Anybody have a good source on what the heck RCS is? I've never heard of it until now. I will google also, but I bet someone knows of an introduction they'd recommend.
RCS is the legacy telcos ongoing attempt to try to somehow get into the messaging game that all of the Internet-based communications app are doing (WhatsApp, FB Messenger, Line, Kik, Skype, iMessage, etc.).
Basically, they'd like all their SMS revenue back!
it is an attempt to standardize what whatsapp made popular: instant messaging with authentication based on phone number.
the spec even includes the big-brother way of you having to hand over your contacts to pair the phone numbers to other users that whatsapp sadly made the norm.
Wow, RCS seems pretty bad from a privacy standpoint.
The spec is available on the GSMA website [0]. The relevant section is 2.13.1.3 of "Rich Communication Suite 6.0 Advanced Communications Services and Client Specification Version 7.0-final draft" available in the specification ZIP.
TL;DR: Encryption seems to be included but for voice and video only. They have _deliberately_ compromised messaging security to be vulnerable to interception.
"SRTP [RFC3711] may be used to provide per message authentication, integrity protection and encryption for both RTP and RTCP streams involved in real-time video and voice sessions."
[...]
"[3GPP TS 33.328] defines two modes of operation for SDES/SRTP: e2ae (end-to-access edge) mode and e2e (end-to-end) mode."
"[...] the RCS client may try e2e [...]"
And:
<Basic description of the messaging protocol>
"When using MSRPoTLS, and with the following two objectives allow compliance with legal interception procedures, the TLS authentication shall be based on self-signed certificates and the MSRP encrypted connection shall be terminated in an element of the Service Provider network providing service to that UE. Mutual authentication shall be applied as defined in [RFC4572]."
There are a bunch of customers that are countries that have a tight hold on their telecom industry. Which I don't mean to offer as a justification, just as an observation that making allowances for "compliance with legal interception procedures" is not anything new for that industry.
Ick. I wish we could kill SMS/Whatsapp/Wechat/LINE already and just do everything over e-mail or some other cross-platform, multi-login protocol.
I hate being tied up to one device to message people. I change devices on the order of minutes, move over the course of a day between a few locations that all have devices I own, and don't regularly carry or look at my cell phone if I am already staring at something bigger (e.g. tablet/laptop/desktop/TV).
I enjoy e-mail/FB/skype/et al.'s ability to freely switch devices, switch OSes and continue your conversations extremely smoothly without any barriers. I want information to move with me, not with a silly phone.
"I wish we could kill SMS/Whatsapp/Wechat/LINE already and just do everything over e-mail or some other cross-platform, multi-login protocol."
That's an workable idea. What's needed first is to improve the transmission speed of short emails. I was once considering writing a mail forwarder for servers that don't have mailboxes, one that would open an outbound SMTP connection to the destination host before closing the incoming SMTP connection. The message would be forwarded immediately and the status code passed back to the inbound SMTP connection before closing. No mail bounces, ever. This would be the normal case for single-address emails that aren't too big and aren't tagged as spam. It's not essential to do it this way, but a mail server should not delay a short message more than 1 second.
Next, IMAP servers need to implement NOTIFY per RFC 5645. [1] This provides a push notification back to any interested mail client that new mail is available.
Mail clients can then treat emails like message conversations. Maybe using the "colored bubble" display UI on mobile, as with texting. A useful informal standard could be that single-recipient subject-only emails or no-subject emails get that display treatment.
That gives us texting with attachments for images using existing infrastructure. It could kill off a few unnecessary messaging services.
Greylisting kicks in only the first time; once a "channel" has been established and the participants send messages back and forth they should be on each other's whitelist
This could work really well with minor fixes. There are additional "enhanced status codes" available for SMTP that aren't used much. IMAP servers could return a new status such as "2.2.5", with meaning "Delivered, recipient notified". That would indicate an active NOTIFY connection between IMAP client and server. That means the client is listening right now and will display the message.
With "forward while connection is open" mail forwarders, that code would be passed back to the originating SMTP sender, which can then display an indicator in the bubble that the message has made it all the way to the recipient's device.
Now it looks just like messaging, but works over email infrastructure.
From the link: "Google is partnering with carriers and OEMs to offer a messaging client for Android that supports SMS, MMS, and RCS, and will be based on the universal profile. The client will be interoperable with any RCS-compliant client across any platform."
Wouldn't RCS deliver exactly what you're asking for?
Yes, but Google Voice is only available in the US. I have my Google Voice number forwarding to my e-mail which is nice. Of course, just actually using e-mail would be preferable. With e-mail I have one permanent address that hasn't changed in 15 years, and won't change anytime soon. Hangouts+SMS seems more like a bridge to the pre-mobile-internet era to me, a time when people were identified by a location-dependent number instead of an nice, worldwide alphanumeric identifier.
Nevertheless, a lot of operators/countries either don't have or don't want to allow these kind of gateways, for whatever reason. A purely IP-based solution would get around these restrictions.
"Yes, but Google Voice is only available in the US."
It would be more true to say: Google Voice only provisions US phone numbers. I have used my google voice number to make and receive calls and SMS messages from other countries. You CAN use it worldwide, it's only TCP/IP data after all.
Unfortunately, you can't count on MMS working if you send to a non-US carrier. But MMS is only good because of its de facto status, it's not the best option for any of its use cases.
At least now, Google only permits you to get a Voice number if you can prove you have another US number to forward to (they dial you to verify). Although I do have a US number, that's only because I happen to be working in the US right now; if I weren't I probably wouldn't.
Also a lot of apps in various other countries (notably China, because I'm familiar with it) do registrations via SMS, in which you need a +86 number in order to register, period. Smaller companies don't have the infrastructure to send international SMS verification numbers. Larger Chinese companies (e.g. Weibo, Wechat) permit registration with a US number, but they're larger companies who have servers in the US and infrastructure with US SMS gateways. So running around the world with a US number isn't always practical. If SMS is dethroned as a "de facto" communication method that everyone is expected to have, this might change. Other places besides China may also have a similar situation.
Ah that's true, apologies I forgot. Agreed that a pure IP solution would be ideal. There are some serious technical challenges to getting a true IP solution working well, esp with regards to security, privacy and scalability, but the real problem is encouraging mass adoption.
The UI shows several user accounts that you have to keep switching. it is a total nightmare.
then, the worst offense, you have absolutely no idea if you send a message to someone, if it will go via hangouts http IM message or via SMS. you have zero control/feedback from the UI. The ONLY way to know, is to create contacts with just email address and others with just phone numbers. and even then, sometimes it will go via hangouts IM when you send to a phone number-only contact.
the separation between an app for first class SMS (and nothing else) and google voice (for google voice) was the right choice and it still works.
DO NOT pair gvoice to hangouts. you've been warned.
When I'm using it I have a drop down next to where I send the message that lets me select sms or hangouts that seems to work as expected. I can choose which number to send to or to send a hangout. Maybe it's been a while since you tried it? I vaguely remember having problems like that in the past.
I respect your opinion about separate apps for sms/messages, but I personally don't believe that was the right choice. I strongly prefer having one app to use over switching all the time.
nope. have to use it daily as my main number is gVoice. sadly.
no dropdown whatsoever. Also to dial via gvoice you need a hangouts dialer addon, and everytime you last selected sms on hagouts and select to dial with the dialer addon, it complains that the sms account can't dial.
Google Voice w/ SMS in Hangouts might fit your use case. I've never tried it with multiple cellphone numbers so I can't say how well it handles that. It does send from your Google Voice number so in theory it should be able to deliver message sent to you to multiple devices and keep your sent messages in sync. I know my sent messages appear just fine in multiple phones and on the web interface.
Better it works pretty seamlessly for people not using it because it just appears to come from a regular phone number to them. They just have to have that number also entered in their phone. That's one of the major hurdles to having a good replacement for SMS is that if it doesn't integrate into normal SMS there's a friction if Alice doesn't have a phone that can use the fancy new SMS replacement that Bob and Carol are hooked on.
Hadn't heard about it. Just checked it out, and it looks interesting. Unfortunately, due to network effects and my social circle, 99% of the people I know pretty much only use either Wechat, Facebook, or e-mail, but I look forward to seeing something disrupt this space with something better, more functional, cross-platform, and multi-login.
It would be killer if Telegram could interoperate with at least 1 or 2 of the other services, which would allow it to ramp up adoption. Unfortunately Wechat is very insistent about not allowing 3rd-party applications to use their messaging protocol, and Facebook seems to have closed their XMPP interface as well. I would guess Whatsapp probably has the same attitude.
In this respect I really, really miss the days of Pidgin and those other similar applications which used to be able to put MSN/ICQ/AIM/QQ/Yahoo/Zephyr all on one interface. That seems impossible with the state of mobile apps now.
You can try what my friend did, he kept spamming our old whatsapp chat with invitations to telegram until we all switched. A few of us, me included, we very reluctant to switch and held out for a while saying that whatsapp is great. Once I downloaded telegram and gave it the time of day though, I turned to love it in the course of a day and now I can't even understand how anybody uses whatsapp anymore. I could go on and list all the reasons why it's better, but I think it's simpler just to say that it's better on every front and feature(except no wifi calling, yet), and even has more features to offer than whatsapp.
I once thought we migrated most of the instant messaging world to Jabber. Now on the desktop side of things a lot of stuff switched to Hipchat, Slack, Skype and what else.
On the mobile side of things we see WhatsApp, Threema, Telegram, Signal, Facebook with now some RCS thrown in between.
Feels like we're back at the end of the 90s. And now fighting on two fronts for open networks. :(
The only communication that stayed open all the time seems to be IRC and email.
> In this respect I really, really miss the days of Pidgin and those other similar applications...
Given that -AFAIK- Signal documents its protocols, I expect that there will be Pidgin support for it not long after the Signal desktop client moves out of population-limited beta and is officially released.
But yeah. It's a goddamn crying shame that this new crop of devs have decided to not only reinvent Instant Messaging, but to do it in such a way that leaves us back in the same situation we were in in the 1990's. [0]
That wheel keeps turning and periodically crushes us all, I guess.
[0] Of course, one could do the very same thing that was done back in the 1990's and reverse engineer the new wave of chat protocols. We still possess general purpose computers that can be used to snatch the plaintext of conversations that they're a party to that are sent over encrypted channels.
As a long-time SMS user, getting widespread RCS support is the biggest future mobile phone innovation I am looking forward to.
SMS is wonderful because you can send a message to any mobile phone user regardless of their nationality, operating system, hardware, carrier, etc. However it has a few major flaws: cost, speed, lack of group messaging, limited multimedia support.
The shortcomings of SMS have fueled the rise of IP messenger apps like WhatsApp, Line, WeChat, Hangouts, and iMessage. These all have the features we want, but their major flaw are arguably even more severe: total lock-in and lack of interoperability. Once you have a majority of your communication networks on one of those protocols, you become dependent on a single for-profit company for your communication. Look at what happens to iOS users trying to switch to Android: iMessage blocks their communication for months afterward.
RCS will give us all the benefits of iMessage or WhatsApp but without being locked in to a single company's network or having to get all of your friends/family to adopt one or the other.
You have these problems with carriers as well. They're technically interoperable but they hit you with prohibitively expensive rates if you try to do anything international. Carriers are also effectively government-controlled monopolies or biopolies in a lot of places so users end up locked-in anyway.
> lack of interoperability
Again, you have these problems. Yes, phones are interoperable with phones, but they're not interoperable with anything else. IP-based messaging apps have the potential for phones to interoperate with computers, tablets, VR googles, smartwatches, and whatever else you want (although not all do at the moment -- Wechat and Whatsapp suck in particular -- but at least they have the potential, and some actually do interoperate with non-phone devices -- such as Facebook and Hangouts).
Phones may not necessarily be the center of everything 10 years down the road. I'd rather the freedom to innovate be with the software companies, not the operators of one particular infrastructure.
> You have these problems with carriers as well. They're technically interoperable but they hit you with prohibitively expensive rates if you try to do anything international.
And very poor transparency on those short codes... I once got some extra charges, because of a shortcode (it was actually Yahoo!) I happened use was international. (No way to tell that by the number alone.) It was surprising to hear from the carrier I didn't have any way to block international text, too.
Here's irony for you: basic text messaging is almost free to the carriers, because it actually happens on the cellular protocol's control channel. [1] Your phone maintains that connection persistently (I think), so fitting SMS messages into idle time makes it virtually free. The SMS cost is just a profit center for carriers, but this explanation also accounts for the speed of delivery, etc.
> Look at what happens to iOS users trying to switch to Android: iMessage blocks their communication for months afterward.
It used to, but Apple built a "deregister my number" page that'll be able to unlock that within a matter of minutes.
1 - yes that is a major issue with SMS and why SMS use is in such sharp decline. I doubt the carriers will make the mistake of pricing RCS like SMS or they'll never get to break into messaging again.
2 - the iMessage to Android experience is still broken in many other ways. For instance if you were in any long-running group messages that were iMessages, your messages will be silently dropped until the thread is re-created explicitly.
2 - That sounds 100% expected. There is no such thing as a group message between iMessage and SMS/MMS. That is readily apparent the moment someone adds a non-iMessage identifier to a new group message. You're asking that the group iMessage experience degrade because you left. That sounds selfish to me.
> Here's irony for you: basic text messaging is almost free to the carriers, because it actually happens on the cellular protocol's control channel.
The airtime is basically free (although, if send/receive volume is high, this ends up with more of the control messages sent than would have been with an idle phone), but routing and storing the messages in transit isn't. Also, a lot of carriers have contracted out their SMS systems and are paying their contractors per message. Everybody charges everyone else for SMS between carriers as well.
Given the clusterfuck between Hangouts and Messenger, and the painful process of getting Google Fi to work with shortcodes, I have little confidence in Google getting texting right. I want to be proved wrong, but I am not liking their track record here.
all of the messaging apps WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat etc are terrible in that they owe a lot of their rise due to users lack of comprehension of sms vs IP and carrier lockin etc etc.
However - google and messaging is just a messy, and they're pushing this now? How about sort out your Messenger and Hangouts mess and get all of that consolidated
Is this why Hangouts recently started advertising the Google Messaging app instead of the opposite? For the longest time, I was using Messaging but Google kept pushing me to Hangouts.
Another version of MMS so carriers can charge per message and organize paid scam services with ringtones and "RCS dating chats"? They're living in 2001.
Of note: Project FI has been plagued with short SMS issues for the past year. Some are reporting that this has been fixed, but does concern me if Google is going to get into this space.
I'm saying this as someone who is a Android advocate and developer.
Guessing they fixed it–I've been a Fi user for the past month and haven't noticed any issues, if anything it's been way faster and more reliable than VZW since it goes over wifi now.
It's fixed for me but I definitely had the issue when I was onboarded. It's because I came from T-Mobile, so they had to "reset" the account and then everything was good to go.
I had the exact same experience coming from T-Mobile as well. No issues after the reset and enjoying the service so far, especially when I travel internationally.
I had a bunch of shortcode issues too -- contacted support and they gave me some canned 'its an smpt gateway issue, we cant fix'. Checked online and found that that is incorrect, called support again and linked the support forum discussions and they escalated me to a tech who reset something -- I have since received shortcode texts.
This is a clear move against WhatsApp? With Jibe, Google is going for the kill, 'cause WhatsApp just went life-time free for everyone with an eye on earning revenue from their enterprise APIs.
Depending on the contract they do. Often enough it's the GSM modem paging someone for alarms that holds a SIM with some old corporate contract that has no flatrate. And you'd violate the contract if you exchange it for some private contract SIM with all inclusive SMS.
Yes, every mobile phone operator in the UK charges for SMS and MMS if you're PAYG user. Users on contracts typically get 1000s of free SMS per month, but I'm not aware of any contracts that have inclusive MMS.
