Lol, the ios users will still be subjected to the eye-fucking shade of green when chatting with android users. Apple sure loves to mess with their users.
I find the green just fine! It’s my favorite color. I’m just happy I’ll be able to send high quality videos to my Android friends who refuse to download signal!
Are you using the default shade of green, or did you enable higher contrast setting in accessibility? I hear it helps with readability.
Default, I’ll check that out! I’ve never cared about the colors of the text bubbles myself, but a deeper green would be pretty cool.
And don’t forget the white text with close to zero contrast.
Hostile design right there
RCS is the wrong one to use, since it is not an open enough standard for there to be a single FOSS RCS app on Android. Something like Matrix or the Signal protocol would be better.
Seriously? Matrix and signal already exists… So you can use them today instead of RCS to your heart’s desire.
I think they mean it more as it’s not only gonna be Google but Apple who are going to be shoving RCS down their throats of people wether they want it or not by shipping it as default.
On the other hand, the era when corporations cared even the tiniest bit for open standards in instant messaging was gone long ago. Now all instant messaging is a complete mess, we users have to deal with a myriad of apps and protocols that in the end are doing the same thing for the sake of “privacy”, and RCS will not fix that. Nor Signal, truth be told.
I yearn the glory days of multi-protocol IM apps like Pidgin and Trident on Android (though +IM seems to still be a thing) - when you could use whatever you wanted without “missing features” or risking to be banned.
“Shoving RCS down their throats” is like saying they’re “shoving phone calls down their throats” or “shoving SMS down their throats”.
As for the mess of chat apps, we’ve had apps like Pidgin before and with Beeper Mini we will have them again. Beeper Mini started out as a way to get iMessage on Android, but their plan has always been to mirror Beeper in that they want to collect different chat protocols in one single app.
Barring that, the EU’s DMA is forcing the most important chat apps to interoperate at the very least, though full support (including calling and such) isn’t mandatory until somewhere in 2027.
Yeah, no. Pretty bad argument.
When you buy a phone you know it will have calls and SMS - it’s what you bought the phone in the first place. You bought them because of that. RCS is still just a fancy alternative.
Barring that, the EU’s DMA is forcing the most important chat apps to interoperate at the very least, though full support (including calling and such) isn’t mandatory until somewhere in 2027.
And you’re missing the point again - a company doing a multi IM service app, like Beeper Mini, is not the same that a group of volunteers doing a multi service IM app, like Pidgin. They’re still going to be closed source and they will not guarantee to give support for platforms people need. Beeper mini on desktop? Beeper mini on Linux/BSD? Forget it.
You know it’ll call and SMS because those are telecom standard. The same is true for RCS. RCS is made by the same people who made SMS and basic voice calling.
The 4G spec people made RCS services optional for carriers. The Chinese government made it mandatory. Even Chinese dumbphones are going to support RCS once they start putting 5G in them for better coverage.
Beeper Mini is mostly closed (there’s a source dump out there but that’s not maintained) but it has bridges for all the major chat services, all completely open source, based on Matrix bridging. You’re free to take that code and make an app yourself if you want to rip out the Matrix dependency.
Personally, I’m waiting for MLS and MIMI to be taken up, but that’s still a work in progress.
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RCS is the wrong one to use
For you. I have relatives with iPhones I don’t talk to frequently but when we get together and somebody takes a group photo it’s annoying. Being able to just text a decent resolution photo without people needing to download an app is a win.
I’ll continue to use Signal with friends and family I talk to regularly.
This right here. I have to have my mom send videos of the grandkids to my work iPhone because my personal Android received them heavily pixelated and compressed.
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Hundreds?!?! Ok, just name one hundred.
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If Apple implemented the Matrix or Signal protocol it would still work the same way for you, while not forcing other Android users to use on Google or Samsung’s proprietary apps, those being the only options for RCS.
Huh? No it wouldn’t. If Apple implemented the Signal protocol they would still have to publish an iMessage app to the Play Store for Android users.
Call Google’s messaging app proprietary all you want but at least their implementation of RCS is E2E encrypted.
If it used the Signal protocol any app that used that protocol which is open, could interact with it, that is the point. Whereas RCS is a closed protocol, just one that happens to also be interoperable with Google Messages, but not any other third party apps that people might want to make.
To be honest, I’m a bit surprised that on Lemmy people are so against open standards and FOSS apps.
That’s not how it works. Other apps (ironically including Google’s RCS implementation) use the Signal Protocol. Simply using it doesn’t magically make your app interoperable with every other app that uses it. And Apple would be the last company to go out of their way to make it work.
Nobody here is against open standards or FOSS apps. I am actually lucky/privileged enough to be able to write open source code for a living.
You seem to not understand the reality of the situation and that use case other than yours exist.
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since it is not an open enough standard
The standard is fine: https://www.gsma.com/newsroom/wp-content/uploads/RCC.71-v2.6-1.pdf
This isn’t an Apple standard or a Google standard, it’s a telecoms standard. It’s made for everything from IoT to flip phones to tablets to smart cars.
Nobody has bothered to build an app for it, though. Well, carriers have, but nobody uses their carrier’s messaging app.
RCS is an open standard, but Google’s implementation of it isn’t AFAIK. That’s why there exist no 3rd party RCS client outside of those praised by Google.
Google’s implementation is just a bunch of weird text sent over texts. It’s using the standard as a transport for their own extensions.
That doesn’t mean other apps can’t communicate with Google’s client. You can’t use Google’s special sauce like encryption (without reverse engineering the details) but you could very well use your own.
What developers want when they say they want Google to open RCS is for Google to take the RCS code out of their messages app and put it into a standard API, the way SMS and MMS work, so developers don’t need to go through the trouble of implementing RCS and basically be able to use the existing code without changes. That’s a nice idea, but I don’t think it’ll happen any day soon. Google generally doesn’t contribute their closed source stuff back into open source Android. There is one type of RCS authentication that requires interacting with the SIM card, which only privileged (system) apps can do. All other forms of authentication can be implemented by any app. With multiple SIMs, you could even use different apps for different services. However, they’d need to actually implement the RCS spec, which everyone is hoping to avoid.
iPhones will be able to message Android phones without Google lifting a finger. Flipphones will be able to do it too. Things like video calling, sending money, and stickers can all work, because that stuff works over standard RCS. The lack of encryption is a pain (though I doubt it’d take long for someone to reverse that) but it’s not something existing cross platform texting solutions offer.
Google Messages is the Microsoft Wordpad of text editing. Pieces of it are open, most of it is composed of public APIs, and it’s no more than a very specific implementation of existing standards.
Are those carrier apps FOSS? Are they on F-Droid? How do you install them? If not, it’s not really any better.
Just because no open source developers have bothered to implement a standard doesn’t mean the standard is closed. Anyone with interest could set up an RCS server, connect an RCS app (by manually specifying the base URL or by hosting a private 4G network) and start hosting their own RCS infrastructure, though you’d probably face difficulty trying to connect your open source network to the big ISPs.
OpenIMSS is working towards a fully open source LTE (and up) network that also sports RCS support. The voice/video calling features are already supported by opensips. I believe OpenIMSS and the underlying base software is run through docker. It’s a rather niche piece of software, as you have to be an MVNO or a carrier to connect to the public RCS network. Nothing prevents the open source community from running their own network, though; that’s how Matrix and XMPP work, after all.
As for RCS clients, https://github.com/Hirohumi/RustyRcs seems to fit the bill, though I haven’t run it myself to see how complete it is. There’s no pre-built APK but if you have Android Studio and Rust on your machine you should be able to get it running in no time.
- why an ios article on c/android, 2) why RCS? SMS was a good system for what it did, so does that automatically create an obligation to mess it up?
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Most Android phones use RCS, so it’s on-subject here since most of us don’t pay attention to iPhone news - and is welcomed news because of #2’s answer
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You ever been in a low or no signal area, but have wifi, and try to text an iPhone user? Ever try to send/receive photos/videos with an iPhone and they look like garbage? Tired of getting SMS’s in group chats of “Mom loved ‘Please poop in the toilet next time, we are tired of cleaning it up’” instead of it just “hearting” the SMS message? A lot of new tech coming out today started from something that “was good” and was built on to make it better.
The thing about SMS is that it sometimes worked in low signal situations where voice and internet didn’t get through. That is a virtue that shouldn’t be given up easily. If anything its reliability should be enhanced. It’s fine to also support a fancier chat scheme as well, but a robust, 1-to-1 text-only mode is important.
Right, I haven’t seen any of them say they are doing away with SMS. Even Android who has RCS in place also has SMS along side it, RCS is just an enhancement.
Even with RCS on both major platforms in the near future, a lot of automations and companies will continue to utilize SMS, and I’d bet that’s true for a long time.
Ah ok. I only use SMS in very basic ways, so if it’s going to stay around then I’m glad. Thanks.
At least with Google messages, you can still send normal SMS if your RCS chat can’t go through. I think there’s an option for it to automatically resend as SMS if RCS fails, too.
I guess there’s no way of knowing if SMS will eventually drop out of fashion, but it would be good to keep around so it probably will stay around as a back up
Edit: well, I didn’t see the other response say basically what I said, oops
Sounds good, thanks.
RCS uses data channels so it won’t work if other texting services don’t work either. It may work better in overloaded networks (RCS can use a separate APN for higher priority, I believe), but it’s not like SMS (which snuggles bytes in a space that would otherwise be an empty bag of bytes that is necessary for bare minimum messaging).
I’ve had to turn off RCS because, when you don’t have WiFi/great cellular data access, you can’t do shit. I couldn’t even open the messages app.
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SMS can’t do group texting. It can’t do images, video, or anything other than a short message (140 to 180 characters depending on your language).
MMS followed SMS and it can do group texting. However, attachment sizes are laughably small, leading to 160p videos being compressed to hell to make it across the tiny video size limits.
MMS also used to cost more in some places. My carrier simply shut it down a couple of years ago because nobody was using it (I live in a WhatsApp country).
RCS is the official next generation of SMS/MMS, made by the people who define standards like 3G/4G/5G. Basically MMS 2.0. Very few carrière launched RCS services when they rolled out 4G, even fewer phones had RCS clients, so you ended up with needing to download your carrier’s (inferior) messaging app to maybe exchange RCS messages with other people if they also downloaded their carrier’s apps.
SMS still works and has always worked.
Isn’t RCS fully controlled by Google now, with encryption only if the messages first go through Google’s servers so they can scrape their sweet sweet advertising keywords?
It doesn’t really matter what server you use for encryption. The key exchange still happens through Google’s servers if you use Google’s app, but there’s nothing for them to scrape there. RCS is a federated network of carrier services so any server can carry your encrypted messages, though you’ll only be able to use a few servers in practice (your carrier’s server and Google’s, as Google opened theirs up to just about anyone). Also, messages are end-to-end encrypted by default so there’s nothing for Google to scrape.
The RCS spec is maintained by the GSMA, specifically this working group within it. That’s a collective of over 1200 companies. Google is probably part of GSMA, but so is everyone else who does anything with mobile networking.
