Since when is rcs dead? More and more of the people I use texting with come “online” all the time.

Weird takes.

Bad take. The problem isn’t RCS, it’s Apple.

The sooner everyone accepts that AndroidPolice has turned into an Apple propaganda and sponsored content website, the sooner we can choose another website for Android News.

they mainly use iOS

Well that’s not a RCS problem, is it?

it’s not interested, and if you want to send your mom high-res videos, you’re better off buying her — or yourself — an iPhone

The article is basically repeating “fuck standardisation because a company is not playing fair, so let’s give them more money”

What kind of crap article is this? It’s paragraphs and paragraphs of words saying that we should just accept the previous status-quo of a bajillion different apps. The headline might as well be “RCS sucks, just give up.” which is such a defeatist way to say absolutely nothing.

But Google’s RCS really doesn’t look like a solution either since it mainly just seems to be a way of enforcing Android as an ecosystem

Not really. It’s not even tied to Google, it just happens that most carriers don’t care because they can’t monetize it like they did with SMS, and Google was getting fed up with slow adoption so they started becoming the defacto provider for RCS. But it’s always been a hack.

Anyway, it’s an open standard that anyone can implement if they want, and it even reuses a lot of the signaling from existing SMS technology. In fact the first release of RCS was in 2008.

The problem is not technological, it’s that a whole bunch of companies like Apple and carriers and even Google to some extent would rather keep all the control. Apple doesn’t want to implement RCS nor open iMessage because then they can’t weaponize their users against Android users and peer pressure you into getting an iPhone. None of those companies want to implement an open standard because then they’ll kill off the era of proprietary messaging apps.

And to top it off, a lot of users also just don’t care. They already use Snapchat and Discord, and standard SMS have been free and unlimited for a good decade so it’s not even inconvenient to fallback to SMS. Works well enough to exchange Instagram or Twitter handles or whatever. Without users demanding a standard interoperable protocol like RCS, it won’t happen.

I don’t even think email as we know it today would have a chance to exist if they hadn’t made it interoperable from the start thanks to the young Internet being more academic and interoperable focused, before companies got interested in heavily commercializing it and enshittifying it all for profits.

There’s practically negative profit to be had by implementing RCS or any other sort of interoperable federated protocol. Even Signal, despite being open-source essentially forces you to use their servers for some reason.

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I’m just sitting here frustrated because I’m wanting my family to move away from messaging me over SMS (they mainly use iOS), but they refuse to download any extra apps.

Weird family. Pretty much all my family and friends happily installed WhatsApp except for the odd ancient mad auntie and that’s probably for the best because it’d get racist quick.

The main issue would be trying to wean them off WhatsApp onto another system (XMPP? Matrix?).

Either Apple takes its head out of its ass, or it’s always going to be fragmented, RCS or otherwise.

The primary form of text communication in Australia is sms. I do a bit of regional travel in Australia and after adopting “chat features” (RCS) in the Google sms app I started having critical messages failing to go through (without notifying me) because of poor (data) reception and it wasn’t falling back to sms.

I love the features RCS brings to messaging and would love to use it, but it’s just not reliable without an uninterrupted data connection.

We already have a lot of next messaging platforms already that don’t rely on phone numbers and ones which do (like Whatsapp).

Also, in this case it’s really Apple’s fault

The ONLY way to fix the wider world of messaging is mandatory adversarial interoperability.

No matter how clever your new standard is, it will not work.

Adversarial interoperability – even if it is gated to only be required of sufficiently large businesses/platforms – will be the end of all this bullshit once implemented. Messaging should be about the people and the messages, not the platforms.

we need fediverse of instant messaging, where big boys like whatsapp etc are forced to become interoperable with the likes of signal etc

Huh, I hadn’t heard about any of this. I guess that’s because I use Google Voice, and none of the features going into the Messages app have made it over to the Voice app.

Ever since they switched to RCS, I constantly have to manually resend things via SMS just for the messages to actually send. IDK what the main differences are, but the fact that it doesn’t even work 80% of the time is why I hate RCS.