So essentially, it's not really an Apple thing, it's more that the universal RCS profile just didn't have encryption, and Google RCS was a non-standard extension that nobody else was allowed to use.
The real news is the update to GSMA RCS, because without that, none of this matters. What I'm missing in the article is who's going to own the keys and why this is probably going to default to the telcos as if it's MMS. Are they going back to the days of charging per message?
With iMessage you'd be putting your trust in Apple, with Google RCS you'd be putting your trust in Google. For WhatsApp that'd be Meta and for Signal that's Signal. But with GSMA RCS?
The thing about RCS is that no messengers seem to care at all about implementing RCS themselves. Part of that is probably because depending on the carrier, RCS may require access to certain SIM card information, which only pre-installed apps can do, and part of it is that many developers are waiting for Google to add RCS to the same API that SMS/MMS already exposes because they don't want to implement RCS themselves.
Realistically, the target demographic for their documentation is 1) Apple (who they'd happily supply with details to get rid of the green bubble problem) and maybe 2) government officials looking into antitrust concerns. In theory someone working for LineageOS can implement an RCS client, though, but for those developers I don't think reverse engineering the remaining unknowns about the protocol (mostly "what server" and "what message contents") aren't that difficult.
I'm not cryptographer, but I haven't heard any major issues from actual cryptographers about MLS. It's encryption principles seem to be similar to those of Signal. Google is actually already using MLS in their proprietary E2EE implementation.
Ideally, MLS would be combined with MIMI so that messaging apps become interoperable, but that's probably a pipe dream.
> who they'd happily supply with details to get rid of the green bubble problem
I would be surprised if this eliminates green bubbles. iMessage supports many features unavailable over RCS on Android devices. These would still be disabled and Apple needs a way to indicate a degraded feature set to iMessage users.
Not to Google. Green bubbles were a big social shaming issue affecting the sale of Android. This is all in the US only afaik. So in other countries with a similar iPhone market share there isn’t a green bubble social stigma.
That's false. The color green is irrelevant. If the Apple bubbles had been green, and the Android bubbles had been blue, still the Android bubbles would have been shamed. It was never about the color. It was because of the SMS/iMessage feature incompatibilities.
Let me spell it out: the arbitrary color lets you identify the ones who use Android. Some people think the reason for using Android is being poor. Others don’t want to be seen as poor, because social posturing is important to them.
If they were functionally equivalent, why signal a difference? What's the benefit, you think? I'm not saying that they definitely would signal a difference, but in this hypothetical, if the color difference remained, it would be obvious why.
Just please stop sending the text that reads as follows, it totally destroys group chats and the amount of information conveyed in a react doesn't require quoting back the entire message, eg
Liked "I would be surprised if this eliminates green bubbles. iMessage supports many features unavailable over RCS on Android devices. These would still be disabled and Apple needs a way to indicate a degraded feature set to iMessage users."
I have never seen a reaction that helped. "OK" is short, it's in plain text, and it works easily. I don't need your thumbs up. Or your like. You want to emoji, go ahead, but I'm getting older and I can't zoom in on them without blowing up general text to the same size. With more complex emoji I have to screenshot the text and then pull up the image to zoom on it to even tell what it is.
I'd silence the conversation, except that iMessage won't let you have two identical groups with exactly the same members. So both humorous and serious stuff goes into the same group chat, and it's often very time-sensitive if serious. Then three or four people start joking around, reacting to each other, and suddenly while I'm at dinner (or, my favorite, one hour into a three-hour drive) my phone or watch is going off every twenty seconds for five minutes. I can't ignore them, because one of those dings might be from someone else about something that needs an answer right now. I can't risk forgetting to turn notifications back on.
When I still used an Android phone, the max-ten-people SMS rule meant that I was missing important business information - like, for example, I found out that our secretary had cancer when she asked me for restaurant recommendations near MD Anderson Cancer Clinic in Houston. Never occurred to anyone else that I had gotten none of that.
You admit that you’re getting older, and I think that’s part of the disconnect with emojis. OK does not convey the same thing. You’re talking about having to zoom in to see the emoji, and the younger crowd already has every one memorized. The reactions may not help you but I’d say for most of us, they do help.
Fine. Is "10-4" or "copy that" or "Roger" acceptable? Because the whole point of that text, in a work context (and this is always a work conversation; I like my partners but I'm not personal friends with them), is to convey "I have received your message". And a reaction generates an SMS that is, until you realize what it is, kind of incomprehensible. "Loved '[my comment]'" makes no sense when you get it as a long comment.
> The reactions may not help you
I have trouble seeing how they help anyone. You made an obvious joke. A guy who laughs at anything reacts "HA-HA!!" or whatever. What is the contribution? The youngest member of my partnership is 40, though we do have a 33-year-old joining in a few months.
This isn't "get off my lawn", much as I do love that. It's "explain to me how it's useful for actual minute-to-minute work". I'm a physician. An anesthesiologist. I never know when the next emergency will arise, but OTOH we don't go for a sterile cockpit approach because there are a lot of conversations that have to do with the running of the day at work that aren't entirely serious (and don't involve patient care, as such; that's why we don't use the sterile cockpit method - it's more about figuring out who can let whom go to lunch, becuase you can't just leave someone under anesthesia to go eat, or how we might be able to let Dr. X operate in about an hour - personnel management is the biggest part of my on-call duties).
We are 3-6 people, and our pattern is specific reaction to questions like this. "do (specific task) so I can go forward" "can someone take over communication with X", depending on what we do we react differently I will do it/it is done/please clarify. This means that if you need two people in a meeting and get two "please clarify" and two "will be there" reactions, there will be less traffic in the chat. It is more concise.
You have a hint above you need to be specific what means what, when we onboard new people we go through these things. This is a problem with ontologies you have to be specific and not allow meanings to drift.
I am not a emoji expert but this has been a way to make our chats a lot more easy to get a grip on.
We do not use Apple so do not get "Loved X" types of messages.
Well you actually make a point for short reaction standardized support.
You won't be able to alter behavior of everyone around you. So at least the software should render these interactions in the least obnoxious way by being consistent on both side.
You will always be able to ask for textual clarification. But the big win is that you won't be bothered by sub-par quoting repost.
While acknowledging that you might not have any agency about this in your specific situation, this sounds more like a social/boundaries problem than a technical one.
If I were in a group chat with people both joking around and sending messages requiring urgent responses, I'd let them know to either cut the banter and keep the channel clear, or contact me otherwise if they need my urgent reaction. Letting people hold my attention hostage like that would drive me crazy.
I realize that I live in an unusual life vis-a-vis most HN readers. I do not work in tech, and I never have. I'm a physician: specifically, an anesthesiologist. I have always enjoyed tech, and I'm certainly miles ahead of most of my colleagues on that. But. Remote work is not possible. Relocating involves getting a new license to practice medicine (3-8 months), getting accepted by the medical staff of any hospital or surgery center you want to work at (~2 months after license is secure and job contract is signed), and all the usual stuff.
So I cannot not answer any number that isn't outside the US system when I'm on call. I can't silence the phone when I'm on call. I can't ignore messages. But we're a partnership, so there's no HR to file a complaint with when someone banters on a business channel, and I can't order them to do something any more than they could order me.
It definitely sounds like a technical one if you can't make two groups, one for banter and one for serious talk so you can mute banter when it's not appropriate.
How are other people supposed to know that it's not okay for you right now because you are at dinner?
We all live in the same metro area. You might eat as early as five, you might finish as late as nine. But if you're going to use the business group, it should be about business. Banter is fine during working hours.
People get lazy and just use the "whole group" message rather than send it to those who are working today. And it's much like my problems with Android vs iOS: there are twelve people in this group, eleven of them have iPhones. They are not all going to install and use a separate messaging app for business than for personal communication, especially as iMessage is nominally E2EE. I could adapt or just be completely marginalized. So now twelve have iPhones.
Have you considered using something like Slack or Discord or (can’t believe I’m suggesting this) Teams, all of which sound like they’d be more suited to your use case?
This does not sound like an impossible stretch, works on more device types, and in the case of Slack or Teams can also be configured for HIPAA compliance (which while you don’t call it out, seems like it may be useful). Tens of millions of people use a chat system for work distinct from their personal friend groups, even if the venn diagram is a circle.
What happens if you have a group with N+1 members and then remove the extra one? That would be a weird error message to write... "you can't remove X because everyone else is already in a group?"
> I'd silence the conversation, except that iMessage won't let you have two identical groups with exactly the same members. So both humorous and serious stuff goes into the same group chat, and it's often very time-sensitive if serious
Really? That's insane, so that means that 3rd party messaging apps literally have better UX than first party ones, as I have lots of groups with the same members for different things.
You'd expect an app, like Whatsapp or Discord or Signal, which focuses primarily on messaging, to be able to devote more attention to it than apple, which is really just a hardware company that reluctantly makes just enough software to charge 30% of all the good app's profits, and sell their hardware.
iMessage just not supporting android/windows/linux devices already makes it drastically worse than any other popular chat app.
You’ve pretty much indirectly nailed the issue: on iOS, iMessage is much more than just a “chat app”. It has an unrivaled feature set on iOS that isn’t replicable on other chat apps. The discourse that reduces it to a “chat app” is critically missing this point.
This wouldn’t mean much if iOS was a small percentage of phones. In regions where it is a majority of phones people use those additional features. In places like the US where most people are using iOS, most people don’t even realize those features don’t exist or are semi-broken on other chat apps because they don’t use them. For average people that have been using iMessage for a long time with other iMessage users, using those other chat apps feels like a downgrade.
The only two features I can think of that iMessage has which discord/whatsapp/etc don't are:
1. Automatically can flip to "do not disturb" mode when my phone is in sleep mode, and display that notice to my companion. Other chat apps require manually configuring that I think. I also suspect apple doesn't provide an API to make this easily possible for other apps.
2. iMessage makes it easy to identify the poors, the android users, and ignore them. If I exchange numbers on a dating app and get a green bubble, I can know to immediately ghost them.
Are those the features you were thinking about, or something else?
Most (all?) of the Apple iOS apps and data can be collaboratively shared, edited, etc over iMessage and it is extremely seamless with fine-grained access controls. I get people sending me calendars, notes, slide decks, documents, etc to either read or work on together via iMessage/iCloud. You can selectively share most things in your iOS environment with any other person in the iOS ecosystem. Google Apps is a pale imitation of this. And the security is tight.
I’ve never seen anything like this on any other chat app I’ve used. Most objects in iOS can be directly shared or collaborated on over iMessage, and that is a very rich set of objects. People that only use iMessage don’t even realize other chat apps can’t do some of these things.
They use iMessage with their family and friends. They use it at work too. Some of their friends, and maybe some of their family, work at the same place. I can try to convince 11 other people who are my business partners to switch to, say, Signal. A special app used only for our group communications. Or I can buy an iPhone. I chose the latter.
It's not my choice. I'm making the best of it that I can. I wish it were not so, but it is.
All the non-tech people in every non-US country have whatsapp/telegram/wechat/line/kakao installed (depending on the country), and it seems to work fine.
It's just the US that has picked a universal messenger that doesn't work on android, every other country, the vast majority of the planet, defaults to a cross-platform phone messenger app.
Not every non-US country. Most people in Norway have iPhones, so iMessage is heavily used. They also use Facebook messenger a lot for some bizarre reason.
> iMessage makes it easy to identify the poors, the android users, and ignore them.
I hope this is sarcasm, and you're not actually that narrow minded.
It is an interesting complete marketing victory in the US by Apple though, that there is a widespread perception that you would only have an Android if you couldn't afford an iPhone. I've had an iPhone for work, it's fine. I much prefer Android and I'll stick to it, and the reasons for that have nothing to do with money. I'm glad I don't love in the US where that would apparently make me a social pariah.
iMessage's killer feature is that you can send a group message to more than a total of ten people. SMS does not officially support this.
I do not recall this being a problem in the pre-iMessage days, even with flip phones. I was on prepaid T-Mobile and had to pay for every message I received, which is the one place where I thought the US billing system had gone nuts - you could always decline to receive a phone call, knowing the number, but you can't refuse a text. I was surprised that nobody ever abused that, but they never did so on a large scale. At ten cents per text, sent or received, you communicated when you needed to, or when you had something to contribute, but one minute of voice was the same cost. One sent and one received text cost as much as two minutes of talk, which can convey a lot more information.
I can't remember the last time I sent an SMS. Comparing iMessage to SMS is not useful. Compare it to one of the (several) cross platform messaging services.
In Europe, Android is on equal par with Apple. WhatsApp is the default messaging service - it is universally installed among my friends, relatives, colleagues, contractors etc.. No-one cares what model of phone the other person has. Everyone communicates.
I don't believe this is true, but you do have to give one of the iMessage groups a name to make it independent from another group.
If you imagine that primary key for a group is its name, and the default name for a group is its participants, this does kind of make sense.
The thumbed up reaction is useful because you can react to something specific in a fast-paced conversation. iMessage also allows replying to a specific message, which is also useful for the same reasons.
> With more complex emoji I have to screenshot the text and then pull up the image to zoom on it to even tell what it is.
...you can make the font bigger. Or get glasses.
> I'd silence the conversation, except that iMessage won't let you have two identical groups with exactly the same members
Create group 1 with coworkers A,B. Create group 2 with coworkers B,C. Add C to group 1, A to group 2. Two different chat groups.
"I won't bother to look up how to do things on my phone" != "my phone sucks."
> The thumbed up reaction is useful because you can react to something specific in a fast-paced conversation. iMessage also allows replying to a specific message, which is also useful for the same reasons.
A makes joke. B and C react "laugh". D replies with sub-joke. E, F, and G react "groan". Produce this little cascade every time a serious topic is brought up and someone makes an offhand joke as a lead-in to a serious topic.
> you can make the font bigger. Or get glasses
I have and use reading glasses. Making the font bigger is an option but I can read text just fine at that size. I can't make out the details of a complex emoji.
> Create group 1 with coworkers A,B. Create group 2 with coworkers B,C. Add C to group 1, A to group 2. Two different chat groups.
A completely non-obvious behavior (you can only create a group after you have sent the first text, see https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/group-conversations-i... for info), and as it's late at night, I can't test it. Trying to search for how to do this turns up mostly threads about how the same group of contacts keeps showing up in different conversation threads.
> "I won't bother to look up how to do things on my phone" != "my phone sucks."
Feel free to tell me what search will show me how to make a "MyCompany - Business" and "MyCompany - Social" group without ever sending a message, and guaranteeing that Business messages always go to Business and Social always go to Social.
> A makes joke. B and C react "laugh". D replies with sub-joke. E, F, and G react "groan". Produce this little cascade every time a serious topic is brought up and someone makes an offhand joke as a lead-in to a serious topic.
iMessages/SMS is not a conversation or an email and the same rules don't apply. You don't have the recipient's attention for any longer than it takes to read the message you've sent. If you want to make a joke then make a point you need to do both in the same message.
The protocol is open but key exchange is not: even on Android, third-party messengers can’t interoperate with Google Messages. See page 11 of that PDF.
That's true, but Google has also indicated that they're switching to the GSMA spec which is intended for interoperability.
I also doubt that Google would withhold such details from parties like Apple even if they maintained their proprietary format. Small developers would need to reverse engineer the details, unfortunately.
Only Messages was allowed to support it. At the time it was written, for example, it was years after the Signal developers had asked for basic RCS support (2015) and given up on Google relenting and allowing it in 2018.
Signal has been rather dismissive of RCS in general. Of course RCS was as insecure and unencrypted as regular SMS/MMS until now, but I haven't found a sign that Signal ever even looked into supporting RCS at all.
At this point I think they just wanted to get rid of their SMS backup feature and used RCS as an excuse.
Because the rest of the world seems to neither care nor even notice the bubble (of either colour) i.e iMessage is irrelevant almost entirely outside North America (and that too I guess mostly USA; only among just the iPhone users of course)
I believe Canada has an even higher iOS market share than the US. Mexico mostly uses WhatsApp but I don’t text people there much. I have and use both WhatsApp and Signal routinely in addition to iMessage; no one I know uses WhatsApp within North America and only a handful use Signal.
When I worked in Europe just about everyone I texted with had an iPhone. We always use WhatsApp or Signal there by default. Nonetheless, iMessage was usually the fallback when those chat apps glitched because it is so reliable, especially compared to Signal. YMMV, etc.
What iMessage has going for it is that it is genuinely a very good implementation of a social chat app with unique features enabled by the iCloud ecosystem. I’m pretty agnostic about it, I’ve used a lot of chat apps by virtue of being more global than most, but iMessage is objectively pretty great when you stay within the Apple ecosystem. I’ve reduced things down to WhatsApp, Signal, and iMessage, which is kind of the minimum set that gets you global coverage, but if everyone is on iOS then iMessage is noticeably superior to Signal or WhatsApp. iMessage is more than just a chat app but it limits itself to that when interacting with other ecosystems.
I haven't seen any indication of that at all. There's sort of an API, but it's basically restricted to Samsung's messenger only.
The EU won't get involved unless a significant chunk of the user base uses Google Messenger. I don't think EU users will reach that threshold because most of the EU uses basically any chat app except for SMS/MMS. Things like receiving verification SMS messages still work using the existing API and I have a feeling that that represents the majority of SMS use in the EU.
> RCS may require access to certain SIM card information, which only pre-installed apps can do
> because they don't want to implement RCS themselves.
Sounds like they can't implement RCS themselves even if they wanted to, not simply that Google doesn't provide an open source implementation? (Referring to app developers here, not custom ROM devs.)
They can't implement RCS for every carrier, but they can implement it for some. Others require nothing more than a network call to a predefined HTTP address over a data connection.
Although Google may dislike it, I don't believe Google's RCS implementation (the one most of the world uses) requires elevated permissions. Their activation sequence is proprietary and closed source, though so I'm not 100% sure.
Just having a base implementation for custom ROMs would be a start. Given that Google will block custom ROMs from RCS in their app (I believe because the spec says to), there is a need for an independent implementation if this makes RCS popular enough under American users.
Someone will have to inventory the activation mechanisms for each carrier to see if there really is a disadvantage. I'd start with mine, but all of the carriers in my country have shut down their RCS servers a decade ago.
> I don't think reverse engineering the remaining unknowns about the protocol (mostly "what server" and "what message contents") aren't that difficult.
That's hard to parse. Removing the double negation, we end up with
"I think reverse engineering the remaining unknowns about the protocol (mostly "what server" and "what message contents") are that difficult."
I understand your point that the "news" part is that RCS standard now includes E2EE, rather than about Apple's support for said standard.
But I don't think it's fair to suggest or imply that this development is unrelated to Apple either.
RCS has been a thing for nearly a decade, and Google's RCS backend has been doing non-standard E2EE for half that time.
Within 8 months of Apple publicly announcing they would adopt RCS and work with GSMA to support standardised E2EE, there is suddenly a standard for it...
It is worth noting that the E2EE system they are using (MLS/RFC9420) was only finalised as a standard as of mid 2023 and has had errata from the last few months. They basically added E2EE to RCS more or less as soon as the protocol they are using standardized with IETF.
Look at Google’s documentation: they explicitly state that only their Messages app is allowed to talk to their key exchange server. The entire marketing campaign they ran about RCS was predicated on nobody reading their docs or noticing all of the Android developers begging for permission to use RCS for years.
> E2EE is implemented in the Messages client, so both clients in a conversation must use Messages, otherwise the conversation becomes unencrypted RCS. In rare situations where the conversation starts as E2EE, then one of the clients migrates to a different RCS client or an older Messages client that does not support E2EE, Messages might be unable to detect the change immediately. If the Messages user sends a new message, it’s still E2EE, however the recipient client may render the encrypted base64 payload directly as message content.
Yes, Google only made it available for Google Messages. They don't have an SDK or API you can use to make your own clients or servers. Google also didn't put it up for standards with the GSMA or any other standards body, at least not publicly. There are no records of it.
There are some older submissions here you can probably find using one of the HN search sites about this, but IIRC those didn't really have any internal Google policy about this, they kept it all pretty private. The only 'leak' I remember about this was the thing where manufacturers that preload Google Android have to ship Google Messages to get RCS support from Google, otherwise they can't have it. Also means you can't have RCS without Play Services.
Unfortunately, RCS on Android requires google apps, so this isn't really a solution to anyone who doesn't want to be tracked by Google everywhere they go.
I'm still a little confused as to what problem RCS is supposed to solve. It is just as centralized as any other chat app, and is a bit more invasive (often requiring device attestation). Is it really worth all this hassle just to not have to install, let's say, Signal?
Defaults matter. While I've gotten some of my friends and family members to install and use Signal, I still have more chats via SMS/MMS (and more recently RCS, since Apple finally started supporting it) than I do on all other messaging apps combined.
This is likely to differ greatly by demographic. I don’t know literally anyone who uses SMS/MMS. The only SMS message I’ve received in years are automated services/spam.
Your point about Google's central role is spot-on, and without an open, Google-independent implementation, RCS does remain problematic for anyone avoiding that ecosystem.
It also requires a Google account as far as I know. I have Google apps but no account signed in. And when I tap on the connect RCS option it asks me to sign in.
Anyway iMessage (and iOS for that matter) is irrelevant where I live so I don't expect this to change anything. I'm not going to be on RCS. The main apps here are WhatsApp and Telegram (the latter more for groups)
I have a very minimal Android phone with no Google account ever added/used on the device, and it says my chats with other Android users are using RCS ...
The phone number is associated in the other direction though (way back when Google didn't be evil and GMail required invites, I dared to trust them with it, I forget for what).
It shouldn't. The only reason Google Messages sometimes asks for an account is to support remote access via messages.google.com without scanning a QR code, as far as I know.
While it's largely openness/federation theater (Google runs most servers in the background, either on behalf of or instead of the mobile networks), they at least got that part right (as in conforming to the specification, not as in doing the long-term right thing for users) and exclusively use the phone number as an identifier.
Ah ok strange. It is a Samsung phone though. Samsung has been forcing a Google login in more and more places unfortunately. I think they made some deal with them about the AI features. Just like they now promote OneDrive instead of their own cloud. Maybe that's why or I didn't understand the popup.
I don't really want it if I can't access my messages online anyway. The whole reason I love telegram and WhatsApp is that I don't need my phone when I'm on the computer (which is 90% of the time). But a Google account is out of the question.
Right now I even bridge WhatsApp and Telegram through matrix because I don't trust those either, though I don't think I trust any company less than Google. But I don't know if you can do that for RCS.
But tbh I'm not looking for any other chat app unless it's federated and I can run my own server. RCS is technically federated but limited to a group of big companies so that's pretty useless to me.
I think I'll just block it just like I do SMS. I turn off all the notifications for the relevant apps.
No chance for bridging RCS to Matrix, as far as I know. That’s what I find so concerning about it: It’s theoretically more open, but practically much more locked down than both SMS and proprietary alternatives.
Yeah me too. It doesn't help at all to take control away from big tech (really, meta or google is the same difference). And it loops in the phone carriers. You know, those guys that charged us 1 euro for 180 bytes just because they could get away with it. I never ever want those guys in the middle again, just as a raw bit pipe only.
The only thing that's open is the standard, but in practice you need to be on google's radar to be connected. So it's just as closed to us as everything else.
this is so true for networks that don't implement RCS servers,
not even Android - iOS interop present!
one thing i would like to see happen is deprecating SMS message with Labels rather than numbers, phishing has got far far too common in my jurisdiction RCS + some sort of DNS validation like atproto of sender would go a long long way
> RCS + some sort of DNS validation like atproto of sender would go a long long way
Now this would be a messaging protocol I could get behind. Phone networks could even provide a phone number registry for people that insist on using that for whatever reason.
But there's absolutely no chance it'll happen – neither the telecommunications industry nor Google have any interest in making federation for others than "trusted partners" possible.
SMS is already a goldmine for carriers (thanks to the widespread use of SMS for OTPs and authentication), so why not make the next logical step and replace email for as many remaining B2C use cases as possible and collect some rent there as well?
No, it's worse than a standard centralized chat app: It's ostensibly federated, with network operators running the servers.
But practically, only Google actually knows how to do that (the specifications are absurdly complicated!), and so they do it for all operators as a service.
It's a fig leaf of an open protocol and service even for telco industry standards.
Yes. Not everyone is going to install Signal (which isn’t end to end encrypted btw), everyone has a cell phone that can support either iMessage/RCS/MMS/SMS and when you send a message to someone else’s number, you have graceful (sic) degradation.
I really, really, really hope RCS doesn't make it as a standard.
Now that it's end-to-end encrypted, it's slightly better than SMS, but it's still laughably incapable compared to decades-old protocols that support multiple devices, phone-number-independent identifiers, self-hosting, have open implementations and non-insane specifications etc.
As it is, RCS is just Google Talk (Google runs most of the infrastructure), but tied to a single device (no messaging from your laptop or tablet if your phone battery dies!) and impossible to use without a phone number.
It makes me really sad to see that even technical audiences don't see the long-term plan here: Cementing the use of phone numbers instead of email addresses as the primary identifiers in people's digital lives, and making the closed, carrier and Google operated RCS ecosystem the ultimate replacement for email and other open web standards for B2C and P2P messaging. (Yeah, most people already use Gmail, but the point is that self-hosting email is at least still possible, and there's still relatively free competition of sending service providers; with RCS, there's no chance to play without paying the cartel.)
> Cementing the use of phone numbers instead of email addresses as the primary identifiers in people's digital lives
From my experience RCS is just a backup/temporary holdover system to keep SMS usable as is, since people are increasingly using regular chat apps like WhatsApp. Plus as long as spam/identity is a major issue then phone numbers will be a part of verification systems. They will use anything they can get to make it harder to abuse. Whether the root ID is phones or not doesn't really make a difference if a phone number is required at some point to use a service.
There's a large split here between the US (where people largely use SMS and now RCS) and the rest of the world, which largely uses WhatsApp, WeChat, or very few others.
I'm of course also just as critical of having Meta run the world's communication industry instead of Google, but that's the duopoly (or rather two monopolies split geographically) we're headed towards. Cheering on RCS as a way out of it, instead of directly towards it, is deeply misguided.
That said, at least WhatsApp provides some basic features that XMPP has supported more than 20 years ago (multiple devices being logged in simultaneously, synced message archives etc.) – I'm not holding my breath ever seeing these on RCS. As a pseudo-federated standard, protocol and client development will always be much more complex, and looking at the baseline complexity of the RCS specification powering the few existing features, I'm just not seeing it happen.
Needing my phone to be powered up and connected to the Internet to message people from my computer in 2025 is absurd.
Even worse: it silently fails if the device does not run an unmodified anf certified Google Android OS. This means, it will not work on alternative OS and rooted devices
It's far more than "slightly better." It supports full resolution content, longer messages, and reactions/interactions. For most people it's indistinguishable from iMessage/etc.
Do you really think that phone numbers aren't already a ubiquitous identifier? That is done. Nothing you're saying is changing because of RCS.
Yes, it's already largely done, but that doesn't mean it was a good idea, so why cheer moving into the same bad direction just because there's now finally a baseline of security?
It's also anything but indistinguishable from iMessage. I can use iMessage on any number of devices without my phone having to be turned on, having the SIM with my number on it inserted, and being connected to the Internet (not always a given when traveling etc.)
The same is true for WhatsApp. Even XMPP could do it 20 years ago! This is not a new niche feature – it's absolutely essential for a modern instant messaging protocol!
No, I'd rather we have an actually open, federated standard such as XMPP or Matrix, with a trusted directory service binding phone numbers (that one could be operated by phone networks) and email addresses or DNS domains to IM handles.
And if we can't figure that out, I consider Google and Meta equally bad gatekeepers of global B2C and P2P communication, and don't see why I should use the technically strictly inferior solution of the two.
When I enabled RCS on my Android, I started getting ads with rich media. So I disabled it. And moreover WhatsApp is the dominant messaging app in my country. So this doesn't matter.
>While Apple’s proprietary iMessage system already supported E2EE, this wasn’t extended to RCS messaging because the previous RCS standard didn’t provide cross-platform support. Google Messages also enabled E2EE by default for RCS texts, but only conversations between Google Messages users were E2EE, and not those exchanged with iMessage users or users of other RCS clients on Android.
this dances around, but does not seem to answer, the big question of whether android will get iMessage or not?
Why was RCS even designed with a none encrypted mode? I get that the original spec isn't exactly new, but it's also not so old that encryption, security or privacy wasn't an issue.
Phone calls aren't encrypted either, if you think about it [1]. There's a large expectation of the telecommunications industry to be able to perform legal interception, and providing end-to-end encryption out of the box might be seen as a direct violation of that requirement.
[1] Except, somewhat incongruently, between Google Fi subscribers on some Android phones: https://support.google.com/fi/answer/11295314?hl=en – no idea how that came to be and how it even works! I suspect it just upgrades to a FaceTime-like VoIP call.
It's the evolution of SMS/MMS; development started 18 years ago, in 2007. The modern spec is based on that with a whole bunch of additional revisions for things like video calling and transferring money. It was designed long before major messenger apps had e2ee in the first place.
Had it been designed with the security practices at the time, the protocol would've been ossified to the point of being practically insecure by today's standards. In a sense, the fact nobody cared about it until the spec was old enough to drive is actually good for users.
The GSMA which designs RCS also serves the needs of government agencies that are tracking (international) criminals, so I bet there must have been some pretty strong opposition against E2EE in the official spec. Frankly, I'm surprised they're even putting it in the spec.
I'm not sure about the case of RCS, but I've seen some instances of a none cipher being better for compression and deduplication, because the encryption messes with the data.
You'd normally compress the data before encrypting it as that makes the resulting cyphertext more resilient against cryptanalysis as well as reduces the amount of data which needs to be encrypted so this sounds like a bogus reason.
That doesn't allow you to deduplicate across users, though – which of course is the entire point, or the network would be able to see who's forwarding which documents.
It depends on what you're doing I guess... for storage it doesn't make sense, but for pushing a lot of data over a private pipe, why spend the resources adding a cipher?
It’s funny that everyone bashed Apple for their lack of RCS support and now that they have it, all posts seem to indicate RCS is a shit standard at best. I have no idea if it is but that’s the impression I got.
I guess it was just a talking point to shit on Apple’s approach?
I don’t care anyway. Here everyone uses WhatsApp so RCS is not important but just an outsider observation.
It is good that commercial messengers forced GSM association to finally create E2EE standards. The reason why telcos want you to use RCS becomes obvious if you calculate how much 1Gb of data costs if sent as SMS (I guess that one could buy a car with this money).
I'd say it's the norm rather than the exception outside of the US.
US operators do things quite a bit differently from the rest of the world; for example, prepaid cards without a monthly fee are not really a thing, i.e. essentially every plan has a monthly fee, but that then almost always includes texting.
Outside the US, it's usually possible to receive calls and SMS on a prepaid SIM without paying anything other than maybe the occasional top-up to not lose the number; in exchange, outbound texts and calls are usually paid.
Does anybody know how the trust model for this looks like? Is it trust on first use together with a notification if a contact's key changes, a centralized key server (if so, who runs it, and is there key transparency), or just opportunistic encryption not protected against active attackers in the middle?
Apple runs servers for managing iMessage key exchange, just like Google’s RCS encryption. Both of them use device attestation to restrict access to those servers to their own apps.
iOS did boycott RCS for a long time in order to convince US teens to buy iPhones rather than Android phones (due to incompatibilities between iMessage and SMS, which are popular in the US). It worked. I think there was even some leaked internal email which admitted to doing this. The US antitrust agencies ignored it; there were no legal consequences for Apple. I believe Apple finally decided to add RCS support after EU legislators threatened to force their hand.
I think Google‘s was something different. This is an actual standard that Apple is committing to implement. I was under the impression Google’s encryption was just their own layer thing they added on top it was not actually standardized.
When people asked last year about why Apple wasn’t implementing encrypted RCS I think they even said that they wanted to wait for a standard.
So an important context here is the server side implementation of RCS is Google's at every major carrier. Google bought the carrier-side provider of RCS services, Jibe, and so the entire RCS stack is still basically just Google Chat with an "it's a standard" label on it.
Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile all use Google's RCS implementation, the only way to not send Google your messages in the US is to own an iPhone and disable RCS.
> Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile all use Google's RCS implementation, the only way to not send Google your messages in the US is to own an iPhone and disable RCS.
Yes the Google Business stuff exists for B2C marketing type use cases, but it is a very limited feature set compared to real RCS and cannot be used for regular communications using phone numbers.
I believe GP's objection is to not being able to access RCS from a non-Google-provided app on Android, not access to the RCS network on the backend side.
I believe even then only US carriers (the rest of the world has moved on from P2P SMS, and only businesses are really still sending them for SMS-OTP and marketing), and of course Google, as the only party actually invested in it (via their acquisition of Jibe [1]).
There are years between updates and then suddenly for like 6 months it'll get a slew of updates, most of which aren't user-facing. Then back to update silence. It's really odd.
I hope it stays that way. I'm almost certain that the minute management remembers it's there, it will get shut down, at least for non-paid (i.e. GSuite) accounts.
I think it only survives because it's so thoroughly overlooked. Probably nobody working on a new messaging/chat/VoIP/video conference/etc. platform within Google wants to nominate Google Voice as the thing they're replacing or reinventing.
Like so many other google products they get it going, maybe polish it a bit here and there, and then everyone wants to work on more prestigious stuff. That's why Google has had something like half a dozen iterations of an instant messaging service.
GV wasn't even an internal product - they bought up Grand Central and for a while the business offering was still branded as GC. But at one point, it was integrated into Hangouts. It's so strange...
They don't support any HD voice codecs, so call quality is shit, the integration with iOS is non-existent, the app doesn't sync in the background so every time you open it you have to wait 5-10s before you can use it...you can't even set a ringtone so you can tell a GV call from a cellular call.
Potentially, but it’s fine as long as it’s done on the device and only notifies the user. Like ‘This might be spam, are you sure you want to view it’ or ‘This message might contain nudity’ if people care about enabling that kind of filter.
As long as it never will call out to any external server it doesn’t break the security.
Sounds like the standard wants phone RCS apps to do CSAM scanning as well as general analysis to see if the encrypted messages are about criminal activity. Not great.
> The GSM Association announced that the latest RCS standard includes E2EE
> While Apple’s proprietary iMessage system already supported E2EE, this wasn’t extended to RCS messaging because the previous RCS standard didn’t provide cross-platform support
The real news is the update to GSMA RCS, because without that, none of this matters. What I'm missing in the article is who's going to own the keys and why this is probably going to default to the telcos as if it's MMS. Are they going back to the days of charging per message?
With iMessage you'd be putting your trust in Apple, with Google RCS you'd be putting your trust in Google. For WhatsApp that'd be Meta and for Signal that's Signal. But with GSMA RCS?
I don't think Google wanted to gatekeep their E2EE implementation. They have some generic documentation about how it works: https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf
The thing about RCS is that no messengers seem to care at all about implementing RCS themselves. Part of that is probably because depending on the carrier, RCS may require access to certain SIM card information, which only pre-installed apps can do, and part of it is that many developers are waiting for Google to add RCS to the same API that SMS/MMS already exposes because they don't want to implement RCS themselves.
Realistically, the target demographic for their documentation is 1) Apple (who they'd happily supply with details to get rid of the green bubble problem) and maybe 2) government officials looking into antitrust concerns. In theory someone working for LineageOS can implement an RCS client, though, but for those developers I don't think reverse engineering the remaining unknowns about the protocol (mostly "what server" and "what message contents") aren't that difficult.
I'm not cryptographer, but I haven't heard any major issues from actual cryptographers about MLS. It's encryption principles seem to be similar to those of Signal. Google is actually already using MLS in their proprietary E2EE implementation.
Ideally, MLS would be combined with MIMI so that messaging apps become interoperable, but that's probably a pipe dream.
I would be surprised if this eliminates green bubbles. iMessage supports many features unavailable over RCS on Android devices. These would still be disabled and Apple needs a way to indicate a degraded feature set to iMessage users.
Blue = iMessage Green = Other
It doesn’t matter if both support 100% identical feature sets, it’s gonna stay like that.
That's completely irrelevant. The problem was (obviously!) always about the incompatibilities rather than the color.
Once again, I'm engaging with a hypothetical. Indeed this is how it would play out in reality.
Liked "I would be surprised if this eliminates green bubbles. iMessage supports many features unavailable over RCS on Android devices. These would still be disabled and Apple needs a way to indicate a degraded feature set to iMessage users."
I'd silence the conversation, except that iMessage won't let you have two identical groups with exactly the same members. So both humorous and serious stuff goes into the same group chat, and it's often very time-sensitive if serious. Then three or four people start joking around, reacting to each other, and suddenly while I'm at dinner (or, my favorite, one hour into a three-hour drive) my phone or watch is going off every twenty seconds for five minutes. I can't ignore them, because one of those dings might be from someone else about something that needs an answer right now. I can't risk forgetting to turn notifications back on.
When I still used an Android phone, the max-ten-people SMS rule meant that I was missing important business information - like, for example, I found out that our secretary had cancer when she asked me for restaurant recommendations near MD Anderson Cancer Clinic in Houston. Never occurred to anyone else that I had gotten none of that.
Fine. Is "10-4" or "copy that" or "Roger" acceptable? Because the whole point of that text, in a work context (and this is always a work conversation; I like my partners but I'm not personal friends with them), is to convey "I have received your message". And a reaction generates an SMS that is, until you realize what it is, kind of incomprehensible. "Loved '[my comment]'" makes no sense when you get it as a long comment.
> The reactions may not help you
I have trouble seeing how they help anyone. You made an obvious joke. A guy who laughs at anything reacts "HA-HA!!" or whatever. What is the contribution? The youngest member of my partnership is 40, though we do have a 33-year-old joining in a few months.
This isn't "get off my lawn", much as I do love that. It's "explain to me how it's useful for actual minute-to-minute work". I'm a physician. An anesthesiologist. I never know when the next emergency will arise, but OTOH we don't go for a sterile cockpit approach because there are a lot of conversations that have to do with the running of the day at work that aren't entirely serious (and don't involve patient care, as such; that's why we don't use the sterile cockpit method - it's more about figuring out who can let whom go to lunch, becuase you can't just leave someone under anesthesia to go eat, or how we might be able to let Dr. X operate in about an hour - personnel management is the biggest part of my on-call duties).
You have a hint above you need to be specific what means what, when we onboard new people we go through these things. This is a problem with ontologies you have to be specific and not allow meanings to drift.
I am not a emoji expert but this has been a way to make our chats a lot more easy to get a grip on.
We do not use Apple so do not get "Loved X" types of messages.
You won't be able to alter behavior of everyone around you. So at least the software should render these interactions in the least obnoxious way by being consistent on both side.
You will always be able to ask for textual clarification. But the big win is that you won't be bothered by sub-par quoting repost.
Why would I need textual clarification? It was/is a mediocre joke. I don't need to comment on everything that crosses my path.
That sounds like a problem unique to yourself and I imagine this is not the only such case in which you struggle.
If I were in a group chat with people both joking around and sending messages requiring urgent responses, I'd let them know to either cut the banter and keep the channel clear, or contact me otherwise if they need my urgent reaction. Letting people hold my attention hostage like that would drive me crazy.
I realize that I live in an unusual life vis-a-vis most HN readers. I do not work in tech, and I never have. I'm a physician: specifically, an anesthesiologist. I have always enjoyed tech, and I'm certainly miles ahead of most of my colleagues on that. But. Remote work is not possible. Relocating involves getting a new license to practice medicine (3-8 months), getting accepted by the medical staff of any hospital or surgery center you want to work at (~2 months after license is secure and job contract is signed), and all the usual stuff.
So I cannot not answer any number that isn't outside the US system when I'm on call. I can't silence the phone when I'm on call. I can't ignore messages. But we're a partnership, so there's no HR to file a complaint with when someone banters on a business channel, and I can't order them to do something any more than they could order me.
How are other people supposed to know that it's not okay for you right now because you are at dinner?
People get lazy and just use the "whole group" message rather than send it to those who are working today. And it's much like my problems with Android vs iOS: there are twelve people in this group, eleven of them have iPhones. They are not all going to install and use a separate messaging app for business than for personal communication, especially as iMessage is nominally E2EE. I could adapt or just be completely marginalized. So now twelve have iPhones.
This does not sound like an impossible stretch, works on more device types, and in the case of Slack or Teams can also be configured for HIPAA compliance (which while you don’t call it out, seems like it may be useful). Tens of millions of people use a chat system for work distinct from their personal friend groups, even if the venn diagram is a circle.
We do not have desks. Nor do we have offices.
I'm an anesthesiologist; I work where the patient and the surgeon are.
Really? That's insane, so that means that 3rd party messaging apps literally have better UX than first party ones, as I have lots of groups with the same members for different things.
iMessage just not supporting android/windows/linux devices already makes it drastically worse than any other popular chat app.
This wouldn’t mean much if iOS was a small percentage of phones. In regions where it is a majority of phones people use those additional features. In places like the US where most people are using iOS, most people don’t even realize those features don’t exist or are semi-broken on other chat apps because they don’t use them. For average people that have been using iMessage for a long time with other iMessage users, using those other chat apps feels like a downgrade.
The only two features I can think of that iMessage has which discord/whatsapp/etc don't are:
1. Automatically can flip to "do not disturb" mode when my phone is in sleep mode, and display that notice to my companion. Other chat apps require manually configuring that I think. I also suspect apple doesn't provide an API to make this easily possible for other apps.
2. iMessage makes it easy to identify the poors, the android users, and ignore them. If I exchange numbers on a dating app and get a green bubble, I can know to immediately ghost them.
Are those the features you were thinking about, or something else?
I’ve never seen anything like this on any other chat app I’ve used. Most objects in iOS can be directly shared or collaborated on over iMessage, and that is a very rich set of objects. People that only use iMessage don’t even realize other chat apps can’t do some of these things.
They do: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/...
They use iMessage with their family and friends. They use it at work too. Some of their friends, and maybe some of their family, work at the same place. I can try to convince 11 other people who are my business partners to switch to, say, Signal. A special app used only for our group communications. Or I can buy an iPhone. I chose the latter.
It's not my choice. I'm making the best of it that I can. I wish it were not so, but it is.
It's just the US that has picked a universal messenger that doesn't work on android, every other country, the vast majority of the planet, defaults to a cross-platform phone messenger app.
In short, consider moving to europe.
I hope this is sarcasm, and you're not actually that narrow minded.
It is an interesting complete marketing victory in the US by Apple though, that there is a widespread perception that you would only have an Android if you couldn't afford an iPhone. I've had an iPhone for work, it's fine. I much prefer Android and I'll stick to it, and the reasons for that have nothing to do with money. I'm glad I don't love in the US where that would apparently make me a social pariah.
I do not recall this being a problem in the pre-iMessage days, even with flip phones. I was on prepaid T-Mobile and had to pay for every message I received, which is the one place where I thought the US billing system had gone nuts - you could always decline to receive a phone call, knowing the number, but you can't refuse a text. I was surprised that nobody ever abused that, but they never did so on a large scale. At ten cents per text, sent or received, you communicated when you needed to, or when you had something to contribute, but one minute of voice was the same cost. One sent and one received text cost as much as two minutes of talk, which can convey a lot more information.
In Europe, Android is on equal par with Apple. WhatsApp is the default messaging service - it is universally installed among my friends, relatives, colleagues, contractors etc.. No-one cares what model of phone the other person has. Everyone communicates.
> With more complex emoji I have to screenshot the text and then pull up the image to zoom on it to even tell what it is.
...you can make the font bigger. Or get glasses.
> I'd silence the conversation, except that iMessage won't let you have two identical groups with exactly the same members
Create group 1 with coworkers A,B. Create group 2 with coworkers B,C. Add C to group 1, A to group 2. Two different chat groups.
"I won't bother to look up how to do things on my phone" != "my phone sucks."
A makes joke. B and C react "laugh". D replies with sub-joke. E, F, and G react "groan". Produce this little cascade every time a serious topic is brought up and someone makes an offhand joke as a lead-in to a serious topic.
> you can make the font bigger. Or get glasses
I have and use reading glasses. Making the font bigger is an option but I can read text just fine at that size. I can't make out the details of a complex emoji.
> Create group 1 with coworkers A,B. Create group 2 with coworkers B,C. Add C to group 1, A to group 2. Two different chat groups.
A completely non-obvious behavior (you can only create a group after you have sent the first text, see https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/group-conversations-i... for info), and as it's late at night, I can't test it. Trying to search for how to do this turns up mostly threads about how the same group of contacts keeps showing up in different conversation threads.
> "I won't bother to look up how to do things on my phone" != "my phone sucks."
Feel free to tell me what search will show me how to make a "MyCompany - Business" and "MyCompany - Social" group without ever sending a message, and guaranteeing that Business messages always go to Business and Social always go to Social.
iMessages/SMS is not a conversation or an email and the same rules don't apply. You don't have the recipient's attention for any longer than it takes to read the message you've sent. If you want to make a joke then make a point you need to do both in the same message.
You should look at how to zoom on your iPhone - https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/iphone/iph3e2e367e/ios
I also doubt that Google would withhold such details from parties like Apple even if they maintained their proprietary format. Small developers would need to reverse engineer the details, unfortunately.
If they seriously wanted random third parties to implement it, anyhow, they'd have published a specification, not an "overview"
https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/4837
At this point I think they just wanted to get rid of their SMS backup feature and used RCS as an excuse.
Is this a problem? Outside NA?
Because the rest of the world seems to neither care nor even notice the bubble (of either colour) i.e iMessage is irrelevant almost entirely outside North America (and that too I guess mostly USA; only among just the iPhone users of course)
When I worked in Europe just about everyone I texted with had an iPhone. We always use WhatsApp or Signal there by default. Nonetheless, iMessage was usually the fallback when those chat apps glitched because it is so reliable, especially compared to Signal. YMMV, etc.
What iMessage has going for it is that it is genuinely a very good implementation of a social chat app with unique features enabled by the iCloud ecosystem. I’m pretty agnostic about it, I’ve used a lot of chat apps by virtue of being more global than most, but iMessage is objectively pretty great when you stay within the Apple ecosystem. I’ve reduced things down to WhatsApp, Signal, and iMessage, which is kind of the minimum set that gets you global coverage, but if everyone is on iOS then iMessage is noticeably superior to Signal or WhatsApp. iMessage is more than just a chat app but it limits itself to that when interacting with other ecosystems.
Is that a planned feature? It's frustrating that third party messaging apps don't work with RCS. I hope we don't have to get the EU involved here...
The EU won't get involved unless a significant chunk of the user base uses Google Messenger. I don't think EU users will reach that threshold because most of the EU uses basically any chat app except for SMS/MMS. Things like receiving verification SMS messages still work using the existing API and I have a feeling that that represents the majority of SMS use in the EU.
> RCS may require access to certain SIM card information, which only pre-installed apps can do
> because they don't want to implement RCS themselves.
Sounds like they can't implement RCS themselves even if they wanted to, not simply that Google doesn't provide an open source implementation? (Referring to app developers here, not custom ROM devs.)
Although Google may dislike it, I don't believe Google's RCS implementation (the one most of the world uses) requires elevated permissions. Their activation sequence is proprietary and closed source, though so I'm not 100% sure.
Just having a base implementation for custom ROMs would be a start. Given that Google will block custom ROMs from RCS in their app (I believe because the spec says to), there is a need for an independent implementation if this makes RCS popular enough under American users.
Someone will have to inventory the activation mechanisms for each carrier to see if there really is a disadvantage. I'd start with mine, but all of the carriers in my country have shut down their RCS servers a decade ago.
That's hard to parse. Removing the double negation, we end up with
"I think reverse engineering the remaining unknowns about the protocol (mostly "what server" and "what message contents") are that difficult."
But I don't think it's fair to suggest or imply that this development is unrelated to Apple either.
RCS has been a thing for nearly a decade, and Google's RCS backend has been doing non-standard E2EE for half that time.
Within 8 months of Apple publicly announcing they would adopt RCS and work with GSMA to support standardised E2EE, there is suddenly a standard for it...
https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf
> E2EE is implemented in the Messages client, so both clients in a conversation must use Messages, otherwise the conversation becomes unencrypted RCS. In rare situations where the conversation starts as E2EE, then one of the clients migrates to a different RCS client or an older Messages client that does not support E2EE, Messages might be unable to detect the change immediately. If the Messages user sends a new message, it’s still E2EE, however the recipient client may render the encrypted base64 payload directly as message content.
There are some older submissions here you can probably find using one of the HN search sites about this, but IIRC those didn't really have any internal Google policy about this, they kept it all pretty private. The only 'leak' I remember about this was the thing where manufacturers that preload Google Android have to ship Google Messages to get RCS support from Google, otherwise they can't have it. Also means you can't have RCS without Play Services.
I'm very curious how long this OS-coupled status quo is going to go on for.
So someone asked Apple and they said “sure we’ll support that”.
I think the big news is that RCS can now be encrypted without relying on Google, but that’s not what gets you headlines.
I'm still a little confused as to what problem RCS is supposed to solve. It is just as centralized as any other chat app, and is a bit more invasive (often requiring device attestation). Is it really worth all this hassle just to not have to install, let's say, Signal?
I'm from Chile, and the last time I sent an SMS (or heard of anyone sending an SMS) must have been like 12 years ago.
Ever since then, everyone has used Whatsapp or Telegram instead.
Anyway iMessage (and iOS for that matter) is irrelevant where I live so I don't expect this to change anything. I'm not going to be on RCS. The main apps here are WhatsApp and Telegram (the latter more for groups)
The phone number is associated in the other direction though (way back when Google didn't be evil and GMail required invites, I dared to trust them with it, I forget for what).
While it's largely openness/federation theater (Google runs most servers in the background, either on behalf of or instead of the mobile networks), they at least got that part right (as in conforming to the specification, not as in doing the long-term right thing for users) and exclusively use the phone number as an identifier.
I don't really want it if I can't access my messages online anyway. The whole reason I love telegram and WhatsApp is that I don't need my phone when I'm on the computer (which is 90% of the time). But a Google account is out of the question.
Right now I even bridge WhatsApp and Telegram through matrix because I don't trust those either, though I don't think I trust any company less than Google. But I don't know if you can do that for RCS.
But tbh I'm not looking for any other chat app unless it's federated and I can run my own server. RCS is technically federated but limited to a group of big companies so that's pretty useless to me.
I think I'll just block it just like I do SMS. I turn off all the notifications for the relevant apps.
The only thing that's open is the standard, but in practice you need to be on google's radar to be connected. So it's just as closed to us as everything else.
one thing i would like to see happen is deprecating SMS message with Labels rather than numbers, phishing has got far far too common in my jurisdiction RCS + some sort of DNS validation like atproto of sender would go a long long way
Now this would be a messaging protocol I could get behind. Phone networks could even provide a phone number registry for people that insist on using that for whatever reason.
But there's absolutely no chance it'll happen – neither the telecommunications industry nor Google have any interest in making federation for others than "trusted partners" possible.
SMS is already a goldmine for carriers (thanks to the widespread use of SMS for OTPs and authentication), so why not make the next logical step and replace email for as many remaining B2C use cases as possible and collect some rent there as well?
But practically, only Google actually knows how to do that (the specifications are absurdly complicated!), and so they do it for all operators as a service.
It's a fig leaf of an open protocol and service even for telco industry standards.
Now that it's end-to-end encrypted, it's slightly better than SMS, but it's still laughably incapable compared to decades-old protocols that support multiple devices, phone-number-independent identifiers, self-hosting, have open implementations and non-insane specifications etc.
As it is, RCS is just Google Talk (Google runs most of the infrastructure), but tied to a single device (no messaging from your laptop or tablet if your phone battery dies!) and impossible to use without a phone number.
It makes me really sad to see that even technical audiences don't see the long-term plan here: Cementing the use of phone numbers instead of email addresses as the primary identifiers in people's digital lives, and making the closed, carrier and Google operated RCS ecosystem the ultimate replacement for email and other open web standards for B2C and P2P messaging. (Yeah, most people already use Gmail, but the point is that self-hosting email is at least still possible, and there's still relatively free competition of sending service providers; with RCS, there's no chance to play without paying the cartel.)
From my experience RCS is just a backup/temporary holdover system to keep SMS usable as is, since people are increasingly using regular chat apps like WhatsApp. Plus as long as spam/identity is a major issue then phone numbers will be a part of verification systems. They will use anything they can get to make it harder to abuse. Whether the root ID is phones or not doesn't really make a difference if a phone number is required at some point to use a service.
I'm of course also just as critical of having Meta run the world's communication industry instead of Google, but that's the duopoly (or rather two monopolies split geographically) we're headed towards. Cheering on RCS as a way out of it, instead of directly towards it, is deeply misguided.
That said, at least WhatsApp provides some basic features that XMPP has supported more than 20 years ago (multiple devices being logged in simultaneously, synced message archives etc.) – I'm not holding my breath ever seeing these on RCS. As a pseudo-federated standard, protocol and client development will always be much more complex, and looking at the baseline complexity of the RCS specification powering the few existing features, I'm just not seeing it happen.
Needing my phone to be powered up and connected to the Internet to message people from my computer in 2025 is absurd.
Do you really think that phone numbers aren't already a ubiquitous identifier? That is done. Nothing you're saying is changing because of RCS.
It's also anything but indistinguishable from iMessage. I can use iMessage on any number of devices without my phone having to be turned on, having the SIM with my number on it inserted, and being connected to the Internet (not always a given when traveling etc.)
The same is true for WhatsApp. Even XMPP could do it 20 years ago! This is not a new niche feature – it's absolutely essential for a modern instant messaging protocol!
And if we can't figure that out, I consider Google and Meta equally bad gatekeepers of global B2C and P2P communication, and don't see why I should use the technically strictly inferior solution of the two.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/1/23150243/google-rcs-ads-in...
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/1/23150243/google-rcs-ads-in...
this dances around, but does not seem to answer, the big question of whether android will get iMessage or not?
[1] Except, somewhat incongruently, between Google Fi subscribers on some Android phones: https://support.google.com/fi/answer/11295314?hl=en – no idea how that came to be and how it even works! I suspect it just upgrades to a FaceTime-like VoIP call.
You assume everyone has the same goals in mind :)
Had it been designed with the security practices at the time, the protocol would've been ossified to the point of being practically insecure by today's standards. In a sense, the fact nobody cared about it until the spec was old enough to drive is actually good for users.
The GSMA which designs RCS also serves the needs of government agencies that are tracking (international) criminals, so I bet there must have been some pretty strong opposition against E2EE in the official spec. Frankly, I'm surprised they're even putting it in the spec.
I guess it was just a talking point to shit on Apple’s approach?
I don’t care anyway. Here everyone uses WhatsApp so RCS is not important but just an outsider observation.
Apple is not a sports team. What people are shitting on is a vendor-specific messaging app. It would be the same if there was a Samsung chat.
US operators do things quite a bit differently from the rest of the world; for example, prepaid cards without a monthly fee are not really a thing, i.e. essentially every plan has a monthly fee, but that then almost always includes texting.
Outside the US, it's usually possible to receive calls and SMS on a prepaid SIM without paying anything other than maybe the occasional top-up to not lose the number; in exchange, outbound texts and calls are usually paid.
This is why iMessage is such a great experience on Android. They don't even try.
iOS as a fallback messaging system since iOS 18, before falling back to SMS
exposing which people are google voice numbers vs actual android devices
When people asked last year about why Apple wasn’t implementing encrypted RCS I think they even said that they wanted to wait for a standard.
https://9to5google.com/2024/02/01/verizon-rcs-google-jibe/
Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile all use Google's RCS implementation, the only way to not send Google your messages in the US is to own an iPhone and disable RCS.
You can disable RCS on Android too.
I first tried RCS in early 2019.
EDIT: https://github.com/android-rcs/rcsjta
[1] https://jibe.google.com/
There are years between updates and then suddenly for like 6 months it'll get a slew of updates, most of which aren't user-facing. Then back to update silence. It's really odd.
I'm still amazed that google hasn't killed it.
Or Gvoice is some backbone service that something else uses. Idk, but it has to be used for something for Google to have not killed it yet.
GV wasn't even an internal product - they bought up Grand Central and for a while the business offering was still branded as GC. But at one point, it was integrated into Hangouts. It's so strange...
They don't support any HD voice codecs, so call quality is shit, the integration with iOS is non-existent, the app doesn't sync in the background so every time you open it you have to wait 5-10s before you can use it...you can't even set a ringtone so you can tell a GV call from a cellular call.
https://9to5google.com/2025/03/04/google-fi-rcs-ios-18-4/
Well well look who is slow to role something out now /s
Of course it’s stupid RCS involves on carriers upgrading, but what do you expect with a carrier standards?
> R5-32-5 An RCS client having E2EE enabled shall implement techniques to detect suspicious messages or conversations.
As long as it never will call out to any external server it doesn’t break the security.
It
- depends on how the clients want to implement it (it's not unthinkable that some might choose a "more effective" remote scanning)
- it makes it a lot harder to make a client, although Bayesian filters should be enough
Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38293082
793 points | 709 comments
> The GSM Association announced that the latest RCS standard includes E2EE
> While Apple’s proprietary iMessage system already supported E2EE, this wasn’t extended to RCS messaging because the previous RCS standard didn’t provide cross-platform support