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by gertrunde
1398 days ago
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I'm not sure why this is being framed as an XOR situation? Why would RCS support imply removal of iMessage? Surely RCS raises the lowest common denominator up a bit from SMS, and people are still free to use whatever 3rd party data-based messaging service they want to, be it iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, Facebook Messenger, or whatever else, even ICQ if that still exists. I don't think I've ever intentionally/deliberately chosen to use RCS, but (on my (Android) phone at least) it does seem to transparently turn itself on the very rare occasion when I send SMS messages (usually in reply to a received SMS), if supported by both phones. |
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I'm not aware of anyone making that argument, it would replace and/or compliment SMS (since even if Apple adopts RCS, SMS is going to around for a long time).
> Surely RCS raises the lowest common denominator up a bit from SMS, and people are still free to use whatever 3rd party data-based messaging service they want to, be it iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, Facebook Messenger, or whatever else, even ICQ if that still exists.
Is it better than SMS? Yes but that's a low bar to clear and as a chat protocol it has many failings, not least of which are it's weak E2E when it supports it at all. Also RCS is practically owned by Google, operated by carriers, I literally cannot think of a worse combo of 2 companies/industries that I do not trust.
Bottom line is SMS is going to be around for the foreseeable future (so much is built on it, similar to email for better or worse) and we will have to support a SMS fallback even with RCS support in iOS. Because of that and the lack of compelling reasons to move to RCS, I feel like it's best just to leave SMS as-is and work on pushing people to your preferred third-party chat app.