the widest imaginable array of devices -
including the obsolete, crappy ones that most of the people on Earth use -
without OS updates.

I don't need stickers or Google Assistant. Those things are nice, but they're
not what I _need_. What I need is the ability to contact anyone, anywhere
without having to wonder whether it's going to work when I hit 'send'. Hi Bob,
did you get my photo? Sorry, it didn't go through, Bob's carrier in Bangladesh
has set limits on photo size and mine was too big. I tried to send Raj a
message, but he recently got an iPhone and my RCS message sent as SMS and his
carrier blocks international SMS messages.

WhatsApp & FB Messenger (and to a lesser extent iMessage) are successful
because they reduce the thousands of carriers and hundreds of countries in the
world to a single, seamless service. RCS is taking us back to the days where a
single obstructionist carrier (remember lots of carriers are owned or
controlled by governments) can screw things up for all of their users.
WhatsApp et al showcased the ability of the Internet to make the world a
smaller place.

I don't Google understands how big or complex the world really is.

~~~
ChrisArchitect
WhatsApp, nothing more than another internet messaging app that requires data,
shot to popularity because it fooled users into thinking it was somehow an SMS
client because it used phone number as account.

~~~
danmaz74
Here in Italy, it shot to popularity because it was "free unlimited SMS for
everybody".

~~~
masklinn
Also "can send images & shit for the same price".

------
exabrial
The carriers are idiots. It's where innovation goes to die.

We had to pull them kicking and screaming into the smart phone and data era.
(Remember When AT&T sent a paper copy of every image you downloaded on your
iPhone in a bill?)

Quite frankly the core problem with Google's strategy is involving then at
all. Instead, go the manufacturers and campaign against supporting sms _at
all_. It's insecure, slow, unreliable, monitored, among many other things.
Push the manufacturers to an open Android messaging api that runs over TLS (or
double ratchet) and bypasses the carriers completely, but the manufacturers
can still rebrand.

The other issue is Apple. For as much as they claim "privacy is a human
right", they have been jerks about making sure iMessage drags it's feet using
secure technologies to communicate outside of their ecosystem. Apple wants to
ride a white horse on encryption, but in reality they're having an opposite,
negative, effect on the vast majority of the world's population.

~~~
scrooched_moose
> unreliable

Really? It's the only messaging format that works without a data connection
and is an absolute godsend when I'm out camping, rural biking, or at large
sporting events and the towers are absolutely swamped.

I'm in a situation at least once a month where the only reliable communication
method is SMS.

~~~
nmcfarl
Wow - infrastructure varies. Here in Eastern Oregon the pattern is pretty
reliably that data and signal drop out at the same time, at least on Verizon
which is the carrier with the best coverage.

I really thought the pattern that you describe, which I've seen plenty of in
the past, had just died out over time and tower upgrades.

~~~
megaman22
I routinely see SMSs fail to deliver, deliver multiple times, deliver weirdly
out of order, or deliver at random times, hours or days after they were sent.
And this is in a relatively well-served area fifty miles out of Boston.

~~~
sli
I still have the issue where MMS seems to just sometimes not work for days or
even weeks on end, then suddenly start working again. No OS updates and no APN
settings changes in the meantime. Normally it's not an issue, since I don't
really use SMS all that much anymore, but my mother and I tend to send
pictures back and forth a lot and she still uses SMS.

SMS itself usually works fine, but MMS is particularly bad.

------
elvirs
Its shocking how Google is embarrassing itself with these incompatible chat
apps released one after another and abandoned right after the release. GTalk
Gmail Chat Google Voice Hangouts Android Messages Allo Duo for fucks sake
Google, just copy Whatsapp but make it stored on cloud, not on the device,
like FB Messenger. Enable account recovery using email in addition to sms and
enable usernames or email in addition phone number to add contacts. Thats
pretty much all you need to do to beat the competition thanks to your android
influence

~~~
mynameisvlad
Google Voice and Duo are not messaging apps. GTalk, Hangouts, and GMail Chat
are the same thing at different iterations and were therefore fully compatible
with one another.

If you're going to criticize Google for this, at least be correct when doing
it.

~~~
WhyNotHugo
No, GTalk was XMPP-compatible and federated, Hangouts was siloed.

So non-google XMPP users could speak to GTalk users, but not Hangouts users.

~~~
SamWhited
This was frustrating to say the least, if they'd just done a clean break it
would have been annoying, but at least we all (I was using a third party
client at the time) would have known what was going on, but they more or less
silently broke it, but ony some of the time, and then strung it out for ages.
I suspect it was a deliberate strategy to try and make the blame fall on the
shoulders of third party clients instead of them for cutting it off, but who
knows. I wish they'd just shut down the interop cleanly when they moved to
hangouts, it would have saved me a lot of pain and debugging early on.

------
polskibus
Long time ago, Google chat supported XMPP. Later on that support has been cut
off.

How do they expect people to trust this statement: "We don’t believe in taking
the approach that Apple does. We are fundamentally an open ecosystem. We
believe in working with partners. We believe in working with our OEMs to be
able to deliver a great experience,” ?

~~~
bb88
Because people want party parrots. And there isn't a standard to send party
parrots through XMPP. /s

Okay, a little snarky, but it makes a point. Chat programs have a lot of
proprietary features that won't translate through XMPP.

~~~
LaGrange
Pretty sure XMPP included extensions for sending arbitrary HTML and binary
attachments. Now, support for janky mobile connections, that's another matter.

~~~
SamWhited
XMPPs actually been really good at this for quite some time; despite XML being
a bit verbose, it compresses very well and it's had TCP like stream management
at the application protocol layer for ages, among other things. It was pretty
bad at low-bandwidth connections in the early 2000s, but now there are people
running it over _extremely_ low bandwidth high frequency radio, so a janky
phone connection is no problem.

------
galadran
No end to end encryption = no interest.

If I use this to communicate with a business (or person!), the carrier can
read every word. No thanks.

Hell. You can't even download the standards documents without giving GSMA a
name and address and consenting to receive promotional material...

~~~
lifthrasiir
Oh. Thank you for pointing that out. I thought that Allo supports E2E so will
chat, but that was my sloppy reading of The Verge article [1]:

> But, like SMS, Chat won’t be end-to-end encrypted, and it will follow the
> same legal intercept standards. In other words: it won’t be as secure as
> iMessage or Signal.

Dammit.

[1] [https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/19/17252486/google-
android-m...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/19/17252486/google-android-
messages-chat-rcs-anil-sabharwal-imessage-texting)

------
guessmyname
I am starting to believe that these "new chat projects from Google" are
actually all the same one with a different name to keep, whatever work they
are doing, alive.

I heard some time ago from the colleague who got an internship at Google that
they have to release a new project almost every 3 months and then fight
against other internal teams to do a public release. This way they — mostly
interns — can justify a full-time contract. At the same time, because these
projects also need a project manager, some high profile engineers help the
interns in order to get bonuses and also to justify a change of
responsibilities to, maybe, become full time engineering managers.

Whatever the story behind the chat re-brands is, many will agree with me that
this is becoming irritating.

------
49bc
> _Unlike Apple, RCS is designed to work with carriers who can develop their
> own messaging apps that work with the protocol_

No no no please. We should be doing everything we can to relegate carriers to
“dumb” data providers. They don’t have he skills or expertise to provide
anything beyond this, which they’ve demonstrated time and again.

------
dandare
I don't see a single reason to invest myself into Google messaging product
once again. I was adamant gtalk/hangout user but you can only fuck me over so
many times.

~~~
seabrookmx
To be fair, the migration from Talk to Hangouts was pretty smooth, and
Hangouts still works.

Google gave up pushing Hangouts for consumers but I don't think it's going
anywhere, as it's a big part of G-suite for corporate customers. Though with
Slack and Discord I'm sure it's usage isn't as strong as it once was.

~~~
stephenr
> the migration from Talk to Hangouts was pretty smooth

I take it you never used google talk via xmpp.

~~~
seabrookmx
I did actually. They kept the XMPP compat running for quite a while after, so
for me Pidgin and my old blackberry GTalk app kept working.

Eventually they shut it down though, but in an uncharacteristic move they gave
quite a bit of lead time.

------
ChuckMcM
For me, nothing demonstrates how self defeating Google's internal structure
is, than chat. They had a lot of adoption of their system in the early 2000's
(and granted it became unmaintainable but that was an engineering issue not a
technical issue) and they killed it. They had a great system they could have
copied (iMessage) and they ignored it. They had a standards friendly system
and they spurned it.

The combination of killing gchat and reader really struck me as "Wow, it feels
this company has no idea what they are doing strategically."

------
ibdf
They don't get it. People don't want new apps, they want improved versions of
the app they already have. It takes so much time to adopt and adapt to an
app... nobody I know uses Allo. I have a google phone and I don't use it,
because no one else uses. Allo has so many interesting features but I can't
use them if no one else uses the damn app.

I don't have an iphone nor want one, but they got it right when it comes to
building upon their core software. Same can be said to Windows/Microsoft. Yes,
they are not perfect, yes sometimes behind everyone else when it comes to "the
latest and greatest", but they have USERS! They know their audience and slowly
improve their apps to keep them happy enough to keep using it.

I can't believe a company this big with so many resources doesn't have an
attention spam greater than 6 months.

~~~
scottinseattle
By that definition, they do get it. Because RCS is an improved version of the
Messages inbox already in the phone. No need to take any time to adopt and
adapt to any new program.

------
tosh
Great example of how expensive it becomes over time to name (almost) every
product you create "Brand" \+ x.

Google is eroding trust in its product offering & regularly adding an adoption
handicap to their whole product portfolio.

P&G, Unilever et al know this. I'd expect the software companies to learn from
the challenges of the "supermarket"-era brands.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
The tradeoff:

\- Add "Google" before the name any product announcement, and it's sure to be
front page news[1].

\- Shutdown any product with "Google" before the name, and it's sure to be
front page news.

[1]You can especially see this effect when a random Googler publishes a random
project, but it's under github.com/google/ because it was done at work. Even
if it's not "a Google product", it'll shoot up to the top of HN.

------
Rjevski
RCS is shit. It’s a good idea in theory, but in practice it’s a crappy, over-
engineered clone of iMessage or WhatsApp without any of the good parts like
end to end encryption or spam protections.

It relies on the carriers to keep it functional and we all know this won’t end
well... given the robocall and SMS spam situation do you really think RCS will
be any different? But at least robocalls and SMS spam cant carry anything
besides plain text, while RCS could contain HTML and a lot more “active” stuff
which no doubt will exploit some bugs in the phone’s implementation to install
malware.

~~~
mtve
This is absolutely true.

And as has been said in other threads, Google Talk was the only sane strategy
for Google and it was lost.

------
blueside
Sometimes it's hard to believe that Google's course of action and decision
making to messaging isn't satire. I can't imagine what a dumpster fire must be
going on somewhere within, eventually I hope we get to hear the stories behind
their calamity of multifarious messaging products.

I'm not even being facetious when I say that they should include an estimated
date of when they expect to cease supporting said product (2 years seems to be
about right)

------
salimmadjd
If I was to summarize the problem of Google is this: Google does not hire
entrepreneurs.

They're great at hiring engineers. They're great at hiring MBAs from top
business schools. But their hiring process does not leave room for unusual
rouge entrepreneurial people.

I mentioned this to a person whose company was bought by FB and later became
an investor. He agreed and he said, he was interviewed by google but they
didn't hire him. So he started his company and a few years later sold it to
FB. I know this in anecdotal. But I think Google just lacks the
entrepreneurial blood. Someone to hustle a product with a cohesive strategy
and vision and finding the way to build it up and turn it into a massive
success.

~~~
mywittyname
I think the issue is they want too hard to be seen as entrepreneurs. They are
always reinventing the same products rather than just improving what they
have.

I'd go so far as to say, Google would benefit from a two-year ban on any new
product releases. Engineers should spend that time focused on adding value to
their current products.

------
hiven
Not only do they keep cancelling chat projects but this one isn’t even end to
end encrypted. What’s the point. Either release a superior product or just let
it go.

------
tallanvor
Can anyone explain why I should be interested in RCS, though? It seems like
it's more designed to let carriers try and stem the flow of customers
switching to other options, and I don't really see what benefits it offers me.

~~~
bb88
Years ago 1998ish(?), there was a fight to open up chat applications AIM, ICQ,
YIM, etc. We had to have 20 apps to chat with each other.

Fast forward 20 years, and here we are again, FB Messenger, Kik, WhatsApp,
Allo, Signal, Telegram, SMS, Slack, etc.

At least this appears to be a "standard" that everyone can use again.

~~~
bhaavan
[https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/) Relevant xkcd.

~~~
eloisant
I'm a bit tired of people pulling out this comic each time a new standard
appears.

Whatsapp, Telegram, FB, iMessages are NOT standards. They're closed systems
controlled by a single company.

XMPP is a standard from the days of ICQ, AIM, MSN, etc. Unfortunately it
failed.

SMS is a standard for mobile phone text communications. It's too limited now.

RCS is the evolution of SMS.

I don't think RCS is a redundant standard, it's a necessary evolution of SMS.
It's a standard for a decentralized system. I know Americans hate their
carriers to the point they'd rather have everyone's data in a single SV
company, but the solution is to fix your carriers. Not to give all your data
to a company (Facebook) that had been proved to be less than trustable about
it.

~~~
bb88
> Whatsapp, Telegram, FB, iMessages are NOT standards. They're closed systems
> controlled by a single company.

That's what the term "Defacto Standard" is for.

~~~
majewsky
Not really. A de-facto standard is when multiple implementations from multiple
parties agree on some behavior without it being described in a formal
specification. Whatsapp does not have multiple implementations from multiple
parties.

------
niftich
In my opinion, the strategy behind _this particular_ change is actually a lot
more clear than some of their past ones [1].

Allo didn't gain significant ground and failed to displace WhatsApp, so they
can't fight Facebook on that front. Instead, they've conceded the phonenumber-
as-indentity over-the-top-messenger market, and have pivoted to something more
fundamental: the humble SMS app, and SMS itself.

They're baking all their Google Assistant hooks into the default Android SMS
app, which will make it harder to avoid -- something Google definitely wants.
This way, they don't have to fight Facebook and WeChat and Viber and Telegram
on their competencies, because they've sidestepped them with the power of
defaults for some amount of users, which will be a problem for the competition
later on.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13465483](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13465483)

------
fauigerzigerk
Every time there is a choice to make for Google on messaging they predictably
make the wrong one.

How on earth can you control the most widely used OS on the planet and not be
able to capture some market share without handing more power to operators?

~~~
rrdharan
The (not-so-)secret is, they don’t control it.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
What exactly does Google not control that prevents them from pushing one high
quality messaging app that is independent of network operators?

What control do network operators have over Android?

Device and SOC makers do indeed have some control over Android. But that is
unrelated to Google's messaging mess.

------
pmlnr
So Google wants SMS to go the Gmail way... how about leaving existing, working
standards alone, google? You're already breaking email, which is bad enough.

~~~
kcmp
An article from the verge mentioned that people were moving away from texting
and are instead using services like imessage and fb messenger that restricted
carriers from controlling text messaging. Carriers could either change or they
could watch their control of texting slip away. This option satisfies the
desire of carriers to keep their control and google's desire to fix the
messaging experience on Android

~~~
numbsafari
... and nary a mention of users. I do think this is Google's biggest weakness.
They don't see the end-users of any of their products as their customers and
they don't seem to have developed the corporate infrastructure to start doing
that any time soon.

------
cryptos
I hope that this approach fails dramatically! Building such an infrastructure
without end-to-end encryption is a crime.

------
Corrado
I think RCS is a great idea and Google should be pushing it. In fact, I would
argue that few other companies could make it happen in a way that Google can.
RCS opens up a much larger world than a simple "chat" client does.

~~~
sdrothrock
> RCS opens up a much larger world than a simple "chat" client does.

How so? It's carrier-specific and thus limited to phones on carriers that
support it. What about international messaging, etc.?

One of the huge benefits of Hangouts is that I can chat with anyone anywhere,
phone or computer, America or Japan.

~~~
icebraining
I can send SMSs internationally, why not RCS? And you can send & receive SMSs
on a computer.

The real problem, in my opinion, is cost; Hangouts is free, SMSs aren't. And
it seems RCS is designed to be billed per-unit, following the model of the
latter.

~~~
eloisant
In France all carriers give unlimited free SMS. Is it not the case in other
countries?

~~~
dingaling
Not on pay-as-you-go in the UK, where you still pay for every message. 3p each
for my plan which doesn't seem much but I easily send over 100 e-mails and IMs
every day.

~~~
Chyzwar
Consider changing your plan. I am not paying SMS for a few years already. (in
the UK)

------
45h34jh53k4j
Hell no, Its like google has absolutely NO CLUE. The carriers are EVIL. You do
NOT want them to have visibility of your messaging data. I really cant believe
we are even discussing this in 2018. EVERY SINGLE MESSAGING PROVIDER WITH ANY
CLUE IS END TO END. Google 2018 -- hey lets get the carriers to implement a
clear text messaging protocol, surely after 30 years of abuse they wont mess
up this time. Pathetic.

------
mxuribe
Let me start by stating that i'm biased in favor of the matrix protocol...I
don't see why google doesn't simply adopt matrix as its protocol and build a
messaging client on top of that? Here are the benefits as i see them:

* The foundations of the basic matrix protocol are already built - so google can simply augment existing efforts and contribute to the project. And, they don't have to wrestle with carriers. (Any help for the matrix team seems to be good thing to me!)

* While, yes, most users wouldn't want to pay for such a chat service, google could tie this new chat service into their free gmail offering. I'm disgusted by my next statement, but i guess they could subsidize this for free users by displaying small text ads - just like in gmail - within the context of whatever matrix-compatible chat client they build.

* Plus, they can tie it into their Google Apps for business - or is it now called G suite? - and companies who DO pay for the greater G suite service will simply gain an additional enterprise messaging service which is similar conceptually to slack, and be available for enterprises as private server instances. Google could monetize this by adding a few cents to the monthly fees GSuite users already pay.

* By virtue of leveraging a decentralized/federated protocol like matrix - the users of google's matrix instances - either from the free or paid GSuite services - can STILL chat with users from other matrix server instances....not so differently in concept to gmail users emailing with non-gmail users. The cool thing about gchat back in the day was its support of xmpp, which i imagined help gchat's network effect...matrix could do the same here and now.

Maybe I'm missing something...but as smart as the people at google seem to be,
I'm constantly dumbfounded by their chat/messaging strategies. Ah, well.

------
throwaway899
I would really love that we all start using some open chat standard (Like
XMPP) so WhatsApp, Telegram, etc. could talk to each other.

Or something like email, you could have foo@whatsapp.com or foo@telegram.org
and that would be your 'chat address' and all clients could talk to each other

~~~
SamWhited
Even if it weren't federated (though I do miss Google Talk), there would still
be some value in using an open standard. If I can only afford a feature phone,
there are XMPP clients for it (or they can be developed relatively easily),
even if I don't get all the features. Using open standards, even if you don't
make the service open, still makes you more inclusive and helps a lot of
people who would otherwise be shut out of your service.

------
prepend
My cynical take. Phones are tied to identies and using google chat means that
real people are linked to all their google activity. That is a extremely
valuable for Google. So IM tied to phones is great for them.

GoogleTalk and chat that allows internet only is not very valuable to Google.

Since it’s trivial to have a chat protocol work well with carriers and
browsers and everything else, Occum’s Razor says Google did it for money. By
allowing anonymous accounts like gtalk and jabber and such, it makes their ad
pool worse. They could go freemium and just ignore those less valuable
accounts that aren’t tied to a phone. But instead save the 1000 engineer hours
or whatever to not have to support non-phone based chat.

------
mindcrime
So, after all this time, the best approach to interoperable messaging is still
XMPP. Google, carriers, etc. should just drop ALL of this non-standardized
crapola, bundle an (optimized, efficient, well-written) XMPP client with
Android and call it a day.

------
calypso
But I just convinced my wife to start using Allo...

------
satysin
SMS works because it is universal. RCS is just another network operator based
messaging service with some new features. Who the fuck wants that?!

What I want is a chat system that does _not_ rely on a mobile operator to
"enable" it and that works like e-mail (in that I can pick any own service
provider to store my messages, deliver them, etc.) and offers E2EE, etc.

It is 2018, we shouldn't be dealing with phone numbers for messaging when
everyone has a much easier to remember email address. Honestly iMessage would
be god damn perfect if it were open and you could use your own provider (or
run your own).

------
apeace
> WhatsApp benefitted from being a first mover — all the other early leaders
> in Western markets are nowhere to be seen today

Has Signal ever released numbers on active users? My anecdata on this is that
ALL of my friends use Signal--and not because I use it or because as their
tech-savvy friend I told them they should use it. I just started seeing them
show up in Signal over the last year.

I get the feeling that Signal may have a massive user base nobody really knows
about, because they don't publish these numbers. Anybody know?

~~~
Markoff
any chance most of your friends are males interested in IT?

though i was surprised or building manager and guy fixing my plumbing are on
Signal, only two other people besides those i convinced and one three friends
working in IT

------
Dawny33
Why isn't Google doubling down on marketing Allo on Android?

They already have a huge ecosystem in Android, which no other company other
than Apple has.

~~~
Arnt
What has Google ever really marketed?

Google's basic strategy seems to be to throw shit on the wall and see what
sticks.

~~~
enitihas
Google+ was heavily marketed though.

~~~
dannyw
And it didn’t work. What makes you think it’ll work this time?

~~~
majewsky
Chrome was also heavily marketed, and that worked just fine.

~~~
xab9
Because it's good. When firefox started slowly killing xul and the clusterfuck
called IE stopped being the top (rabid) dog, a new kid had to come along.

Google+ seemed like an afterthought, a way to create a facebook clone without
creating a facebook clone.

~~~
enitihas
Google+ was given the most importance of any project within Google as far as I
know.

~~~
chii
Politically, it's given importance, but users didn't see it that way, unlike
chrome.

It just goes to show that an exec pushing a project doesn't mean much when
it's a shit project.

------
owaislone
That's it. I'm giving up on Google chat products. I tried hard to use Allo and
get my friends to use but enough. We need a new XMPP like protocol that
prioritizes privacy, end-to-end encryption and supports all the fancy features
like stickers and video calls to make it easier to adopt. Does anything like
this exist?

~~~
selectodude
iMessage

~~~
owaislone
Is iMessage XMPP like open protocol?

~~~
SamWhited
iMessage _is_ XMPP isn't it (although a somewhat outdated version of the
protocol)? It was the last time I checked, but I don't have a device capable
of running it so that was a while ago. If it's not anymore I'd be curious to
know what they replaced it with.

~~~
owaislone
I did not know that. I thought it was a locked down messaging network on Apple
devices could get on (plus some SMS). Does that mean another service speaking
XMPP can exchange messages with an iMessage user?

Edit: According to Wikipedia, it's based on APNs.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMessage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMessage)

------
Zigurd
If it is RCS, it will be interoperable messaging, which is something the world
needs. But I rely on Hangouts and the fact that I can have calls to my Google
Voice number ring as a Hangouts voice call. I hope there is a reasonable
migration path that does not force me to give up important capabilities.

------
johnchristopher
> Microsoft is among the OEM supporters, which raises the possibility it could
> bring support to Windows 10, but the company was non-committal when The
> Verge pressed it on that possibility.

If windows phone is dead I suppose this would "just" enabled some kind of SMS
messaging on a win10 desktop ?

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Microsoft's been pushing Always Connected PCs, which, as far as I'm aware,
have SMS/MMS capabilities. But the rumored Surface Phone is also still on the
horizon with Windows on ARM, the whole foldable phone thing, etc.

Microsoft is not going to just give up on mobile, but they realized their
existing strategy wasn't working. (I think abandoning the share they did have
was a mistake, mind you, just like Google repeatedly dumping chat products.)

------
periferral
The problem with Allo and Duo and other "chat" tools google provided never
felt feature complete. If I'm on my mobile phone, I want one app to get
messages regardless if it comes from the carrier or my peeps on google.
Hangouts is the closest thing we have to this. Even hangouts doesnt fully
integrate. I'm a Fi user and when use apps that send text to verify, the
autoverify doesnt work with Hangouts as my default messaging app. It only
seems to work with Android Messaging app. These kind of half baked reasons are
why none of the google messaging apps really have taken off. I agree with the
past comment that Google had the opp to just improve on Google Talk and build
on it rather than create 6 different messaging apps.

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lanius
I'd love for this to get widely adopted if it can remove the pain points
around sending images through SMS/MMS. I have no confidence that recipients
ever actually receive the images I text them.

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skywhopper
This is weird but I have to assume it’s a political sop to the carriers to get
something from them. The PR is disingenuous of course, but I’m more
disappointed in the reporter for failing to mention a big advantage of
iMessage and a reason lots of people choose WhatsApp are because not only do
they provide a better experience than SMS but they are (at least they attempt
to be) secure. No federated messaging system that involves the carriers will
be end-to-end secure or provide easy syncing across clients.

------
flukus
Google is sick of missing out on all that data mining it can do in the private
messenger space.

When the worlds largest spyware company supports something you have to look at
why.

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wnevets
I miss google talk so much. Stupid fast and very clean UI.

------
arpit
Will this now now third party services will be able to send rich messages to a
phone number? This could be a good or a bad thing. I occasionally get random
messages from my carrier or ad spammers, not looking forward to them including
images or media in those.

On the flip side, if you are a startup, you would be able to send rich
messages to your clients without having to integrate Facebook messenger,
Whatsapp etc etc

------
bullen
SMTP is my bet, let’s dust off the old spam can!

[https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/19/17252486/google-
android-m...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/19/17252486/google-android-
messages-chat-rcs-anil-sabharwal-imessage-texting)

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sabujp
but does it use encryption?

~~~
praneshp
The verge puff piece about RCS specifically called out that messages are _not_
end to end encrypted.

~~~
geeostation
without end to end encryption. this is doa

~~~
majewsky
Except for 99% of users who sadly don't give a shit about E2E.

------
d3v4n5h
Check out this video by The Verge:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCh-
qRYMAKk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCh-qRYMAKk)

------
georgeecollins
Calling this a strategy is a stretch.

------
indigodaddy
Are there any chat/messaging alternatives in the dat/ipfs/beakerbrowser space?

------
Havoc
Don't think doing something different every month counts as a "strategy".

------
throwawaymacmac
I'm trying to be blunt here, thus the throwaway account. This has nothing to
do with Google's messenger strategy (they have none, or actually, they don't
really care), it's all about employees seeking promotions by releasing a
"influential" project with "impacts" to get promotions. Now all the promotions
are done, what's the incentive to keep it? Here's an idea, how about automatic
revocation of all promotions if your project is nixed within a year?

------
jg24
Will having a new standard kill companies like Twilio? How will it affect
them?

~~~
jg24
Twilio makes probably about half of their revenue from SMS

------
thrillgore
I'm disappointed but not surprised by this development.

------
toddh
Not git? That's so off trend.

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baybal2
Was it their 12th attempt? I think they have to think about finally changing
their product manager.

~~~
stevedonovan
Perhaps the problem is that they are _constantly_ changing their product
managers.

