[habosa]

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.

[dheera]

> total lock-in

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.

[unsignedint]

> 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.

[trebor]

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]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Message_Service#Initial_...

[habosa]

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.

[ine3432n4e23n4]

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.

[toast0]

> 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.