[oellegaard]

As a long time Apple customer I couldn’t care less.

This is mainly to satisfy governments who are looking into Apples dominant position in the market. I doubt this was a big request from the apple community.

It’s like the new possibility to use non apple app stores. It’s mainly coming from people who don’t like Apple and use Android anyway.

[junga]

> I doubt this was a big request from the apple community.

As a German I'm looking forward to this since iPhone market share isn't as big as it might be in America. In the end I might delete Signal and WhatsApp since media sharing is the only reason for me to use these apps.

[int_19h]

It matters for anyone who has an iPhone but regularly texts people with Androids. That is a very common use case.

[ellisv]

Only 2 of the people I regularly message use Android; nearly all of my friends and family use iPhone. Our friend group uses Messenger to accommodate the Android users and I doubt that will change just because of RCS.

[brailsafe]

This is such a strange type of assessment to me, not only of the announcement but of one's social life, I guess because it hasn't occurred to me since high school that I'd think of my social life as a static group, or what hardware platform any of them would be using to message me, unless I get a particularly blurry MMS message from someone who's always categorically been all in on iPhone. I don't at all mean to be critical of your perspective, everyone's in a different life context and that's why culture is interesting. I also do listen to Apple oriented podcasts, and presume the hosts might have a similar view to yours.

Even if I wasn't regularly meeting new people, I have a variety of long-term friends who travel in different flexible circles, and I just get messages from whoever independently on whichever platform we happen to have exchanged a message on that day. Everyone just has a black square in their pocket as far as I'm concerned; if they're recent immigrants they might use WhatsApp, some use Signal, lots just use whichever texting protocol (if it's on Android Messages it'll auto switch to RCS), some Messenger, some Instagram, some Google Chat. Off the top of my head I might be able to guess how someone would message me, but I would only know which phones only a tiny percentage of people have.

It might be a different messaging platform because of context, such as the recent exchanges I had with the same person on Steam and Instagram, but they have my number and would probably just call or text if we were meeting up.

[watermelon0]

Messaging app fragmentation is a real issue, and I currently have to use ~4 different apps, because different people have different subset of these apps installed.

Situation gets even more complicated when you need to message a group of people, because you have to find an app that everyone in the group has it installed (usually, FB Messenger is the best candidate here).

RCS could finally (mostly) solve this in the near future, because practically everyone will have a phone with first-class support for it.

[frizlab]

Exactly. I’m a long time Apple customer and actively do not want third party app stores.

[hagbard_c]

Why not? You don't have to use one if you prefer to stay within the walls so why don't you want others who dare to venture outside of them to have the opportunity to do so? It is the same on Android where the majority uses the Google Play Store but some - like myself - choose to use alternatives like F-Droid.

[_yb2s]

It’s a huge deal to me as an iPhone user- half my friends and family have android phones and I can’t see the videos, photos, and emojis they send me and vice versa.

I’m not sure how this would not be a big problem for any iPhone user? Do you not send or receive messages?

[javagram]

In the USA, iPhones send videos/photos over MMS when including Android phones in a group conversation. There is a quality degradation but they aren’t missing. This feature works fine for me with the Android users I know in real life.

I wonder if you or your Android counterpart have a cell network issue with the MMS server configuration. This would only appear in cross platform texts, I suppose.

[_yb2s]

The quality degradation can be so severe the videos and photos are mostly useless. They aren't literally "lost" but I've seen videos and photos that looked like a mosaic of large pixels rather than an image or video.

Perhaps the images automatically scale down during poor connection events? That isn't an acceptable behavior, modern protocols just wait, and transfer when they have a good enough connection.

Other things like tapbacks are also not technically lost, but also become useless- it responds with text saying something like "thumbs up" but not which message the response attaches to- so the context is lost, often making it impossible to understand.

[acdha]

That’s exactly the problem, and it’s why RCS users have reported so many problems, too. Cell companies just aren’t great at running servers, which has been good for Google’s Jibe business as carriers decide to outsource the infrastructure to someone good at it.

[ryandvm]

As an Android user, it matters because our clueless iPhone user friends don't understand that their phones only send us shitty quality media.

[MBCook]

I’m an Apple person and it’s not huge to me. The people I tend to trade pictures/etc with are also iPhone owners.

That said I personally know multiple people in my family who have run into “problems” sending pictures or especially video back-and-forth to Android phones because you get stuck with ancient MMS sizes that look like garbage. Images are bad but video is just atrocious.

It’s a good upgrade for iPhone users. I don’t think it’s the number one feature for anyone in my group, but I can easily be imagine being an iPhone person with a mostly Android family/friends network where this is going to be a big quality of life thing.