SMS rates are absolutely bonkers considering the technical way they're transmitted. The US is an outlier in SMS rates actually being reasonable (usually unlimited or close to) for consumers - but for the rest of the world the insane mark up on that communication method has mostly obsoleted it...
That'd be all well and good... the technology would die naturally, but all my American relatives continue to stubbornly use iMessage.
> for the rest of the world the insane mark up on that communication method has mostly obsoleted it...
For P2P communication. SMS is alive and well for B2C messaging, most importantly for 2FA OTP delivery, but also as a first line of defense against spam/bot account creation.
It's not a good solution to either problem, but it's slightly better than nothing (which apparently makes it good enough for many), so I suspect we're stuck with it for now.
> That'd be all well and good... the technology would die naturally, but all my American relatives continue to stubbornly use iMessage.
iMessage is not SMS, though. It just uses phone numbers as identifiers, but so do many other popular over-the-top messengers, including the most popular one globally.
To clarify - iMessage does not use SMS if you're going from Apple to Apple device and both devices have data/wifi available. iMessage refuses to support messaging to Android clients and defaults to SMS for these messages.
I've got an Android phone so all iMessage transmissions come across as SMS (or MMS).
Messages inflexible reliance on SMS for communication to non-Apple devices is definitely an Apple issue, in my opinion. Apple has made it clear that they continue to default to SMS for non-iPhone communication solely because it's unpleasant for everyone involved.
There's apparently even "green bubble bullying"[1] of kids who have Android devices and thus have their messages appear different. In this particular way Apple is happy compromising the mental health of young people to secure a larger market share - it's awful and they deserve a lot more negative PR for it.
It reminds me of the "Blue eyes/Brown eyes" exercise (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott) so let's say this was a real psychology experiment. Middle-schoolers and high-schoolers are encouraged to communicate via a chat application with rich multimedia functionality. But any conversation that includes even a single individual who belongs to an arbitrarily-defined "out-group" has its functionality degraded and the application highlights who the out-group member(s) are. After a year you compare the mental, social, physical, and academic well-being of both groups. Would your university's IRB approve such an experiment?
I initially gave Apple the benefit of the doubt that this was simply a technical limitation. And of course kids will always bully each other about something. But at this point it does indeed seem like a billion-dollar company is intentionally amplifying and leveraging this sort of bullying to drive marketshare. If you don't find this immoral then I'm not sure what to say.
On the other hand, I have saved many a dollar by instantly knowing that I just sent a legacy text to somebody I normally iMessage with.
My carrier charges an arm and a leg for international texting, and if distinguishing between texts and iMessages wasn't as easy as it is, I would probably have to pay hundreds in carrier bills at least once.
> In this particular way Apple is happy compromising the mental health of young people to secure a larger market share
Should we also force luxury brands to offer stipends so that teenagers whose parents can't afford them (or simply don't want to participate in that nonsense) don't feel stigmatized?
It would be a completely different story if Apple were to ban third-party messaging apps on their platform, but as restrictive as they are in other areas, they aren't doing that.
It literally only takes a free app download to get a cross-platform messaging experience at least on par with iMessage (and in my personal view superior in many regards).
Do you have a source that it was started by Google? From looking around, they support its development but it was an industry initiative, and Samsung was one of the first OEMs to support it.
Adopted by Google yes, but since when would Google adopting a technology give them full control over the future of that technology? Surely the other industry members who started RCS also have a say?
And I would argue that the language used implies Google created RCS themselves (it was their idea): "RCS is Google's idea of a solution"
Google Messages, which is fast becoming the default Android messaging app across Android OEMs uses RCS when both participants support it and falls back to SMS when that is not the case.
RCS is an open standard that any carrier/OS/messaging app can support, unlike iMessage, which is exclusive to iPhones.
That's exactly RCSs biggest problem: It requires active carrier support. (As far as I understand, Google runs the infrastructure for many international carriers at this point, but they still need to opt into that.)
Using my phone number as an identifier and authentication factor for so many things these days is bad enough; I really don't want the messaging layer itself to touch my phone provider at all.
My preference would be that Apple drop SMS support from Messages all-together and market it as an iOS only communication method. People with iPhones would then have to pick some alternative, perhaps they would use Signal or perhaps something else.
I already have to install a handful of applications to talk to all of my friends and co-workers, at least I wouldn't have to continue to use SMS.
As an iPhone user, I am happy with messages and do not want it to drop SMS support. Note Apple created iMessage way before RCS even existed. iMessage works well and I am happy with it.
It's interesting that you mention that you like it having SMS support; do you only use this function to message Android phones? In my experience, the iPhone people I know are consistently annoyed by me and my SMS messages.
IMHO, RCS isn't a solution to anything since it still requires phone carriers to adopt it. A quick check of the internet indicates that many of these phone carriers are actually charging more to send RCS messages than SMS, making it a non-starter all around.
Maybe Google could create an iMessage-like (internet only) alternative for Android... Although it still wouldn't work with the actual Apple iMessage protocol unless Apple adopted it. IMHO they'd have better luck getting companies like Apple to interoperate if it was pre-installed and worked on all Android phones.
My phone runs Android, I'm pretty much forced to use SMS in order to communicate with anyone who uses an iPhone and that's most of my family. While it can be argued that iMessage provides a good enough experience on an iPhone for most people, I have wondered if they are the one thing keeping SMS alive.
> I have wondered if they are the one thing keeping SMS alive.
Absolutely they are. Most of my friends and family are Pixel users and we all communicate using RCS. If Apple would just support the modern replacement for SMS (which includes end to end encryption), iPhone users would be much safer and would have a better experience.
I really dislike iMessage, but somehow Google has managed to deliver an even worse alternative with RCS:
It apparently just doesn't work with dual-SIM phones, requires a phone number and an active plan with a supported operator (at least iMessage lets me use an email address!), the multi-device story is non-existent, to just name a few.
> For P2P communication. SMS is alive and well for B2C messaging, most importantly for 2FA OTP delivery, but also as a first line of defense against spam/bot account creation.
In Brazil, businesses use Whatsapp to communicate with consumers. You order pizza and book doctor appointments over whatsapp
Personally, I prefer it over downloading yet another client, dealing with additional credentials, wondering about who can access my messages, and so on and so forth…
And all that just to message the handful of people that I know who use <popular in other country third party app>.
If only someone would release a universal protocol that the app's native messaging apps could utilize to eliminate the need for these 3rd party messaging apps. Oh, right, it's called RCS and Apple refuses to support it.
RCS is anything but universal. It requires the explicit cooperation of mobile phone providers, which makes it a non-solution in many scenarios – including usage on any device that happens to not be a phone.
RCS is exactly what it says on the box: A modern successor to SMS. That does not make it a good modern instant messenger.
RCS is better than SMS no doubt but lets not pretend it is on the same level as iMessage. Lack of end to end encryption alone makes RCS a dated standard
I see that you feel strongly about RCS, but as far as I know even some of the bigger US carriers dont support the universal profile on all the Android devices they offer. So maybe you’ll get your wish some point after carriers align on RCS.
Telecoms don't even want to roll out all of the infrastructure they get paid by the government to, I don't know that their willingness to do anything is a point I'd try to stand firmly on.
Exactly, so how on earth does Google think that it is a good idea to put them in charge of running the infrastructure powering the future of instant messaging?
Any chance at all it has something to do with the fact that they've acquired an RCS infrastructure provider that they can sell to telcos?
Someone has to run it. Logically, the obvious party to do so the carrier providing network access to the device, which also has a recurring billing relationship with the user from which to recoup its costs, and that the user knows to contact when they have issues. As a standard ostensibly replacing SMS, and coming out of the GSMA, it's also pretty obvious it'd be biased toward a carrier-centric solution.
There are a couple other options of course, but I am not sure they are better:
* Fully federate this, a la Matrix or XMPP. I really wish this was a practical option, but without legislation I doubt any company wants to go willingly in this direction. Even if they did, it'd be difficult to contain spam at scale. It also creates 'first contact' issues; love it or hate it, the general public seem attached to the idea of phone numbers and it seems to work relatively well and unambiguously. It is also the most technically complicated and most brittle and unpredictable for users.
* Phone / OS maker operates it for their devices. You don't seem to want Google running things, so this seems markedly worse than what they have actually done which is give you options (most people can at least choose a carrier, and carriers can choose implementations). It's unclear how operating costs are recouped here, especially for low-end devices. Does this lead to feature stratification? I hope not, but probably. It's a global single point of failure, both from a technical point of view as well as a policy/jurisdiction one (can $country LE subpoena my records because the company operating the service is ${country}an - or perhaps merely operates in $country, for example?). Also unclear how users are 'found', but maybe it's a bit easier than in a fully federated system.
* Phone / OS maker partners operate the service, giving users a few choices. Not really sure why anyone would go in for this, but it's basically the same as if the phone maker operates it.
None of these are great options, but I think the carrier is probably the least-bad one. You have an agreement with them. You have the legal protections offered in your home jurisdiction, with clear jurisdiction over the whole thing. They already have a ton of data on you and access to your traffic. You have a neck to wring if the service doesn't work properly.
They really should have standardized E2EE though, not including it is ridiculous.
Literally nobody wants RCS except Google and a handful of HN commenters. It’s so unwanted that Google had to scrap their original plan of making the carriers host the infrastructure and do it themselves, because the carriers didn’t give a shit.
(And even Google doesn’t really have any love for RCS, they crawled back to it as a fallback plan with their tail between their legs when their own proprietary lock-in messaging apps didn’t work out. Which makes their attempts to shame Apple into adopting it pretty hilariously disingenuous.)
> It’s so unwanted that Google had to scrap their original plan of making the carriers host the infrastructure and do it themselves, because the carriers didn’t give a shit.
To be fair, that wasn't Google's plan, that was the GSMA's plan. GSMA created the RCS spec, failed to get more than a handful of their members to use it, and kind of abandoned it to the wolves. For reasons I don't quite understand, Google decided it'd be a good idea to take it up, and then push it harder than any of their previous messaging services; but it's not like they came up with it.
I think I understand your comment, since iMessage isn't SMS, but defaults to SMS for those not using it.
There are opensource self hosted solutions like BlueBubble that allow reasonably secure communication through iMessage to the other chat platforms on desktop/Android etc. I have zero affiliation, but I know others who happily use it. There are also less secure and paid solutions I can't speak to.
For the purpose of 2FA and account registration let’s view it as a tax for fraud prevention, where the real value in SMS is in verifying someone’s identity rather than transmitting messages
If SMS actually worked for this purpose, it would be acceptable. However, SMS provides no guarantees about:
1) If it actually gets delivered
2) If it is delivered to the intended recipient
3) 1 and 2 without anyone reading or tampering the message while in transit
Now, even if stars align, your SMS ends up on a route where nobody is mitm-ing or hijacking it, the telco systems work and it gets delivered, it is STILL not a guarantee of identity. It simply verifies that you have somehow got access to a particular phone number.
Just because consumers get unlimited SMS doesn’t mean businesses get that. The telcos are ruthless about extracting their pound of flesh at business rates.
That'd be all well and good... the technology would die naturally, but all my American relatives continue to stubbornly use iMessage.