What if they kept the green color just to troll...
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They probably will. They're aware of and actively foster the "in-group" psychology that plays out in youth social circles. Anyone with a non-Apple phone is excluded as lower class, weird, or less-than. You don't get included in the group chats that are often the center of your peers' social lives because no one wants the annoyance of dealing with the limitations of conversing with a green bubble. You must conform, purchase the correct products, and sign over your life to the correct social media platforms if you want to participate in society.
Yea, but the real question is will the youth see through the BS or not? Before it wasn't just a color, green bubbles actively broke things in blue bubble group chats
But once that's gone with (hopefully) the rollout of RCS (which should fix most, if not all, the things that broke gcs) it really would be "just a color"
Ofc, Apple being Apple, I wouldn't put it past them to artificially "break" things or arbitrarily introduce limits between RCS and iMessage
Ofc, Apple being Apple, I wouldn't put it past them to artificially "break" things or arbitrarily introduce limits between RCS and iMessage
That's where my money is
Ofc, Apple being Apple, I wouldn’t put it past them to artificially “break” things or arbitrarily introduce limits between RCS and iMessage
I’m guessing RCS support will be as barebones as possible while still technically functioning. All of the fancy bells and whistles will remain exclusive to iMessage.
Some iMessage features might not be possible to implement with RCS I suppose. Maybe RCS messages will get a different colour. All Apple said in the WWDC keynote was RCS would be supported, they didn’t elaborate any further.
It’s super useful to know instantly if the messages are encrypted or not.
Exactly. Encryption is coming later.
Also, there are iMessage specific features that are not part of RCS, so knowing what platform someone is on is still useful for cross platform communication.
It’s not just to troll. There are actual differences between the RCS and iMessage protocols and their capabilities.
On the iOS 18 preview page, they show RCS with green bubbles
Image for the lazy (and yes, of course, Apple's breaking their own accessibility guideline of having text at least 3:1 contrast ratio for text to be readable and instead making it 2:1 by picking the lightest shade of green possible).
The bubbles will remain green. At the very least, it’s handy a hand way to tell if chat is unencrypted.
Sounds like it just replaces sms as the default method to communicate with androids. So it's very likely the bubbles will remain differently colored.
Apple could easily do the bare minimum to keep regulators at bay while still keeping the experience as shitty as possible so that Android will continue to look bad. For example they could refuse to implement reactions or typing indicators, or they could even deliberately compress videos. I'm expecting the worst until we see otherwise.
This is exactly what I'm expecting. The company of "buy your mom an iPhone" isn't going to be aiming for maximum interoperability.
For example they could refuse to implement reactions or typing indicators
Reactions already work in MMS groups, use them every day.
or they could even deliberately compress videos
Except they’re already advertising improved quality of photos and video in non-iMessage chats. Doubt they would advertise a specific feature only to make it worse.
I loved how blasé he mentioned it and moved right along. It is a pretty big announcement and I’m glad they are finally doing it. It will benefit many even if only indirectly.
I know people want this. I do to. But SMS going away will suck. Even in 2024, there’s still that moment you have every now and then that you can’t get a call out but a sms will make it out just fine. SMS rides along with the carriers ping signal. It’s not part of the data signal.
Right now my phone gives me the option if RCS fails for some reason, to send the message again with SMS. I assume that will be the case here as well.
I don't think sms will go away, that ping is fundamental to GSM & LTE so far as I can tell.
You may need an app that explicitly taps into the sms feature though
Google Messages app already falls back to SMS automatically if RCS fails. SMS is not going anywhere.
And yet Google still hasn't rolled out RCS for Google Voice, and last I checked there was an issue with it and Google Fi as well. (It works but it precludes some advertised feature of Fi or something.)
Currently Google has bricked RCS for people with rooted phones in such a way that it fails silently for like the 4th time this year, and it's looking like the modders may not be able to keep getting around it.
I'm still of the opinion that the basic message app should only be SMS.
Then anything else should be its own thing. Mixing the two is a recipe for disaster, where it's a consumer product.
Counterpoint: SMS shouldn’t exist, and RCS is our best shot at replacing it right now
SMS has one feature nothing else does. It’s not data per se. if you can ping a tower you can get a message out. You can’t do that with anything else.
Makes a difference when you’re out in BFE.
What? SMS is a proven standard that works reliably. Why do we need to replace that? I tried RCS twice, in both cases the other end did not receive my message or at a later time. Even if SMS needed replacement, RCS is not it.
RCS is the wrong standard to use though, as there isn't a single FOSS Android RCS client. They should support something like Matrix.
Yea, like that would ever in literally any possible incarnation of any possible existence where Apple is a thing happen. Totally.
Matrix
😂 As an SMS/MMS/RCS replacement?? You're joking. Surely.
If you do anything as merely speak the name of anything FOSS in Apple headquarters, they throw you in a deep dark well in the middle of the campus and remove your name from the world of the living.
Here me out, iMessage on any OS, wait, no, not just that, how about no hardware vendor is allowed to produce software that only runs on their hardware and for any given core function the hardware must prompt the end user with a competitive selection of capable apps to accomplish said function (to be downloaded and installed upon selection) instead of coming with a default option enabled. Let's get crazy and say that any hardware vendor must allow software they produce for their own hardware to be uninstalled and replaced by software of the end user's choosing.
I'm talking some "treating United States v. Microsoft" as legally binding precedent" shit.
Meanwhile, regulators be like...
.
(Side note: what's up with the bullshit where Apple makes an Android-native AppleTV app that will install on a phone fine but is blocked from running once it detects it's not an AndroidTV device? Apple acts like it would be an undue burden to make iMessage for Android (and pretends they didn't make the decision to not release an Android client with their hardware business in mind) but their Apple Music app somehow runs better on Android than it does on iOS...)
RCS is crap, inconsistent, unreliable, lacking, buggy. It doesn't even handle Dual SIM .....
Android needed a native "iMessage" style solution at least 10 years ago.
I can buy a $99 flip phone, basic phone, up to a $1,500 premium device, SMS/MMS will function the same across all 3 devices. RCS however will not. So how is this the answer to advanced messaging on Android? It isn't.....
If Google bought BBM & made it their own when it was still relevant in the consumer space, made it native on all Android 10 devices & later with SMS/MMS fall back, this would be something! Damn I miss BlackBerry....
RCS is not seamless, not native, and it simply is not it. It's the 1 thing I hate about Android, as creative and customizable as the software is, we need more.....I hate what Apple represents in the consumer space and how people often think who use an iPhone which makes me never want one.....
The moment Google saw the exclusivity Apple was doing, Android should have followed suite.
RCS sucks.....
Crazy thing is Google Hangouts did this back in 2012! They had it! You could text and message digitally to someone’s hangouts acct. then they killed it because of some legacy code or something.
Man it's a shame that Google RCS doesn't run on android phones by default if you have a custom rom or rooted your device or have an unlocked bootloader. Guess this won't really affect me then and it doesn't really matter.
I just want my gf to have the same SMS app as me so she can see the silly emoji animations I see 😢
RCS is proprietary, right?
No but also yes.
The spec itself is open, but implementations that are in the wild aren't. Google's implementation is proprietary, for example.
On Android, Google has went out of their way to make other RCS implementations virtually impossible to implement. Samsung, for example, had to enter an agreement with Google to use their implementation, otherwise they'd have no RCS.
As of now, the easiest way to implement RCS outside of using Google's proprietary implementation is to create your own OS and RCS implementation for it.