I’m not a fan of the “war” between Android and Apple when it comes to SMS/texting. The rest of the world doesn’t use SMS/RCS/iMessage as much as WhatsApp and the like, so the US is pretty much lagging behind everyone else on this anyway.
That being said, I have to admit Android did a good job with this!
Can some custom rom group do the same type of video but about Google not allowing third party sms apps to use RCS?
Lol this is funny. I wouldn’t really call it much of a war, it’s Apple holding back easily implemented features to cater to elitism. Would platforms like WhatsApp have taken over so heavily if basic texting was actually good enough?
Yea, basic texting is ass. As much as I don’t like WhatsApp or Meta, it’s still better than plain SMS.
WhatsApp certainly dominates Europe but I’d love to see a universal standard to replace SMS. The less messaging apps the better. WhatsApp is owned by Meta after all…
So do people in the US chiefly send messages via SMS rather than WhatsApp and others like it? That’s so bizarre to me haha.
I use RCS, except for the handful of iPhone users that receive an SMS from me. The group is small, because more and more people are switching over to Android.
It is less that people use SMS and more that people just don’t use WhatsApp. I have a mix of group chats, including some with SMS and Facebook Chat. However, no one uses Whatsapp.
Yeah I use Facebook Messenger and Snapchat to keep up with friends and RCS/SMS mostly for family. Never used WhatsApp before though.
I would say that was the case in the UK generally about 5 years ago. But WhatsApp increasingly took over as the norm because it was clean, quick, relatively well encrypted, and made sending gifs and stickers easy and fun for the average user. Plus, the youth aren’t only wedded to iPhones unlike the US increasingly.
If you’re using Google Messages anyway, it’s true that RCS is a half-notch better than SMS. Unfortunately, it doesn’t compete with any decent chat service on any front—Not signal, not Whatsapp, not Matrix, not even Telegram, and Telegram sucks ass. It’s fully centralized, Google gets all of your metadata (which is not worse than Facebook getting all of your metadata, but it is something that Apple obviously won’t agree to), there’s only one app that does it…
have they even figured out how to encrypt group chats yet?
not even Telegram, and Telegram sucks ass
Telegram is literally pioneering messaging apps. Everything that other apps add, Telegram has added first. Go look at their blog post updates, and you’ll see how far ahead of the curve they are. Features that WhatsApp is getting in 2023, Telegram added back in 2016.
I am assuming you think they “suck ass”, because you’re upset the E2EE is not enabled by default, and you have to open a private E2EE chat with someone? You know, the same buttons you press to open a non-E2EE chat?
Telegram is literally pioneering messaging apps.
Oh, is that why they haven’t figured out how to encrypt a group chat yet? Or how to sync an encrypted chat? Or how to institute any of their fucking features in an encrypted chat?
They still don’t have multi-channel chat groups, do they? And there’s still a limit on how big their chat groups can be, unlike Matrix / Discord / Slack, right?
Everything that other apps add, Telegram has added first.
Oh, you’re talking about “broadcast channels.” No, actually, Twitter added that feature first, it’s called Twitter. Telegram Broadcast Channels are just a social network, except it’s unmoderated, so crypto scammers can play around there with impunity. Wow, incredible feature!
But oh boy, you have lots of sticker packs!
Oh, and it looks like they added stories after Snapchat did it, and then after Facebook did it… what, ten times? fifteen? Yeah, sure, Telegram invented those.
I am assuming you think they “suck ass”, because you’re upset the E2EE is not enabled by default, and you have to open a private E2EE chat with someone? You know, the same buttons you press to open a non-E2EE chat?
That’s one of the bigger issues, I’m guessing you haven’t actually tried using one of those chats since you seem to be excited about all of Telegram’s “features.” Yeah, sorry, this untold disaster against privacy is an insult to its users’ intelligence, and the users can’t tell.
I def agree that there needs to be major interoperability improvements between platforms. Though I do not want to be locked into using Google Messages to get RCS. I wish they’d open their API to other apps and even more so allow self-hosting your own RCS server but I don’t foresee the latter ever happening.
Ya there’s Matrix and whatnot which I use with some people, but most everyone just wants what works by default. I like to tinker and have options, but most people don’t.
Till then, I’ll enjoy postage stamp resolution videos from my Apple friends /s
The rest of the world doesn’t use SMS/RCS/iMessage as much as WhatsApp and the like
SMSes use a standard available to any app. WhatsApp is controlled by a single company.
If you were arguing that XMPP or something like that should be used instead of SMS, okay, that’s one thing, but I have a hard time favoring a walled garden.
deleted by creator
Here’s the thing - the rest of us do use SMS, we just weren’t gullible enough to fall for Apple’s bullshit about text bubble colours
That’s fuckin infantile 😂
At least props for Stereo MC’s Connected.
What a weird dig coming from Google. Who is Google to complain about outdated messenger tech when they don’t even built RCS into Android? The RCS Google wants you to use (the one with encryption) is part of their messenger, not part of the operating system itself. It’s not even standardised.
The iMessage/SMS situation is stupid, but Google isn’t exactly doing much better here.
I’m not using RCS until it is available with no vendor lock-in. Call me when third-party apps like Textra can use it, and I don’t need to use Google’s relay.
Google’s relay is a requirement for carriers who don’t host their own RCS infrastructure. Google set up a fallback server because outside of a few specific carriers, nobody bothered implementing RCS in their networks. In theory your carrier could set up a server and you wouldn’t need Google at all.
In theory apps could build an RCS implementation and take control of your RCS account.
Canadian carriers did, but they since have started moving towards Google’s RCS servers instead. Probably realized it wasn’t worth hosting a server, and then maintaining it. I remember some carriers wouldn’t update their servers, so not all RCS features would be available to them.
I trust my carrier even less than Google, which is saying something.
deleted by creator
When RCS first came out, my carrier provided their own app to use it lol
It should just be an API that any text messaging app can use on Android, with the ability to define your own relay if desired.
Give google a break, its hard for them to keep track of what message backend is in which app. They have created and killed 5 messaging apps in the time I wrote out this comment, how can you expect them to know whats going on?
Google is taking the “monkeys with typewriters” approach to messaging apps, if they release enough of them they’ll eventually stumble across a messaging app that’s compatible with iMessage.
And then cancel it two weeks later.
I miss Hangouts 🥲
I miss Messenger with XMPP
I miss shouting and whispering with Allo
Wheres my Google circle crowd at? Y’all move over to Wave?
This kind of shit is why I’ve been working on replacing things, and leaving their ecosystem. There are 57 ways to do everything, and nothing ever works properly.
I am all about tweaking and changing things, or adopting something new, but that’s all under the assumption that it works. One of the reason why people like iMessage is because they don’t have to fuck with thirdparty apps, half of which can’t even receive a text message without issues
How about we adopt open standards
Not using proprietary protocols isn’t lagging behind.
The rest of the world doesn’t use SMS/RCS/iMessage as much as WhatsApp and the like, so the US is pretty much lagging behind everyone else on this anyway.
Not sure I want to end up with Facebook controlling my messaging…
Signal. Use Signal.
I would like to use it but no one else does
Make them
Signal removed SMS integration, making adoption less likely.
When I could install Signal on my parents phones, and they could SMS and Signal message in the same app, it was great. Especially since any contacts that happened to have Signal, it just worked. My parents didn’t have to do anything.
After Signal removed SMS, my parents just open up Google Messages and message everyone from there. They don’t want to juggle two apps. They also don’t really understand it. They just go back to the “main menu”, select their friends name, and type. Signal shot themselves in the foot.
The rest of the world doesn’t use SMS? This is new to me.
Why shouldn’t we? They’re free, they work everywhere.
deleted by creator
Thye are free now. Sms used to be a “per text” charge. Phone plans had “100 txt free/month, then $.05/each” deals, along with “300 free minutes/month.” This went on for years.
It was during this time that other countries started using “data only” apps that didn’t have per message fee, which was their killer feature, and they stuck with them.
Charging for SMS was of course brutal profit seeking. The messages have always been embedded in the largely empty “where am i” pings that cellphones have to always be sending to towers to work at all. They were 100% free for phone carriers to send and receive.
Thye are free now.
They aren’t, as they require you to pay a monthly fee with a carrier to receive SMS. Data-only plans do not receive SMS.
Roaming charges also apply. As a Canadian, it costs me $14-16 per DAY to receive a text if I leave the country.
They’re not “free”, many places still charge per SMS. Even if your country doesn’t, you NEED an SMS plan, which costs more than a basic data-only plan. SMS is extremely unsecure. They don’t work “everywhere”, especially if you’re travelling, and your country charges extreme fees to receive SMS out of country (for reference, Canadian carriers charge $15/day to use your phone outside Canada. That’s one expensive ass text…).
That being said, I think it’s crazy that a large portion of Europe has adopted WhatsApp. I wouldn’t touch that Meta garbage with a 100 kilometre pole.
If it doesn’t work everywhere, then the phone company is actively unlocking it, as it relies on the management frames in the cellular protocol - it’s embedded in cell architecture.
They are not free here but since like no one other than my grandma uses them it’s not really important.
they’re free
They were not always free, and when they were, they were up to a limit. Yes the limit was something absurd, but surprisingly, some people did hit them.
That’s why as soon as phones had easy access to the web and enough bandwidth to last a month, people started treating SMS like a last resort, and I have not met a single culture on Earth that didn’t think this way in the transition period up to when what you said became universally true.
Plus… People don’t want to message only their “contacts”, nor want their phone address book filled with trash. Mindblowing, know, who would have thought (other than US apple users???). Facebook’s Messenger was one of the earliest to give that to the wide public and it got heavily adopted. But people moved on from even that.
They’re limited as hell and buggy. The thing that most bothers me is the character limit and then your device sends out multiple SMSs, other devices may not understand that and instead of receiving one message you receive multiple broken ones.
Accents, anything not in the English alphabet: á ä ā ą é ê and so on, good luck with those.
Attaching media is a nightmare, basically the entire MMS protocol is broken.
You’re relying on your carrier and your recipients carriers.
International messaging is also completely broken for the reason above. You can forget any media in that case too.
Geez I don’t know if I should continue. Did you know SMS was not a feature planned in phones originally but rather it takes advantage of a bug that was never fixed?
In Brazil where I’m originally from people stopped using SMS altogether as soon as the first iPhone got in the market. Android followed shortly after. Viber was the popular choice back then, now WhatsApp is the standard.
