> Right now, when people on iOS and Android message each other, the service falls back to SMS — photos and videos are sent at a lower quality, messages are shortened, and importantly, conversations are not end-to-end encrypted like they are in iMessage.
They will still not be end-to-end encrypted in RCS. They will just be encrypted in transit, but your carrier (or whoever is running whatever server in an RCS architecture) can read all your messages.
There is talk that Google's got some kind of extension that adds E2EE to RCS but others will be well informed on it and can add to my message.
I'm blissfully happy with iMessage. For the non-Apple people, we've been using WhatsApp for nearly a decade.
But what does this do for OTP messages, etc? I'll have to check if Twilio automatically uses RCS if you send a message to a supported number. I do like the idea of all messages being encrypted in transit at least (SMS is not).
> There is talk that Google's got some kind of extension that adds E2EE to RCS but others will be well informed on it and can add to my message.
It’s not just talk, but it’s locked down. Google’s huge PR campaign backing RCS has been very impressive at getting people to conflate the two but basically they have an RCS extension implementing the Signal protocol which theoretically could be implemented by anyone but it depends on Google’s key exchange servers which are restricted to their own proprietary app – even third-party Android developers are blocked.
It’s a PR masterwork, really. They’re honest on the technical white paper:
> E2EE is implemented in the Messages client, so both clients in a conversation must use Messages, otherwise the conversation becomes unencrypted RCS. In rare situations where the conversation starts as E2EE, then one of the clients migrates to a different RCS client or an older Messages client that does not support E2EE, Messages might be unable to detect the change immediately. If the Messages user sends a new message, it’s still E2EE, however the recipient client may render the encrypted base64 payload directly as message content.
They even had one of the most popular messaging apps 15 years ago - I remember when iMessage launched and people were predicting it’ll fail because GTalk was so popular. The mismanagement is just epic - so many botches trying to build something new (or make Google+ happen) because apparently nobody gets promoted for good stewardship of a product they didn’t start.
Google Talk supported XMPP so I could connect via Pidgin. I could also message myself on Facebook from my Gmail thanks to GTalk supporting this ;) which was fun. Then they locked it down (both FB and Google). Then there was Google Plus Huddle, Google Hangout, Duo, Google Allo, and Google Chat.
You also had Google Voice, Google Wave... and so on.
There was a point where Google had a good quality alternative to iMessage. Hangouts was popular and had features comparable to iMessage. Google also allowed setting Hangouts as the default SMS app so you could have mixed Hangouts and SMS conversations, just like in iMessage. Unfortunately, they then killed the SMS functionality after a few years and decided to convert Hangouts into an enterprise communication app.
Everyone I knew was on Hangouts pretty much. I don't know how or why Google squandered that opportunity. They split it out into Alo and Duo, and Duo became pretty popular but no one touched Alo. Then they switched Duo to Google Meet and lost many people again. Now most people I know just use Facebook Messenger for WhatsApp for personal video calls
They are capable, they have even arguably done it a few times over the last 15 years. They don't want to.
Google wants your messages to feed their ad serving, which is their actual business. Messaging is just the crap they give away to feed their ad serving revenue machine.
Technically Google Messages is E2E encrypted, provided you stay one the happy path, which is harder than it looks, since they don't allow anyone but themselves to play in the happy path.
They've had a few good messaging apps that were then left to rot and slowly break before being killed. GTalk was pretty solid and Hangouts was amazing at launch. But they all got worse over time instead of better.
They tried to push one years and years ago (combining SMS with one of their existing non-SMS messaging services) and I had to manually upgrade back to the prior version of their messaging app to get anything to work properly again, including SMS. Total disaster, broken as hell.
When I switched to iOS, that experience gave me a special appreciation for how smoothly iMessage/Messages works.
> When I switched to iOS, that experience gave me a special appreciation for how smoothly iMessage/Messages works.
But that's selective recall too - for YEARS iMessage was horrible. You had an iOS device but no longer? Good luck getting any of your friends messages who were still on iOS.
Apple ended up having to build a portal just to allow users to properly de-register their numbers from iMessage so they could receive messages from Apple users again.
It’s not. My actual experience was that basic, happy-path usage of Google’s effort failed at such a high rate that I couldn’t use it for anything. It was too unreliable.
Happy-path use of Messages, when I switched, was much smoother.
I haven’t tried to switch from iOS to Android so I don’t have that experience to recall.
To build something 1:1 with iMessage, there'd need to be a market the Pixel has a large share of. For something like FB, they tried with G+. And WhatsApp had first mover advantage.
They had other messaging apps that were maybe ok, but I've never known anyone who used them, and whoever did was thrown off when they made 999 other apps.
The end-to-end encryption is a client feature. It will work with any RCS provider that implements Universal Profile, as long as both clients are using Google Messages.
> Messages from Android phones show up as green bubbles in iMessage chats, and chaos ensues.
This is not true -- messages from Android users show up as grey, the same as messages from iMessage. Messages from you *TO* Android users show up as green. I don't know why people keep getting this wrong.
That's why it's always a pain to figure out why a group chat is showing up green all of a sudden; you can't tell who brought the Android to the party.
> That's why it's always a pain to figure out why a group chat is showing up green all of a sudden; you can't tell who brought the Android to the party.
Or as the rest of the world would describe it: That's why it's always a pain including Americans in a group chat – they usually don't have WhatsApp :)
I’m Dutch and so live in a WhatsApp world. Still I lobbied my family hard to keep our family group in Messages. Reason being that we often share photos, and nothing ruins a nice photo as much as the insane compression and low resolution that WhatsApp applies.
There's an option to send images in higher resolution these days.
I personally dislike getting full-resolution images in iMessage by default and wish there was an option to manually request the full-res one (the sender could just upload two versions, or maybe a progressively compressed one). It seems like the worst of both world (in that it still wipes metadata from the photos, last time I checked, making them annoying to save in my photo library).
As you’ll know when dealing with non-tech family, if it’s not the default it doesn’t exist But yes your idea of sending a low res placeholder and only downloading the full res on click sounds elegant.
I'm not saying the rest-of-world status quo is ideal or even desirable; I'd also much prefer an open and federated network, or at least interoperability.
But what I wanted to highlight is that SMS/MMS and generally carrier-based messaging is just as much of a weird communication island at this point as all of these OTT messengers are, from a non-US point of view.
RCS would just be a continuation of that, so I'm not sure if it's worth cheering on Apple for taking this path, further cementing Google's hold on Android messaging in the US – they run almost all the infrastructure and get all the message content, after all!
It’s not the messages I worry about so much — it’s the contacts.
I can’t use WhatsApp because on iOS it asks for access to your contacts, which I refuse to give. (Facebook already burned me once, there.) So in WhatsApp, all my contacts show up as numeric phone numbers, and there’s no way to change that, so it’s basically useless to me.
It's not discrimination to say "the message you just sent is green because it went over SMS (and now RCS) and we can't verify the E2E encryption, deliverability, etc like we can with iMessage".
In my view, it starts being a problem as soon as people start complaining about the person "causing" said lack of functionality, rather than the companies at fault for it. (Everybody who believes that unencrypted RCS, after a literal decade, is the best these two giants could come up with is deluding themselves.)
I'm fortunately too old to ever have experienced this myself, but so I have to rely on others' observations for this.
That said, I wouldn't quite call it "discrimination" yet, but it's certainly uninformed, targeted at the wrong entity, and on top of that is at least a bit icky given the quite large difference in retail pricing of iPhone and Android smartphones.
Why the past tense? Every US iPhone user can install a third-party messenger on their phone today if they wanted to!
The reality is just that people only install new apps if the preinstalled ones don't do the trick, or at least only if most of their friends already have too.
So in my view, the entire problem is that apparently no regulator has been considering it a problem for the better part of a decade that Apple is effectively running half of the country's communication infrastructure without being regulated anywhere close to the way landline or mobile carriers are from a competitive and interoperability point of view.
But this seems to already be changing; Apple definitely didn't implement RCS out of their strong desire for openness and interoperability. I just wish they'd picked a better protocol/system.
I don't want to use a third-party messenger app because I don't want to deal with separate apps, and none of them are very good anyway. FB Messenger is close, but it doesn't work well with non-"friends".
On the large scale, I agree. We have telecom regulations for good reasons.
Maybe you don't, and I respect that, but I wanted to push back on GP seemingly responding on behalf of all Americans, somehow ("we prefer to keep our messages out of the hands of Facebook" is evidently not true).
It really degrades the experience and often does really wonky things, like delivery 3/4 the messages to 3/4 of the people. Happens nearly every time in a decently sized group text for my friend group.
I don’t know if that’s Google’s, Apple’s, RCS’s, or SMS’s fault.
Is it not an option to use one of the many free OTT messengers such as Signal or WhatsApp that offer the same user experience as iMessage, but work for both major mobile OSes, and as an additional bonus don't depend on 30 year old brittle protocols (looking at MMS here) and don't hand over your entire conversation history to your carrier?
I spent my entire youth convincing people to move to platforms like signal, and including signal, that would then be used by said people only to talk to me, until they had some UX problem and I became tech support for them
after many years of this I gave up and now I use the default: SMS
I don't doubt that, and have heard it several times from other people as well.
Sometimes I think that keeping SMS and especially MMS ridiculously expensive was the greatest unintentional gift European mobile network operators could have ever given their customers:
People now just accept OTT messaging as a fact of life, and enough people will be able to provide that type of tech support, just like they'd fix a parent's or friend's internet connection in case of problems.
The problem with such messaging services is that they aren't universal. You have to find out and install what others are using, and then remember which service is used by which person. That's really the thing that makes OTT services undesirable to me.
SMS/MMS, for all of its myriad faults, is something you know that everyone has.
Yeah, whoever pushes this is way more annoying than whoever makes the bubbles green. Just one group chat I'm in uses Signal for some reason. People often miss messages cause it silently deprecates old versions. And nobody has verified each others' secret numbers anyway, so after all that work someone did to secure our bar plans, we might be mitm'd anyway.
E2EE apps have inherent UX problems. It's possible to do multi-device messaging with synchronized message history and a way to get in if you lose your codes, but it requires trusting the service and/or your cell carrier in some capacity. Something has to give if you want E2EE, usually it's the chat history or multi-device support.
WhatsApp didn't have multi-device support until mid 2023. I'd have to see exactly how it works now, cause it raises more questions. If you can rely on users remembering passphrases (no recovery mechanism), it makes chat history easier, even then I wonder if it knows how to merge divergent chat histories if one device misses messages. iCloud/GDrive storage is another moving part but also nice in case you want to download/copy it. Would be neat also if contacts could be stored that way, cause I ain't sending them to WhatsApp.
The only major app I've seen handle everything 100% reliably is FB Messenger, since the start, which was easy because there was no e2ee. Just a server-side master with simple web and mobile clients using it.
SMS is bad, but at least I can send/receive it on my Mac without my iPhone being online, idk how.
> WhatsApp didn't have multi-device support until mid 2023.
I think it was 2020, but in any case, it was very late. To be fair, it is quite hard to do securely and without compromising too much on usability with end-to-end encryption.
> even then I wonder if it knows how to merge divergent chat histories if one device misses messages.
There's one primary device (I think it has to be a phone) that maintains the "source of truth" message database and also does the backups, I believe.
> SMS is bad, but at least I can send/receive it on my Mac without my iPhone being online, idk how.
Are you sure? Does this work with the iPhone completely off (i.e. not just on mobile data, because it does proxy SMS to iMessage in that case)?
I didn't think that was possible. Only very few operators even allow voice calls via FaceTime (without proxying the audio data through the iPhone via local Wi-Fi), but maybe they extended that to SMS over IMS recently. I can't test it with mine in any case, since my provider/plan is not on that short list.
I think 2020 was the beta. They announced the full feature in 2023, and I see a 2022 article about enabling the beta. Primary device SoT makes sense, but that has its caveats, and yeah it all goes back to the privacy guarantees.
> Are you sure?
Nope, I was wrong. I must've been thinking about how the SMS forwarding will work even without cell service, provided the iPhone is on wifi, which was a new feature at some point and requires carrier support (AT&T was early).
"To automatically forward SMS/MMS messages to one or more of your other devices, the other device must be signed in with the same Apple ID as your iPhone, and your iPhone must be connected to a Wi-Fi or cellular network."
I suspect that something's slightly off with Apple's SMS implementation. People often complain about lost CSM chunks that were sent to them from iOS devices. Of course lost messages can happen anywhere, SMS is inherently not reliable, but the frequency with which they point to the other device being an iPhone raises my eyebrows.
One-on-one SMS was mostly fine, but group SMS was a constantly-buggy mess back when I was on Android, too.
I wouldn’t be surprised if SMS experience has more to do with carriers and with the details of the network topology and composition between correspondents, than with phone vendor.
There's no such thing as group SMS. Your phone either sends multiple SMS messages, or uses something else than SMS (usually MMS). I'm talking about SMS specifically, as CSM chunks aren't relevant to anything else.
My assumption is that iOS somehow manages to lose some SMS messages when sent in rapid succession more often than it would happen for usual reasons.
That is mostly SMS fault. It doesn't guarantee reliable delivery either in theory or practice, and the carrier will happily drop messages if a resource limit is exceeded. Essentially all of the IP-based chat protocols are reliable, whether that is WhatsApp or iMessage.
It absolutely guarantees reliability on the protocol level. If mobile network operators are load-shedding, that's on them.
I've never experienced this in decades of using GSM, and it's only recently become a thing (mostly for 2FA SMS since I stopped using it for P2P communication).
> Message delivery is "best effort", so there are no guarantees that a message will actually be delivered to its recipient, but delay or complete loss of a message is uncommon, typically affecting less than 5 percent of messages.
That's SMS's fault and partly the reason the rest of the world moved on, it's old and janky and you never know when it works, just use Whatsapp like everyone else in most of the world.
I blame apple for this. Basically forces me to use WhatsApp or something. Otherwise I'll not receive some messages or some people won't get mine. It's pretty confusing when trying to nail down plans.
Because often times the Android phone won't even do group SMS properly, and it screws everything up. You start getting messages that some other group members didn't. Maybe this is why a lot of Android users use WhatsApp, and that's what I do with my in-laws.
I know when my parents(on iphone) share an image with me(on android), the image is about 64x64 pixels. Whereas they send the same image to my brother on an iPhone and it is multiple megapixels...does the same kind of downgrading happen for everyone if a single person on a group chat is using android? That could be a reason to find out who it is.
It depends on the combination of the sender's and the receipient's carrier, specifically on what their MMS server allows.
MMS is a hot mess of a protocol stack straight from the early 2000s that is only still meaningfully used in the US, due to the unique iMessage situation there.
The big one for me is image quality and metadata. Images shared in "mixed company" are lower quality and have the metadata stripped; it's not dissimilar to being sent a screenshot of a picture instead of the picture itself. It's not a big deal for "Look at how big the kids have gotten!" but if I go on a hike or beach trip with friends or family, and there's something they took that I care about, I have to say "Great thanks for sending but can you upload it somewhere else," usually Google Photos, and go through that whole dance.
Devil's advocate: that was an intentional design choice to incite even more user hate against Android users and build Apple cult mentality. Users will subconsciously assign the blame for their frustration of figuring out who the Android user is, to the Android user, rather than to Apple who is the real culprit.
Hard for me to see Google as the good guys in this RCS situation when Google Chat is separate from Messages and Google Voice is almost totally neglected.
That’s cuz they’re not. Nobody is. RCS is a crap standard, but it is a crap standard that the PRC, one of Apple’s larger markets, is requiring in new handsets going forward (something that The Verge reporter overlooked). I’m still curious what the compatibility story even is given Google has their own encryption standard but Apple is sticking to the GSMA spec and in their original announcement said they were going to be working with the GSMA to improve the security and privacy and all the carriers seem to just use Google’s software to run the backend.
Do you have an article on this? This is interesting news to me. Here I was thinking "oh, the big stink Google made about Apple not supporting RCS must have actually moved the needle."
But if it's simply a legislative requirement, there's no mystery. That must be why.
That's interesting, because that's not exactly what the Chinese text says. It just says vendors need to implement 5G standards.
The reddit translation interprets "relevant industry standards for 5G messages" as including RCS. I'm unfamiliar with this, but apparently GSMA claims that "the 5G standards mandate the implementation of RCS in 5G networks and devices". ( https://www.gsma.com/solutions-and-impact/technologies/netwo... )
So if I'm reading this correctly, any vendor who claims to have 5G support needs to implement RCS?
Unfortunately I can’t read the original text myself but the machine translation I looked at used the phrase “5G messages” so I interpreted what the Redditor was doing as providing clarification as to what that is in context (“RCS”). Per the document you pulled up, I can see why it would just be called 5G Messaging or something like that, not technically true, but may as well be true as I didn’t realize the GSMA had also mandated it for what they’re calling their “Universal Profile”.
> Operators are free to decide whether or not to implement RCS within their 4G networks. However, the 5G standards mandate the implementation of RCS in 5G networks and devices.
Given this, I'm amazed it took a roundabout detour into Chinese mobile phone regulations to arrive at the conclusion that apparently GSMA mandated RCS for 5G...
> Apple is sticking to the GSM spec and in their original announcement said they were going to be working with GSM to improve the security and privacy
One of the aspects of RCS that was supposed to be a feature but turned into a problem is the spec supports varying profiles which include a bunch of different capabilities. The GSMA publishes a "Universal Profile" with a base set of features but notably absent is E2EE.
Google runs their own RCS infrastructure that Android phones can use but not all do. It becomes a shit show when a Google RCS user sends a message to a carrier RCS user. While they might get the nice RCS features, the conversation is not E2EE since the carrier doesn't/can't implement Google's custom RCS profile with E2EE.
If Apple hosts their own RCS infrastructure they could make a custom profile allowing E2EE between Apple RCS users but not between Apple and Google or Apple and a carrier. Unless the GSMA includes E2EE in the Universal Profile and gets carriers to actually implement it, RCS is just MMS with better quality.
RCS is such a crap standard, it is very much the sort of standard you'd expect from telecom carriers. There's no E2EE built into the core service and its use requires a SIM. Sender verification is also limited to business messaging so there's no inline mechanism to verify messages from normal users.
I worked with the IMS (the standard on which the RCS standard is based) in grad school and the best article I read on it was called something like : "IMS, a useless subsystem"
Shh, don't mention Google Voice or they might remember it exists and kill it. I can't think of a Google service that's been more useful in my life, and hate to think what I'll have to do when they kill it.
How is that relevant? Text messages have historically (and technically) been separated from standalone chat applications, so it makes perfect sense that Google Chat is separate from Messages.
On the contrary, merging the two is a "bad guy" move since it causes vendor lock-in (case in point, Apple).
I hope the wider adoption of RCS will mean Google opening it up to other messaging clients on Android. If only because it'd be nice to fall back to something, anything, a bit better than SMS (most of my regular contacts use Signal these days). I just don't want to be locked into Google's client.
I hope RCS will never be widely adopted. It's bad technology, and despite what Google says, it's not carrier-based:
Google runs almost the entire show (since carriers can't be bothered to actually run RCS servers) and gets effectively all messages sent over it in plaintext, unless you happen to use Google's "Messages" app, which is the only one capable of end-to-end encrypting messages (using a centralized key sever run, you guessed it, by Google)!
Google Talk was honestly better than this on literally every metric, and additionally didn't tie everything to a phone number as an identifier.
I feel the same. I feel like I remember years ago, when RCS was first being implemented, Google said they would open the APIs so any texting app could use RCS. RCS is the reason I stopped using Textra and moved to Google Messages. Textra did say at one point they would integrate the RCS APIs when it was opened, but nothing has happened yet.
they still do white text on a lime green background despite every accessibility guidance to the contrary. if I used white text on a lime green background at my job I would be reprimanded. this is malicious compliance.
Before iMessage, they used the green bubbles for SMS. So unless Apple was planning a long con, they believed the green bubbles were fine for their customers for years, and switched to a new color (blue) when iMessage came about.
For some reason reading this, I didn't believe you, and imagined "black text on green bg" to be very ugly, but you're totally right. There's the classic look we remember. Hmm.
Yeah it’s also where bookmark, find, print, sharing, and a ton of other stuff are. It’s not like it’s some menu nobody ever looks at, it’s an entirely normal place for something like that to be based on what else they’ve put there.
Would you not be reprimanded for white text on a cyan background?
That is the alternative on iMessage.
The bubble is not blue.
Edit: to be fair the text is also not "white"
The approximate (sRGB) color codes are:
"green" #39ff5a (57,255,90)
"white" #fdfdfd (253,253,253)
"grey" #d8d8d8 (216,216,216)
"blue grey" #aeb9cc (174,185,204)
"blue" #218aff (33,138,255)
All the contrasts are terrible, but clearly a marketing decision.
WebAIM Contrast Checker says the standard green/white and blue/white combos both fail by default, so you're sort of right, but, details...
> "green" #39ff5a (57,255,90) ...
This list of colors is both inaccurate and very inaccurate.
In fact, there is not one single green (or blue) color in iMessage, and anyone who says there is is mistaken.
1. The bubble colors show in a gradient from the bottom of the screen (newer messages have more contrast) to the top of the screen (older messages have less contrast). The standard green at the bottom for the newest message is measured with the macOS built-in digital color meter from a screenshot taken on my iPhone is [51,199,89]. The standard green at the top is [56,228,100].
2. The OP is just being foolish on the internet. Enabling the increased contrast accessibility mode in iOS settings turns the green at the bottom into a dark forest which very easily passes for anyone who actually needs it and isn't just talking out of their ass on the internet to bash iPhones without having used one.
> to be fair the text is also not "white"
macOS digital color meter says the text is white [255,255,255].
Thanks, I agree about the accessibility setting. I know the iPhone at least doesn't actually use sRGB so the numbers are bound to be a bit off, but I'm surprised it's that far off.
Also, I'd note for modern iOS even just in dark mode the writer is in "black/white", while it's your own messages that are "blue" or "green" depending on whether its RCS so readability is less of an issue.
iOS supports increasing color contrast for anyone who wants it, and whining about iMessage bubble colors while ignoring that fact is doing the world a huge disservice.
For your own messages that you wrote and sent, not anyone else’s, and the contrast lower down on the screen is fine, it’s only at the top of the screen when it’s doing the fade-to-indicate-you-can-scroll-for-more thing that it runs afoul of contrast minimums.
1) The examples in those screenshots are way lower contrast than my actual messaging app on the real device. Maybe it wasn’t that bad when they did the calculations, but it’s not a great sign.
2) The author believes Android users’ messages show up green, so I wonder if they’ve ever even used an iPhone.
3) The messages are in fact not hard to read and you can crank up contrast system-wide if that or anything else gives trouble (and if these do, you’ll need improved contrast to browse the web, anyway).
The examples looked very close to a real device to me. What is the contrast ratio on your device?
The author identified correctly the message colors. "When you send a text to someone, your message floats to the conversation area in a blue or electric green message bubble (depending on whether you’re texting with another iPhone/iPad/Mac user or some other device)."
Many iPhone users make the error you believed the author made. And the criticism would be valid if they never used an iPhone. Please do not use logical fallacies.
Calling the green bubbles not hard to read is your opinion. Opposed by other opinions and Apple's guidelines. Not fact.
The system high contrast mode makes some other apps less accessible. It makes weather icons all white for example.
The error is in the texts in one of the images. Observing that someone doesn’t appear to be familiar with the thing they’re writing about isn’t a logical fallacy.
Common sense? If Apple refuses to make obvious accessibility changes to drive customers to some alternative first-party product, that's probably going to get brought up during antitrust hearings.
iPhones are packed to the gills with accessibility features including for contrast, text size, bolding text, filters for the color blind, text to speech and color inversion.
It's not unreasonable for Apple to appreciate an aesthetic that is less accessible considering they provide the tools for users to customize the device for their needs.
The majority of people have no problem with the contrast of the Messages app, or at least it's never been a complaint that I've heard. That's not to say we shouldn't consider those who do have problems, but, again, there are options for those people.
That is in fact one of the accessibility settings. Increases contrast front the blue bubbles too, and color contrast between foreground and background colors system wide.
This might sound strange but most people with iPhones actually like how their phones look and behave. Personally I’m not the biggest fan of this era of UI design, but it’s silly to assume hostility on Apple’s part. Every year they announce even more accessibility features, and it makes sense to because they really want more people to actually be able to use the phones they sell.
You don't seem to have a great level of awareness of the world.
There are plenty of regulatory bodies, especially the EU, who have forced Apple to do things it doesn't want to.
They are making noise about interoperability of communications and rather than have the US (we don't have RCS over here, so it's meaningless for us) make rules that forces their hand in a manner that may not be how Apple want to do things, they get out ahead to reduce the power of the argument.
The fact that it's a shitty implementation is the feature.
I see a lot of confusing chatter about RCS (and maybe that’s the point).
Does anyone actually have a good write up on E2E encryption and whether or not all messages will actually go through google’s servers in plaintext? As in, not Google marketing.
Seen a lot of chatter and it seems like it’s is complicated on both fronts.
Only mildly worse (depending on the answer) than sending an SMS already but really makes me question the push for it in the first place
Its hard to avoid Google's marketing when the end-to-end implementation proprietary to their RCS app. This is their technical paper which confirms that it is end-to-end encrypted using the Signal protocol. The actual RCS spec has no support for E2E at this point.
> RCS uses a set of standard internet protocols like Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)[1] to establish a connection between two clients through a central messaging server. This connection is then used to exchange the messages using Message Session Relay Protocol (MSRP)[2]. In some RCS deployments this server is hosted by the carrier, and in other deployments the server is hosted by Jibe Mobile from Google.
> In situations where the two clients are not on the same carrier network, they’re connected through multiple servers—one from each carrier. The connection between the RCS client app and the carrier’s messaging server is encrypted using Transport Layer Security (TLS). Server to server communications are also encrypted.
How end-to-end encryption in Google Messages provides more security
Even if Apple cracks and ports iMessage to Android, I would still expect them to use a green bubble. It's a social signal to shame those in the outgroup
I might be the only one, but I think I would feel slightly uncomfortable having the blue bubble. (that's the apple one, right?) Like maybe not enough to stop me from getting an iphone if I wanted one otherwise. But it's such a visible signifier of being in an in-group. It somehow feels like a tacit approval of social shame strategy. Like even if I had an iphone, I feel like I would want to opt-out of the good color in solidarity with the have-nots or something.
I have no interest in iphones, and also don't really participate in any group texts, so it's double academic for me though.
I could not care less about the whole "green bubble/blue bubble" thing. That's for iPhone users to fret over.
If someone thinks less of me or won't communicate with me because of something as meaningless as the color of my messages on their phone, then that person isn't worth my time to begin with.
>If someone thinks less of me or won't communicate with me because of something as meaningless as the color of my messages on their phone, then that person isn't worth my time to begin with.
It's not about the colour of the message, it's what it signifies: this is an insecure conversation that is not end-to-end encrypted. To me it signals "switch to whatsapp/signal"
Today green means SMS, which also means that deliverability can be unreliable (in the past I've seen SMSes send and never arrive, arrive multiple times, or arrive hours late), and delivery notification is limited and unreliable. Same with tapbacks, and that voice/image/video involves MMS (which is bad, and in many countries carries per-message fees).
P.S. the incoming message bubble is black-on-grey, the same as all incoming messages no matter the medium - it's unencrypted outgoing messages that get a green bubble
Your own messages appear green to you if you’re messaging over sms.
The only time they’re blue (your own messages) is if everyone on a chat is using iMessage, so you know you’re sending over a different protocol and a ton more features plus e2e encryption are available.
The green bubble indicates that some features are disabled because another client doesn't support them. It isn't a social construct, it is a UI device to indicate something important to the user.
This won't change with RCS either, since RCS does not support many features of iMessage, but at least RCS will be more reliable than SMS.
Are you a child? From what I've heard, this is an extremely effective marketing strategy among children; kids get bullied and ostracized if they don't have an iDevice (in the US).
And if you captured the kids, that's the entire future market after a few generations.
I am not. It's been a while since I was subject to peer pressure of that kind. That kind of makes me want to avoid it even more. I don't want to support that kind of thing. But then again, being old and lame, perhaps the opposite of what I do is the definition of cool. Hmm...
> But it's such a visible signifier of being in an in-group.
It also works really well and is a lot of fun for interacting. Many people aren't just using "text", its quite rich forms of interacting. Enough people have grown up with that now to not care about the more rudimentary way form of communication you associate with "texting". It also signifies that there are even MORE ways you can communicate, with the integrated location sharing when desired, video chat, video voicemails, and more.
(I'm sure android users have the possibility of all these things, but not as deeply integrated or without any other app.)
> and also don't really participate in any group texts
> but not as deeply integrated or without any other app
Deeply integrated? How about a button that just does that? My android messaging app (that came with the phone) has a video call button in it. It works. Is it an app? What app is it? I don't know. I never installed it. It's just called "Video Call".
It seems that the main reason you can't video call or send emojis across Apple's garden wall is that Apple doesn't want you to. As you note, all the MORE ways you can communicate are things that I've done without an Apple product. I'm not sure what "without any other app" means. Other than what? Is Facetime a separate app from iMessage? Are those even the right names?
It's almost exactly as fun as WhatsApp, except that that's available on Android as well. Which arguably makes it more than twice as fun (based on the number of people you can reach with it globally) :)
So literally every non-US phone user just installs it as the first app whenever they get a new phone and that's that.
Having grown up on XMPP, I don't love that it's not federated, but at least it's available to everybody, and reasonably secure at that.
What are you referring to with European regulators? They're forcing WhatsApp to provide interoperability, but not iMessage, nor are they forcing Apple to support RCS (since only relatively few people use iMessage in Europe, and absolutely nobody knows what RCS even is).
I mostly message over WhatsApp but iMessage has a lot more features, and especially fun (e.g. multiplayer games directly in the messaging program) and useful (e.g. very slick location sharing) ones.
I use both, and I find WhatsApp much more fun, so maybe this is just a matter of habit/convenience.
iMessage is regularly glitching out for me, doesn't work in the browser, has a more confusing sent/received/read indicator system than WhatsApp in group chats (not that I particularly care about the "read" part, but knowing who actually had signal and received the message is useful when traveling internationally), and most importantly isn't available with all of my contacts.
WhatsApp location sharing works just as well in my experience.
Well it’s still not E2EE so it should he green in my opinion. Green means “this is being logged by the phone company like it’s 1999 and can be subpoenaed at any time”.
Sounds like that still true of RCS since it still works with the phone company. Why in the hell are they needed when every modern messaging app just worked using, you know, The Internet?
It could be E2EE since the google implementation of E2EE is literally just signal protocol messages wrapped as the payload of RCS Universal Profile messages.
The only thing they'd need to do is tweak the signal identity servers to federate KPI lookup (which RCS practically does for you).
Nothing new in this article. While starts with, "The long-awaited day is here: Apple has announced that its Messages app will support RCS in iOS 18." no such day is here. They previously announced it was coming later this year (which meant iOS 18) and we are still waiting for that future unknown date this year. And still no details on how exactly will work. So while very excited for it, no new news here yet.
Sad that EU is (likely) banning e2e encryption ("chat control") before RCS ever got an accepted standard for it.
To their defense, that was what Apple key saying was their blocker on RCS. Some reasonable truth to it. I don't know how far or how hard Google went trying to make their extensions standards; AFAIK it's not like the web where this work & activity on it is easily seen.
So SMS goes over the phone network, online chat programs (like Discord) go over their own servers obviously, but what does RCS and iMessage go through?
Google's and Apple's servers on the internet? The phone system, seeing they're SMS-based?
Also, if I'm in the SMS messaging app, I expect my messages to be SMS, not internet-based?
Cell phone carriers can set up their own RCS servers. All the major US carriers (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile US) outsourced their RCS to Google's Jibe platform, though.
Messaging apps haven't been pure SMS for a long time. If you've sent photos/images, it's using MMS, which basically uploads the picture to a HTTP server hosted by your carrier and sends the URL in a SMS message that the receiving app knows to automatically download and display the image, provided you have a data connection.
iMessage is proprietary to Apple, so of course it goes through Apple's servers. When you set up your iPhone, it registers your phone number with Apple's iMessage server so that whenever someone tries to send a message to your number, it sends it to the iMessage cloud instead of SMS. This can actually cause problems when you switch from an iPhone to Android because other Apple users trying to send you text messages might still get routed to iMessage instead of SMS, and there's no iMessage available for Android. You may have to use a website that Apple provides to manually deregister the phone number from iMessage in that case.
I'm not all that familiar with how RCS works but presumably there's a similar registration process so that other phones know that your phone is RCS capable, except decentralized since it's not controlled by a single company.
>This can actually cause problems when you switch from an iPhone to Android because other Apple users trying to send you text messages might still get routed to iMessage instead of SMS, and there's no iMessage available for Android. You may have to use a website that Apple provides to manually deregister the phone number from iMessage in that case.
Wow, Apple really manages to come up with every possible way to lock-in and hamstring competitors.
This is why I get so furious when I hear Apple apologists try to defend the lock-in nature of iMessage.
Before iMessage was so ubiquitous on iPhones, everyone just expected that you could message anyone else, regardless of their phone or carrier, over SMS/MMS. And I also don't fault Apple at all for releasing iMessage. But it's not like they released iMessage as just another app in the App Store like Whatsapp or Telegram. In true "Embrace/Extend/Extinguish" fashion, iMessage was just released as the default "texting app" on iPhones, and over the years the situation became more and more awful for iPhone -> Android communication. Non-US folks often don't understand the situation - "Why don't you just choose another messaging app?" Because in the US most people never "chose" a messaging app to begin with - they just used the default texting app on their phone. The US didn't really have the issue with exhorbitant SMS fees that other countries had that pushed usage to other messaging apps.
I guess they meant the situation became more and more awful for Android users as Google released a new messaging app and killed the last one every month.
That's not what I was talking about. Google's messaging apps were famously a mess, but my guess is that the vast majority of Android users never cared. There was always a default texting app on Android devices that handled SMS and MMS, and later RCS, and that's what most people (again, in the US) used for texting.
I had this exact problem with RCS on my Android phone. I didn't realize that it had been enabled by default at first. Since I don't want to use it, I disabled it once I noticed -- but then a couple of the people I had been texting with could no longer receive my texts.
I didn't know how to resolve it at the time and it only got fixed for me after I replaced my phone and got a new phone number.
Note that MMS is extremely uncommon outside the US, so many people might not be personally familiar with it. I think the last MMS I sent must have been some time in 2004.
P2P SMS is also quickly becoming obsolete in favor of OTT messengers like WhatsApp.
Both work via the public Internet, i.e. not a special APN, like MMS does; they use your regular data APN and accordingly also incur data charges. When you're on Wi-Fi, they use that.
As for who runs the servers: iMessage goes through Apple's servers.
RCS ostensibly goes through a federated network of telco-operated servers. But since almost none can actually be bothered to implement it (they've given up on trying to monetize it, so they have no incentive at all for incurring additional cost deploying and maintaining them), Google runs it for them, via a company they acquired [1].
> Also, if I'm in the SMS messaging app, I expect my messages to be SMS, not internet-based?
Is your SMS app actually called "SMS", these days? I usually see it called "messaging" or similar. In any case, assuming these apps do RCS, it'll be Internet-based.
Because RCS doesn’t have end to end encryption. Google has a proprietary service which is restricted to their own client, but no other RCS client can use it.
> Right now, when people on iOS and Android message each other, the service falls back to SMS — photos and videos are sent at a lower quality, messages are shortened, and importantly, conversations are not end-to-end encrypted like they are in iMessage.
Sure wish Apple would now make it available in a Windows app, or at least in browser. It would be so helpful to be able to text from my Windows machine through my iPhone.
That won't happen unless they are forced. They know people buy iPhones to get the blue bubbles in iMessage, so they can be seen as "cool". They only make money by selling iPhones, not iMessage.
RCS is out-of-the box an unencrypted messaging protocol.
The EU forcing Apple to adopt a cleartext protocol like RCS is deeply suspicious. Interoperability will force disclosure of message contents to the state and carrier.
(unless your phone vendor has implemented encryption in their implementation. Ie: optimistic encryption aka can’t trust if
it is truly working)
Use encrypted messaging protocols — iMessage, signal, WhatsApp…
Tell the government and the carriers to pound sand and <encrypted>……
I’d be more concerned if RCS was replacing an encrypted protocol. Going from SMS to unencrypted RCS is still an improvement, and it’s hard to imagine it being less secure than SMS already is. And at least with RCS they have the possibility of implementing encryption in the future, which they don’t with SMS.
iMessage was explicitly determined to be out of scope of the DMA [1], simply because there isn't a meaninful user base in Europe (as is the case in almost the entire world except for the US).
> The EU forcing Apple to adopt a cleartext protocol like RCS is deeply suspicious. Interoperability will force disclosure of message contents to the state and carrier.
I don't think it's suspicious. Almost nobody uses SMS in Europe anyway so this change is almost meaningless over here. It's just WhatsApp and then a little bit of Telegram, Signal etc on top.
I'm honestly not sure why anyone drives this (in Europe). I used to work for a mobile operator and RCS was a big thing around 2006-2009 in our R&D department. Then I changed to others jobs and almost didn't believe my eyes when it resurfaced with Google over a decade later. I was absolutely sure it was a dead horse already in 2009.
> Use encrypted messaging protocols — iMessage, signal, WhatsApp…
Using RCS E2EE is trivial. The way google does it is to simply pack signal protocol messages in the RCS message payload. It works great and it's simple.
Key identities are managed with a central identity server (like signal does) of course but that's because it's only supported on Google's jibe platform.
This can be trivially resolved by having each carrier who supports E2EE to host a key identity server so that you can lookup keys by phone number (which RCS already uses to point you to the right federated carrier service).
All that's missing from RCS having E2EE by default is google having literally anyone else adopt RCS forcing them to properly federate E2EE.
That depends on how apple decides to implement it. They are a huge player, and I am sure they can make some kind of agreement with google so that they can message through the jibe servers which use the signal protocol.
Why would you suggest a conspiracy theory like that?
I'm not even sure what RCS is, other than a replacement text service that American phone companies offer. I am not aware that it's something that I could use over here.
RCS is a messaging service / protocol developed by the GSMA (the global system for mobile communications), a non-profit industry association representing mobile telephony operators worldwide. Nothing to do with American phone companies.
For someone who is "not even sure what RCS is," you seem very certain of that.
Per Wikipedia:
"In early 2020, it was estimated that RCS was available from 88 operators in 59 countries with approximately 390 million users per month. By November 2020, RCS was available globally in Google Messages on Android, provided directly by Google if the operator does not provide RCS. By 2023, there were 800 million active RCS users on Google's platform and 1.2 billion handsets worldwide supporting RCS."
This gets repeated a lot, and might be true (apparently the patent lawsuit forced Apple to change the implementation to be less peer-to-peer?), but lore says that Steve Jobs announcing Facetime as an open standard was a surprise to everyone working on Facetime.
Not killed. Apple decided not to charge for non-Apple users and not to provide it for free either. They were only prevented from doing P2P connections, not from opening the protocol.
Or maybe it could've even been federated... not that Apple likes to play nice with anyone else.
Which is funny given that WhatsApp started as a very popular paid service. They could've been that for iMessage and extended it to calls.
You can start facetime calls from an Apple device to anyone by sending a link that works in their browser. No it's not 100% of the functionality, but it's a lot of it.
I am vaguely surprised that phone messaging apps are not a two level architecture. level 1 the ui would manage your contacts and display and dispatch messages. then you have a well defined interface and level 2, I guess you would call them plugins, knows how to authenticate you to to a service and deliver and receive messages. The messaging vendor would supply the plugin and the os vendor would supply the ui.
Only vaguely surprised because, while this could be better for the end user and interoperation, it reduces lock in and who wants that? /s
They will still not be end-to-end encrypted in RCS. They will just be encrypted in transit, but your carrier (or whoever is running whatever server in an RCS architecture) can read all your messages.
There is talk that Google's got some kind of extension that adds E2EE to RCS but others will be well informed on it and can add to my message.
I'm blissfully happy with iMessage. For the non-Apple people, we've been using WhatsApp for nearly a decade.
But what does this do for OTP messages, etc? I'll have to check if Twilio automatically uses RCS if you send a message to a supported number. I do like the idea of all messages being encrypted in transit at least (SMS is not).