Google tells Apple to 'fix text messaging' in bid to promote RCS protocol Google has launched a campaign to pressure Apple to adopt Rich Communications Services (RCS), a protocol used by most mobile industry vendors but not the iPhone maker. Android devices communicate using RCS, but Apple devices don't. Apple uses its own iMessage protocol in its Messages app to communicate between iPhones. Thus …
Not only that it requires much more complex carrier involvement than is necessary for SMS/MMS, and as a result is far from foolproof at this time as it depends not only on Google servers but also the carrier has to support it. So even Android users will fall back to SMS if they roam, etc.
More to the point, consider that Google has changed their messaging strategy more often than some Reg readers probably change their underwear. What reason do we have to believe that this 8th time or whatever is finally the one Google will be sticking to?
If RCS is so great why did Google try so many proprietary messaging schemes before taking a shot on this well over decade old technology that's languished unnoticed until recently? If they had a coherent messaging strategy they wouldn't be supporting RCS today either.
Frankly, I'd much prefer it if Google simply provided an SMS app. Like there used to be. So I'd know which technology was being used to deliver the messages and half of them wouldn't show up two weeks late.
If I want a real-time text conversation, there's no shortage of choices and I wouldn't choose Google's offering.
Well my new phone only ships with one and the only reason I discovered RCS existed was that messages were sometimes taking days or weeks to arrive and the version of messages on my phone shipped with RCS on by default.
I have turned it off, thank you, but in order to do that I had to know that the app known as Messages had fundamentally changed its behaviour and the only clue to that was its total unreliability. I presume the release notes (and indeed the privacy warnings) are to be found somewhere beyond a "Beware of the Leopard" sign.
Google's messaging sucking is entirely Google's fault, and now they want to blame it on Apple and get them to use Google's own 'standard'?
As a reminder, while Apple has kept on message and on strategy with iMessage, here's a partial list of Google's messaging apps, which they inevitably abandon to spawn a new half-assed monstrosity:
- Google Talk
- Google Voice
- Google Wave
- Google Buzz
- Google Chat
- Google+ Messenger
- Google+ Hangouts
- Google+ Huddle
- Gmail Chat
- Google Docs Chat
- Google Hangouts
- Google Spaces
- Google Allo
- Google Meet
- YouTube Messages
- Google Chat (again)
- Google Maps Messages
- Google Photos Messages
- Google Stadia Messages
- Google Pay Messages
- Google Assistant Messages
- Google Phone Messages
- Google Chat (AGAIN)
I'm sure I'm missing some, some might be dups (who can keep track of them all) and it might not be fair to include some of them like Google Stadia Messages. But the point is that Apple has management and Google has no management - just a series of competing fiefdoms that want to kill off existing products so they can replace them with their hot new worse version of what was previously working (Google Wallet being the most egregious of these, but messaging surely wins for most self-inflicted wounds).
Also, RCS is just plain bad. Apple's response to this is probably just going to be to point and laugh and go 'see, this is why you suck', if they even bother acknowledging it.
Furthermore, did you see Google's website (linked from article)? Hilariously it bemoans the colour combinations by which SMS messages appear in the Google apps. It was at that point I couldn't fathom what they thought they were going to achieve.
Moving to Google-controlled RCS running through Google's servers will allow Google to continually make it slightly shitty for Apple users to contact Google users so they can point the finger in hopes of increasing market share. The entirety of this is a dick-move and another sleight in reasons why people are losing respect for them, again. Not saying I prefer Apple and their business methods but this is incredibad.
Oh wait, they already have.
If you want to be able to communicate seamlessly across mobile platforms, you use WhatsApp, not iMessage or this RCS thing that I have never heard of..
At least WhatsApp is (allegedly) encrypted (although that claim is becoming much more dubious with the new WhatsApp Web system that stores all your messages in the cloud)
Any chance of adopting a system that's not controlled by Google, Apple or Facebook? Not much chance, although Signal seems to be the closest we have to that.
Google have a nasty habit of buying up the competition and then closing them down. How many of the above "Google" products (and the rest, listed in full at killedbygoogle.com) were originally acquisitions?
Even the cases where google acquires a competing product and kills off its earlier in-house version, the effect is the same: They remove a competing product from the market and push all of its customers towards a new one, owned and data-mined by Google.
I remember seeing this thread two months ago and realising why Apple hasn’t implemented RCS yet. The standard might need some more work before it’s ready for the big time.
Initially I had the same reaction to this 'Google prodding Apple to fix messaging' thing - "Surely RCS is a Google thing". Turns out it's not. It's a standard from the GSMA, but like so many other things from the GSMA, it's a mess of a design.
Why does Google not go after Whatsapp? Whatsapp doesn't use RCS either. Neither do Signal or Telegram. Since all three of those and iMessage all use their own custom protocols, I think Google should stop whining. They can always release an app on the App Store ('Messaging with Android') if they are so utterly concerned about security. Oh. Wait. They already tap Whatsapp and Signal for that. Nevermind.
Yes, and no in both cases. Google cobbled it together then convinced the GSMA to turn it into a standard. They even generously offered to host the servers for GSMA members/operators. The operators aren't generally keen, because they don't see money in it.
The standard part also didn't include end-to-end encryption, but now Google has gone it built it over-the-top, but it only works when the clients are Google's, e.g. their Android Messages app.
Channelling my inner cynic: this has been a very long and winding road for Google to try and establish a foothold in the messaging space. A job at which they've consistently failed. As per usual, they'll tout the end-to-end encryption as the main feature, but neglect to mention the insane amount of meta data they'll be privy to. I'm sure they're green with envy at the amount of meta data Meta/Facebook/Whatsapp is slurping up.
I would not be surprised if Google has similar WeChat-style super-app aspirations for Messages/RCS once they've firmly turned it into a global platform. Of course, I might be overly cynical.
The metadata, that's it. That's also what's in it for Meta owning WhatsApp.
Meta doesn't care that you've asked your significant other to pick up some potatoes on the way home. It does, however, care a lot about that you both know each other, where you both are every second of the day, who else you regularly chat with etc. etc.
I'm curious - what else from the GSMA is "a mess of a design"? Many other things they're responsible for - VoLTE, IMEIs seem pretty effective. And, as a member of 3GPP, they have some common responsibility for some very successful standards (GSM, UMTS, LTE, 5G, etc).
RCS was probably as good as could be done at the time it was done, and likely didn't really make the engineers doing it happy at the time either.
RCS was sort of just "handed" to them by Google as a "here's a standard for you". GSMA had tried, around the time of MMS/WAP to create a Wired Village (or maybe I misremember the name) initiative. It was in the identify, communities and instance messaging domain. That was a design-by-committee fail and never even got off the ground.
VoLTE is _just_ VoIP over LTE. Sadly it inherited many of the security issues of VoIP.
Well, that explains why Google are so keen on RCS.
MMS was really only intended to be SMS plus pictures, and it did achieve that.
What ruined WAP was that the network operators tried to make it "theirs", i.e. WAP would take you only as far as the network operators WAP sites and that was it.
The tech underneath WAP wasn't so different to Japan's iMode. However, what the Japanese did was to make sure that iMode could break out of the network operator's network, and literally every business in Japan could operate an iMode site. And lots did. iMode was so successful that it actually significantly delayed the adoption of what we now call smart phones in Japan, because smart phones then were expensive, had terrible battery life and didn't work at all well, where as iMode phones worked a charm, did everything you could possibly want (as a practical tool), and ran for days on a charge. WAP could have matched this in the West, but the greed of the network operators ruined it from day one.
VoLTE exists only because the 3GPPP crowd decided not to put a circuit switched voice profile into LTE. They nearly didn't put one in UMTS, but did at the last minute, which was just as well because VOIP over 3G at the time would have been a total disaster...
Indeed MMS was fundamentally push email. The message format was limited to a very simple structure, but re-used the fundamentals of MIME and email. And then they used the same SMS channel to serve as notification with a link to retrieve the full message.
You could argue push email made Blackberry. They just did slicker, with more conviction, a better user experience and support stock email by routing the "fetch" parts through their secure Blackberry server.
tl;dr: MMS wasn't a horrible idea, maybe a bit ahead of its time and lacking operator commitment/roaming.
Text messaging IS SMS.... Wanting to overcomplicate a simple protocol...is pointless. Apple's use of it caused huge issues a few years ago if one switched from Apple to a different company, as iphones somehow marked the device as 'use imessage' and refused to send proper SMS messages
As far as I'm concerned....
"they do not support modern texting features like end-to-end encryption, high quality media sharing, read receipts, typing indicators and more."
......is as good a reason as any to not use it.
Agreed, but I believe that is a level lower. WhatsApp started out using XMPP (and may still do, just in a Signal-based encryption wrapper). iMessage still is XMPP as far as I'm aware. Same for Facebook Messenger. Most messaging systems just grab XMPP as the starting point and then build upon and around that.
It's the interoperability where the challenge lies. Having twelve walled gardens all use XMPP doesn't help interoperability one bit.
As usual, the tech bit is the easy bit, the economics is the hard part. The success of SMS was that operators could charge for its use. That gave them an economic incentive to support it, nay, actively promote it. Imagine there were some open standard based around XMPP for interoperable messaging. Demand side will not be the driver as most people don't care, they just want to chat with Jane about Love Island, even if it goes via a server in China owned by the state. Supply side will not be the driver if there is no way to at the very least offset the cost and preferably even make a profit.
"But Signal refuse to deny that they were backdoored by the americans."
Do you have any links for any more information about that claim?
(Yes, part of me does always wonder/worry that someone in dark sunglasses is playing a very very long game with Moxie and co being 'double agents', but, on the other hand, at least they're not Meta or Telegram - whose encryption is thought to be poor (small mercies, or perhaps not).
At the end of the day, crypto is hard, and trying to make an informed decision about who you can trust is also hard. (Part of me also worries whether autocomplete usage on iOS/Android phone keyboards ends up being sent back to the motherships as 'diagnostics telemetry', allowing them to reconstruct your messages as you type them anyway?))
It’s all very silly that if I want to communicate with this group, they use signal, and these others use discord and somebody else uses telegram and the chavs all use WhatsApp and if I want to talk to these people I need to have a separate app and account for each. Totally ridiculous. It’s like having to have a Vodafone SIM to talk to vodafone network users, an EE SIM to talk to EE customers etc. Sort it out.
I was going to post to say there are already several alternatives fro people needing to communicate between different devices. WhatsApp seems the most ubiquitous and I have to use it for messaging various groups (especially within the younger generation of my family); I'd prefer if they used Signal but WhatsApp does the job (allows exchange of messages and pictures).
Apple's iMessage is just one extra one, but one that is also able to fallback to SMS (which is available on all mobiles - and there are people I need to message who don't have a smartphone, so SMS is needed). Personally, I see no need to change the iMessage protocol - it may need Apple hardware to make the best use, but it is still able to communicate with any other mobile. The fact that the bubbles change colour is useful as the level of message security changes.
Yes, having one app that can merge all the protocols would be useful, but it's not really a hardship as it stands.
Signal does this already.
If you choose to give Signal access to your contacts and allow it to to be the default SMS client then sending a message to a contact that is not on Signal will seamlessly use SMS instead.
I prefer to keep messaging systems separate and don't share my contacts, but the feature is there.
Because email is very rarely end-to-end encrypted.
But on that note, Delta Chat is perhaps worth a look.
In the context of a universal messaging system there is one significant, unresolved issue. What is actually needed?
To date, we have Email, and SMS. Email only recently (2008-ish?) came to mobile telephony, SMS has been around ever since the GSM standards engineers decided to slip it in to aid network engineers (and of course it became the phenomenon of the late 1990s, early 2000s). Both are moderately simple to implement and support, they do different things, but both deliver quite a punch despite that simplicity. SMS is actually pretty amazing, on an absolute scale; getting a short text message delivered for almost no power consumption to a mobile phone anywhere on the planet nearly instantly was a major accomplishment of that time.
But, what more is actually needed?
End to end encryption? A popular choice, but also not one universally called for (especially law enforcement agencies). This aspect is important, because I can't see government applying pressure for the adoption of a universal rich messaging system that they themselves can't easily get into.
Group chat? Definitely got its plus points. Ability to block senders? Multimedia and daft icons? Two little ticks? "XXX is typing" indications? Time expiring messages? How about a mode that works on feature phones (SMS works perfectly well on these...).
And so on. Basically, the feature set one ends up with isn't so very different to the design of the original, BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), from which all of today's apps are derived. Even BBM was end to end encrypted in its Enterprise guise (well, the company held the keys, not BlackBerry).
RCS clearly isn't the way to go, it's just rubbish.
Basically, it seems pretty clear that the set of features people want would settle on those found in BBM or WhatsApp or Signal - they're all nearly the same; something like that. The one remaining issue then is, end-2-end encrypted, or end-2-server encrypted to keep law enforcement agencies happy? I can't ever see that debate being voluntarily settled to the satisfaction of all interested parties across the globe. Without that, there can never be a single, standardised, open universal messaging system. So, in the current status quo between governments, law enforcement agencies, users and companies, fragmentation is inevitable.
Google are Analysing the Wrong Problem
Ok, so that's a fairly brief and obvious analysis of messaging and policy. And from that, one can conclude that Google are on to a hiding to nothing in its calls for Apple to adopt RCS. Fragmentation in messaging is more or less guaranteed for a long time to come, so they may as well just suck that up, clone Signal or WhatsApp or BBM, and just run it for sufficiently long for us hardened sceptics to become confident that this isn't just another flash in the pan from a company with a long history of dropping products.
They could even do something radical (for Google at any rate) and make it plain that they're genuinely not collecting any profitable metadata from it. Perhaps they could open source their code so that independents can confirm that it doesn't suck up contact lists and pipe them off to the Google mega-brain, doesn't exploit device data (location, sensors, etc) in any way other than to make the app work.
Governments, and What's Left After They've Adjusted?
As a background to all this, there is still the issue of governments, law enforcement, etc. Governments are very powerful - they can pass laws - and it looks like various governments are building up to pass some quite radical legislation that will impact any company running end-2-end encrypted messaging services. The rights and wrongs are a separate issue, let's just think for now about the consequences.
WhatsApp have already said that they'd rather pull out of the UK than cave into demands for access by law enforcement agencies. Bold talk indeed - but possibly a fatal step. The UK has historically been at the forefront of developing legislation for tech - the Data Protection Act of 1984 was pretty farsighted and has generally been A Very Good Thing - and it's likely that if the UK does legislatively "evict" WhatsApp from the UK, a lot of other countries will follow suit (the EU, Aus, NZ, bits of SE Asia, etc). WhatsApp could lose a big slice of market...
And if WhatsApp goes, what about Signal, or anything else of that ilk? Basically, in large chunks of the world, it might simply become commercially and legislatively unviable to operate end-2-end encrypted services. Governments will probably set fines too large to be passed on to the consumer, and make travel difficult for those intent on running such services from outside of their country.
The question then is, would there be anything left at all? Would any company be willing to run a messaging service fragmented by differing legal frameworks and customer expectations?
Probably not.
Good Excuse for Apple?
In which case, Google's calls for everyone to adopt RCS takes on a different feeling. It could be that, by the time legislation settles down all over the civilised democratic world, the only thing left that makes any sense for anyone to implement is RCS - or more likely an updated working version of something similar - with legal intercept taken into account (RCS does this, just like SMS and email are).
Apple are clearly feeling some political heat over iMessage and their platform in general. They tried to introduce this stupid neural network thing into iPhones that would automatically dib you into the cops if it thought it'd found something illegal. That did not go down well at all. The fact that they tried at all suggests that they're aware of impending problems if they don't do something.
So, whilst Apple might initially laugh at Google's suggestion to implement RCS, it might be that, actually, they're looking for an excuse for changing the way they do messaging that (as a not widely discussed side effect) also gives a sensible legal intercept capability back to governments. A bit of legislative anti-trust attention too might be an additional excuse they can wheel out to annoyed customers, saying "sorry, we have no choice but to interoperate with this new standard".
We may see some very strange corporate alliances emerging in this changing world, e.g. Apple and Google jointly taking on Facebook / WhatsApp.
WhatsApp alone processes somewhere north of 10x more messages per day than SMS, and that's before you count WeChat, Messenger, Snapchat, Telegram, Signal etc. etc. Using iMessage or SMS routinely is a geographic quirk you'll find in some places historically constrained by artificial bandwidth limits on mobile contracts. In most geographies SMS messages are reduced to carrying very little besides 2FA and marketing messages, and even iMessage is a distant also-ran in most geographies for iOS users.
even iMessage is a distant also-ran in most geographies for iOS users
I would expect that's the case in places where iPhone has only a few percent of the market, as places like that tend to be dominated by some messenger most people in the country have tacitly agreed upon, like WhatsApp or WeChat.
In most western countries iPhone's share is far higher than that and I would be surprised if most iPhone owners are using something else. You have any data to back up your claims?
As for me, I use iMessage to communicate with everyone, and since it seamlessly falls back to SMS for those who don't have an iPhone I can communicate with everyone. I have yet to have a single one tell me they want me to contact them via WhatsApp or some other application. I don't have any other messaging apps installed anyway, and likely wouldn't bother for just one person.
More than the money side, let's see who is for and against it.
If the US is for it (one will probably hear more from backwards Southern states) - "think of the kids", then it is probably secure. Or they are showing their ignorance, or both.
If the evil dictator de jour is for it, or not against it - it probably is open to everyone that asks Google for info. If the evil dictator de jour is against it, it probably means it has good enough security (one's definition of security can vary to the next persons')
If the UK security agencies are against it, it is probably barred TO THEM. I assume they can also as Uncle Sam and Google nicely.
If the EU are against it on privacy ground, i will assume it leaks like a sieve.
I am sure a matrix or decision tree can be made of this.
"If the EU are against it on privacy ground, i will assume it leaks like a sieve."
But only after Max Schrems has pointed out to them that there's an issue. Until then, the EU will have considered it good and secure, because the Americans said so. See: Safe Harbor, Privacy Shield, etc.
"If the US is for it (one will probably hear more from backwards Southern states) - "think of the kids", then it is probably secure. Or they are showing their ignorance, or both."
You're two or three days out of touch: since the FBI started acting like politicians do not have automatic immunity, representatives for the southern states suddenly want to defund the police.
"my SO's computer notifies her anytime she gets a "text" message from any Apple user, but not from Android users (i.e. me). What's the point in such software if it only works with Apple?"
In that case, your SO should pick up her iPhone and go to:
Settings » Messages » Text Message Forwarding
…and add her Mac to the list, so that SMS messages to her phone number can be received and sent on her Mac (as well as iMessages, which the Mac Messages app already knows about automatically).
Apple and Google, please agree on something so your users have a seamless experience with something as simple as text...
Agreed ... but that's the problem, isn't it? We're talking about "something as simple as text" but they're talking about "features like end-to-end encryption, high quality media sharing, read receipts, typing indicators and more."
I like SMS. Like most other mobile phone users in the UK I get unlimited SMS text messages FREE, but have to pay -- albeit not very much -- for mobile internet usage. For the things for which I use SMS I don't care about sophistications like encryption and media-sharing; I just want to send a simple short text message.
SMS uses a standard protocol that is set by the standards used by the carriers. All phones have to support those standards, at some level, as they have to conform to those standards. Deciding not to expose the protocol at app level is just perverse, stupid, and limiting.
I'm in two minds as to whether using a single app to manage SMS messaging and IP-based messaging is helpful or confusing ... but there should at the very least be a way to send a message specifically by SMS rather than any other protocol, and there should be a way to receive SMS messages.
MMS is a completely different bucket of hake. MMS is not free, and in fact is stupidly expensive. It costs hugely more to send media by MMS than by IP-based protocols, and I can't see any redeeming benefits, except that MMS may be accessible on some non-smart phones. There's a clear win for the IP-based protocols, here, but it's really nothing to do with texting.
MMS is a completely different bucket of hake. MMS is not free, and in fact is stupidly expensive. It costs hugely more to send media by MMS than by IP-based protocols
You get charged for sending MMS? That hasn't been true in the US for ages, where pretty much all plans offer "unlimited texts" and MMS has always been included as a "text".
Pretty sure carriers here count MMS against your data allocation (since that is how it is delivered) so not sure what you mean by "costs hugely more than by IP based protocols". You pay data charges to send multimedia via iMessage or WhatsApp or RCS too, so it is the same cost either way. IP based protocols are how MMS is delivered, with some extra steps that involve an SMS message with the URL for your phone to visit to pick it up after it has traversed one or more carrier servers.
>You get charged for sending MMS?
Yes!
"unlimited texts" - In the UK this means unlimited SMS's
MMS aka photo messages are charged, currently EE charges 55p per message.
Because pure data charges are significantly lower, it makes good financial sense to install WhatsApp et al.
That’s just the MMS stuff - for all other options around US vs UK carriers and costs, I’d take the UK carriers every time having spent a few years in the States. Oh, and the AT&T guy I spoke to last time I moved over there said he would too based on his sister’s experience in the UK.
EE have the best network around my way but they are stupidly expensive. I did use Virgin Mobile who are a VMNO piggybacking on EEs network but they wanted to play the "put your (sim-only) contract cost up by RPI each year" game so now I'm on Smarty. The network is just about good enough and they don't play any silly games.
No. This is a cultural phenomenon specific to the US. WhatsApp, Line, Telegram and Signal, to name a few, all exist and are used by the rest of the 7.6 billion people in the world. Clearly the remaining 0.33 billion people are incapable. Yes, a unified standard would be nice. But outside of the US, it's not a problem of lock in.
> Android devices communicate using RCS
No they really don't. Every time I buy a phone I turn off RCS within a week because I can't recieve messages from some contacts by RCS - and these are Android users, not iPhone. RCS doesn't work at the best of times, failing to deliver messages and not even telling you they failed. It doesn't work if you don't have an Internet connection and if you know anyone on a pay as you go SIM just forget it.
The supposed benefits are garbage. Why would I care if someone happens to be typing on their phone, I don't get the message till they send it so there is no value in telling me they are typing.
A secure version of SMS would be a better choice than RCS.
I wish they'd leave SMS alone. Whatsapp etc. are great, but must have a data connection to work. SMS will work when you are in low signal areas where you can't get even EDGE or 3G (they still exist). I sometimes find that SMS will work when voice won't as it keeps trying until your recipient wanders into a signal.
Also for those without decent data roaming contracts when abroad. So a great fall back. Suspect that carriers will want to keep it; how else can they send you messages to sign up to a nice expensive data roaming option?
Delivery notification could be nice if it could be added easily and non-disruptively. For example, I have developed my own protocol to cover some of this (patent in creation). I add the words "please reply or call when you get this" to the message :-)
Yes! The problem isn't that Apple falls back to SMS for messages to non-Apple phones, the problem is that it waits for a data network to use iMessage to Apple phones even when it could send an SMS right away. I frequently have data roaming turned off and want to send an SMS message to someone, but the iPhone just won't send it if it knows that person has an iPhone also. If a data connection exists, then fine, use some other protocol; if not, why not just send the message!
If I had a data connection, I probably would have used WhatsApp anyhow.
The trouble is that the iPhone only provides the iMessage application. With Android I have a choice, I can use the built in Text Message/SMS application or I can use a functionally richer third-party application.
If memory serves me correctly, on earlier versions of iOS (think iPhone 5) you could make iMessage send a message as an SMS, but it wasn't easy/obvious.
"If memory serves me correctly, on earlier versions of iOS (think iPhone 5) you could make iMessage send a message as an SMS, but it wasn't easy/obvious."
Settings » Messages
…and then either disable the "iMessage" toggle or enable the "Send as SMS" toggle (for use when sending as iMessage fails).
I also seem to recall on an occasion when my network's data connection was being briefly flakey, iMessage would attempt to send to an iPhone user as an iMessage, but when the sending failed, it would let me know and then ask if I wanted to retry as SMS (this might have been related to the setting above, I can't remember).
Yes, there are ways to force it to work. It's just interesting that the designers chose to require more steps to communicate with another Apple device than are required to communicate with any other while the data connection is unavailable. The cost of data roaming is a separate problem, and part of the environment that the phone should be able to handle.
I've tried to use RCS. To use RCS I had to register my phone number with Google server and if I did that too many times the registration failed. I had to re-register every time I rebooted my mobile phone and there's a limit on that on the Google servers. This should not how you design a message protocol. Both SMS and MMS have their failure, because of when they where designed but they at least work as expected and do not require me to register my phone number every time I reboot my phone.
New message system is needed, one that works over 4G and 5G and WiFi. RCS is not that message system. I've turned RCS off on my phone.
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