Texting is the single most important feature on a phone.
Also it's not Apple's fault that MMS was terrible for years and now RCS is still terrible. Google also tried to make their own proprietary chat and failed... like 10 times. But more importantly, I don't care, this is not my battle. I'd use WhatsApp if that's what people did here, not that I like it any better.
The iMessage app does both SMS, and the iMessage protocol. Apple could have released an android app to let you have blue bubbles on android and communicate securely without any of the constraints of SMS by simply releasing "iMessage for Android".
Somehow Signal, Whatsapp, Telegram, Discord, WeChat, LINE, KakaoTalk, etc etc all manage to have both iOS and Android apps that can message each other, but for some reason the richest company in the world, Apple, cannot manage to port its chat app to one additional platform?
It is 100% Apple's fault that messaging between iOS and Android has had so much dumb "green bubble" friction.
Apple's conflation of the SMS and iMessage protocols has also made it harder for people to realize what's happening. Frankly, Apple should have had two apps from the start (Text Message and iMessage), one of which only spoke SMS, and the other of which only spoke iMessage.
Sure they could've provided a solution, but they didn't create the problem. And they're not a charity. It's like blaming Nvidia for not giving away CUDA for free/cheap.
Btw everyone knows whether they're using iMessage or SMS, that's the whole bubble color thing.
> Btw everyone knows whether they're using iMessage or SMS, that's the whole bubble color thing.
Everyone sorta knows, but because iMessage "feels" like it's just the native messaging app on the phone, it makes people feel like the issue is android (why don't android phones come with this super-sms built in?) rather than apple for not making the app available broadly.
If it were a separate app, then perhaps the EU would have regulated "when setting up iOS, you must get a default option between iMessage, Whatsapp, Telegram, Signal, etc, you must be able to change the default messaging app", and forcing people to install it would make it more obvious that this is Apple implementing a proprietary chat protocol, not Apple just doing SMS better than android.
> they didn't create the problem. And they're not a charity.
Apple did create the problem by creating a walled garden messaging app, banning beeper for implementing the iMessage protocol for android, and tying some of the phone's core functionality to this built-in app in an anti-competitive way.
A certain amount of industry interoperability should be expected. If you make a browser, it should be able to load competitors websites (which nice, safari can load google.com, good work). If you make a computer that can install arbitrary software, you should allow anyone to install software they wrote freely (oops, apple missed that one). And if you make a messaging app or social media app, you should make it support all major operating systems people use so that people can switch their operating systems and phones without losing touch with their friends. I should still be able to facetime my grandma even if I switch to linux because gosh knows she's not going to learn a new video call app.
I get if you want it that way with all social apps being cross-platform, but Apple didn't make the rules. And if it were like that, they'd probably not have invested so much in iMessage, and SMS would be the thing, which would at least be cross-platform.
You're correct that SMS is straight ass and needs to be deleted from the world. And you're also correct that RCS sucks (seriously? No end-to-end encryption built into the protocol? Jesus Christ is it 1998?)
But many companies build protocols all the time and then open them up. iMessage only works on Apple because Apple is greedmaxxing. Not because of any technical or cultural constraint. They know the value proposition for an iPhone will drop significantly if they open up iMessage, so they don't. This is on the record, by the way, not speculation.
I don't see why Apple is obligated to fix SMS/MMS/RCS's mess and it isn't the standards body's fault that their standard sucks. Apple could've just not made iMessage and nobody would blame them for this.
Of course iMessage makes iPhones valuable. Apple has invested in iMessage since 2011 for their own gain, which is how every tech business works, and maybe Google should've done similarly.
Android users still go on WhatsApp for group chats instead of using RCS. I'm in an RCS group chat with some Android users, and they're always missing messages even between each other. So no I don't buy it. Same with MMS, Google and other phonemakers always blamed Apple, but nobody actually wanted to use MMS even in a full Android group chat.
Maybe RCS between Pixel phones is ok, because that's not the same thing, it goes through Google's servers only. And that was also the only way you got E2EE in RCS until very recently.
Nope rcs is great, except when iPhones are involved. Sms and mms are only fallbacks and it's always iPhones that fallback. Rcs just says the other device is offline and wait
