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.
I've got an Android phone so all iMessage transmissions come across as SMS (or MMS).