[obnauticus]

I would agree more if the RCS standard wasn’t also hot garbage…

I would encourage anyone who is curious to read more about it. It’s taken so long to gain traction that it has also become somewhat legacy. Also, it still requires a carrier sponsored phone plan? How is this “modern” in comparison to say every other carrier agnostic messaging app in existence?

Also this: https://twitter.com/RonAmadeo/status/1480679515298934786

[equalsione]

It really is god-awful. RCS is a technology that benefits mobile operators, not users.

Also, Google really aren't in a position to lecture anyone on this topic, given their N+1 approach to messaging services.

[jkingsman]

Speak for yourself; I LOVE texting my fellow-Android-owners with RCS. My photos don't get squashed a la MMS, sending multimedia Just Works, and typing/receipt indicators are lovely. Maybe the mobile operators are getting far bigger wins, but as an average person texting my friends, it's great.

[kelnos]

I'm just annoyed that it's opt-in, and still seems to have some issues. I think I converse with exactly three other people who use Android.

One of them works with RCS! Yay!

The second hasn't enabled RCS for some reason. (Or he has -- I haven't asked him -- but for some reason the machinery in between hasn't figured out that we're both RCS-capable.)

The third has enabled RCS, and the messages I send to him go over RCS, but when he replies, they go over SMS/MMS. No idea why.

[jkingsman]

Yeah I definitely feel that pain, especially with the swapping back and forth to and from RCS.

[navjack27]

Honestly same. And the same thing for getting Wi-Fi calls with people on the same network and how they sound crystal clear but then you call someone who's not on your network and it sounds like a crappy phone call again. When my dad and I were both on Google fi our phone calls sounded great and texting through RCS was great. He switched to the same carrier that his new wife has and the service is just degraded.

[angryasian]

Its definitely a compromise, but Google is ultimately at the mercy of the carriers. We can sit back behind our keyboards and criticize but it is a way to get something going. I don't think carriers have any incentive to improve this area, and probably nothing would happen

[kelnos]

> Its definitely a compromise, but Google is ultimately at the mercy of the carriers.

Are they, though? Google absolutely could have implemented an iMessage competitor, directly in the stock Android Messages app, and then required third-party Android manufacturers to include it as the stock SMS/MMS/"gMessage" app as a part of Android conformance testing.

But no, instead they choose to play games with Allo, Duo, Hangouts, Chat, etc., all of which are an optional download and need not be included in the stock install. And even if/when they are required, it's still an extra app that a user has to find, and understand why they should use it.

Now, I don't want them to do this. I want them to promote and support a federated, open standard; I don't want another iMessage. RCS is not great for many reasons, but at least it's not a walled garden.

[rootusrootus]

> Google is ultimately at the mercy of the carriers

Yet again I recall the deal with the devil Apple did with AT&T, giving them a year or two of exclusive rights to sell the iPhone in return for having exactly zero control over the device. That was an excellent trade. Before 2007, carriers were intrusively involved with all aspects of a mobile phone.

[obnauticus]

I understand that there are huge interoperability and legacy requirements on the phone network. But for the sake of solving the biggest problem of Android to iPhone communication I think we can and should demand something which is actually modern (ie platform and carrier agnostic).

The problem with RCS is that the solution has been stuck in GSM consortium hell for over a decade.

[danaris]

> Google is ultimately at the mercy of the carriers

I mean...are they?

If Google were serious about pushing a new standard, and were willing to actually push it on the carriers, they have plenty of money, reach, and clout to make their point heard loud and clear. That would be triply true if it weren't a "new standard" that was yet another transparent attempt to gather more data from users.

[kelnos]

They don't even need to push it on the carriers. They can just implement their own siloed iMessage clone in the stock Android Messages app. They don't need to integrate with any carrier services to do so. Hell, simply moving Google Chat into the stock Android Messages app, and seamlessly switching between SMS/MMS and GChat (like Apple does between SMS/MMS and iMessage) would do the trick. (To be clear, I don't want them to do this, but they could.)

And even if Google pushed a new, better standard (than RCS) on the carriers, Apple could (and probably would) still refuse to implement it.

[worthless-trash]

I dont imagine implementing their own imessage clone would work as hardware vendors such as samsung will remove the stock app and ship their own.

[resfirestar]

>There are zero benefits to phone identity over email

I can think of one: most people’s email identity is subject to termination under Google’s ToS. Same thing with identity tied to Facebook or other social networks. In the US, your ability to take your phone number to a different carrier is protected by federal regulations.

[ElijahLynn]

It is actually light years better than SMS/RCS and has a huge value to end users. I can see if a message was read, I can send legit voice memos without size limits, I can send large high resolution photos.

It may not be perfect but it is better than what Apple is doing now.

[arbirk]

Very interesting. I wonder what protocol and format the EU commission will point to in enforcing the Digital Markets Act

[a2tech]

No one really wants to understand it, they just want to complain that Apple doesn't support it

[upbeat_general]

I don’t love phone based identity but it’s wrong to say it has no benefits.

While it does lock you out if you don’t pay, at least you won’t be locked out by accident since you can generally prove your identity to the carrier. This obviously is a con (sms hijacking) but for many people it’s much more important.

Not to mention the importance of phone numbers being basically universal which is why 3rd party messaging apps haven’t totally replaced sms. RCS has the potential to do so, or at least cut down on sms usage further.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

Google cannot legally ship, as part of Android, a carrier-agnostic messaging app like iMessage.

[unethical_ban]

Could you elaborate? I've never heard this before.

[ThatPlayer]

It's illegal tying[0]. Google used to force Chrome and Google Search as part of Google Play Store requirements. And were fined a few years ago by the EU[1]. Pretty much most of this reasoning could be applied to a messaging app too.

[0] https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_18_...

[kelnos]

Why didn't Apple & iMessage run afoul of this same thing? Is it because Google was forcing third-party manufacturers to include things, but Apple of course just doesn't have that issue?

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

> Is it because Google was forcing third-party manufacturers to include things, but Apple of course just doesn't have that issue?

Yes.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

I've heard that since Android is the OS that 3rd parties use it could violate antitrust to include a Google branded chat-app. Apple does not distribute iOS so they can do whatever they want.

[kart23]

ehhhh, that twitter post is weird. It's like your phone number. You're free to switch carriers, and just like a phone number, you lose it if you stop paying. It's not designed to replace whatsapp, its replacing sms.

[lostgame]

I miss XMPP :(

[thiht]

XMPP sucked, you guys have to stop bringing it out over and over again. Not having a common experience between clients because of that stupid « X » sucked. There’s an impossible to solve mismatch between XEPs supported by the clients and the servers.

XMPP is dead for reason, stop trying to bring it back

[MattJ100]

Because of the "stupid X", modern XMPP supports far more than it used to, and isn't stuck in the past like email and SMS.

There is a mismatch between iMessage (Apple) and RCS (Google's flavour of the month). To the point where there is almost no sensible interoperability between the two.

All XMPP does is provide answers to "If I want to implement feature X, how should that look on the wire".

Just as the XMPP Standards Foundation annually publishes the recommended baseline feature sets for XMPP clients, it wouldn't be hard for Apple and Google to follow that or (more likely) agree on their own baseline for interoperability between the two ecosystems.

As I always say when this comes up: the wire protocol is of least concern - it's not the reason these businesses don't prioritize interoperability. No protocol engineering can magically fix that.

[thiht]

> Because of the "stupid X", modern XMPP supports far more than it used to, and isn't stuck in the past like email and SMS.

Yeah, it’s dead. Maybe XMPP supports shiny stuff. But no client or server support them, and if they do it’s like they don’t understand the spec the same way.

A protocol should not be extensible, it should be full featured and regularly updated to include new needs. It should also propose a reference implementation and an official client so that there’s a clear baseline.

Matrix is doing it way better than XMPP ever did.

[zaik]

I use XMPP because unlike Matrix, XMPP is properly standardized and not a product by a single VC funded startup.

If you ever have multiple independent implementations a single monolithic spec will always only be partially supported (or there is only a single useable implementation like Synapse), so no different than having extensions.

[Arathorn]

Have you ever considered that your constant FUD against Matrix just ends up hurting open communications in general? How about putting your energy into improving XMPP rather than constantly whining about the existence of Matrix.

Matrix is properly standardised at https://spec.matrix.org by a non-profit foundation: https://matrix.org/foundation. Just because the core team created a startup to fund our work (3 years into the project) doesn’t make it “a product by a single VC funded startup” - especially when there are hundreds of independent companies building on the standard. Meanwhile empirically synapse, dendrite and conduit can all talk fine to each other and we haven’t seen any fragmentation yet.

If you want to complain about something, go attack the closed cabal of RCS or the hypercapitalism silos of FAANG - and leave us the hell alone.

[Gigachad]

HN struggles with the reality that users pick again and again, platforms with unified experiences instead of extensible platforms where everyone's client supports a different subset of features.

I'd rather have 5 IM apps on my phone than have one and have no idea how my message shows up to the other person. I like that I can use the best app for the job. I mostly talk to people on telegram but if I want to do a voice chat or share my screen, I switch to discord. It's very frictionless and modern OSs allow you to receive notifications while the app is not actually running so it consumes no resources.

[Zash]

It's XMPP that misses you ;)

[Hippocrates]

Agree. It sounds similar to the argument for USB-C charging, also a hot mess of a standard. But RCS is definitely more offensive.