[GeekyBear]

> The problem with chat experience is that it's really, truly not Android's fault, it's Apple's.

Apple forced Google to screw up it's messaging strategy for all these years?

>Google has been unable to field a stable, competitive messaging platform for years and has thoroughly lost the messaging war to products with a long-term strategy. At least some divisions inside the company are waking up to how damaging this is to Google as a company, and now Google's latest strategy is to... beg its competition for mercy?

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/new-google-site-begs...

[theptip]

The article you link mentions Google asking Apple to use RCS, which is the industry standard for messaging interop these days, not SMS. Apple has so far declined, so nobody can function in their Messages app.

[GeekyBear]

>RCS, which is the industry standard

The article I linked to points out that RCS, as used by Google today, is a proprietary closed source fork of RCS that Google has refused to create a public API for.

>Google's version of RCS—the one promoted on the website with Google-exclusive features like optional encryption—is definitely proprietary, by the way.

If this is supposed to be a standard, there's no way for a third-party to use Google's RCS APIs right now. Some messaging apps, like Beeper, have asked Google about integrating RCS and were told there's no public RCS API and no plans to build one.

If you want to implement RCS, you'll need to run the messages through some kind of service, and who provides that server? It will probably be Google.

So the pitch for Apple to adopt RCS isn't just this public-good nonsense about making texts with Android users better; it's also about running Apple's messages through Google servers. Google profits in both server fees and data acquisition.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/new-google-site-begs...

[willio58]

Yeah it seems the only solution is for Apple and Google to truly come together and work on an open standard. At that point, if Apple refuses, it’s on Apple.

I agree though, right now it really isn’t a defensible argument from Google.

[ls15]

The EU is going to mandate interoperability soon, because it turned out that these companies cannot be trusted with allowing users to do what they want to do.

[GeekyBear]

SMS already represents universal messaging interoperability.

Even ancient no-longer-updated dumb phones support SMS.

[ls15]

Yes, but the EU wants to open up modern messaging:

https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/24/dma-political-agreement/

[GeekyBear]

Everyone needs search, and it's unfair that Google has spent over a decade creating a better search engine than its competitors, so Google should be forced to open source their search algorithms.

Is this the argument you guys are seriously making?

The solution for a competitor having a better product than you is to pick a single strategy and keep iterating on whatever it is you build, instead of abandoning one product after another.

[zaik]

Search is not something that requires interoperability. I can use DDG without any of my friends using it.

[GeekyBear]

iMessage already has interoperability through support for the universal SMS standard.

[theptip]

> RCS, as used by Google today, is a proprietary closed source fork

That’s news to me, interesting.

So is this fork fully incompatible with the spec, or it just adds some features beyond that spec? I.e. if Apple implements the open spec can they communicate with Google systems using the base spec features?

If Google built and run their own non-interoperable fork as a competing messaging system then I strongly agree that they don’t have a leg to stand on.

I’m a bit less convinced with the whole “Google wants your data” angle. The whole reason they used RCS in the first place is because carriers want to run their own messaging infra, and I believe the carriers still do even if they are using Google’s spec (eg see https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/30/22556686/att-android-phon..., though I am not certain on this point). In the past Google tried to get carriers to buy in to their own proprietary service and failed.

It looks to me more that AT&T, Verizon (a bit) and T-Mobile are all running Google’s version of the RCS spec on their own networks and servers, so even if it isn’t open (it should be), it is still a de facto industry standard. So I think they still have a case here that Apple should fall back to this spec instead of SMS.

[slavik81]

If Apple won't implement RCS, can Google implement iMessage?

[senttoschool]

Apple isn't begging Google to implement iMessage. Nor is Apple creating a public smearing campaign against Google for not implementing iMessage.

[THENATHE]

And yet it refuses to actually open source RCS. Imagine if they could add RCS fallback to signal!