It's about time. I hop between iOS and Android every so often, and the lack of RCS has always been a major pain in the ass. Goodbye shitty compressed photos and hello read receipts. Unless your Android vendor doesn't fully support RCS... Looking at you, Samsung
this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2024
1 points (51.4% liked)
Technology
59693 readers
4184 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Or LineageOS, apparently...
Looking at you, Samsung
*Samshit or Samsuck whichever lol
Hahaha so funny and edgy lol
what the hell is with the damn downvotes on all the tech posts all the time ?! just dont follow tech if you’re going to just downvote everything all the time.
I'd just assumed downvoting everything that's not a progressive op ed or a meme was part of Lemmy culture. All my LSF posts get downvoted too.
sorry to hear man :-(
don’t know what’s wrong with the people downvoting
I can understand with spam or ai generated content but just sharing a link? come on people
Even the political stuff I get, Lemmy was founded by people pretty far to the left.
But in general I don't really care much. I share what I like, say what's on my mind, and move on.
I never noticed issues texting android phones from iPhone. What the hell is this?
RCS support!
Nothing changes for me 🤭
It’s more about the lack of iMessage features. Things like editing, unsend, text effects, etc are absent in regular texts. If everyone is on iMessage, everyone can use those enhanced features. They’re apparently pretty popular in group chats, but even a single android user will drag the entire conversation into regular text messages instead. So lots of iPhone users (especially the younger gen Z and alpha) started complaining whenever someone had an android, or even outright bullying them for it.
And for android users, texting with an iPhone user is a horrible experience; Images are horribly compressed, videos are severely limited in file size and compressed, group texts need to be opened as an attachment to be read, etc… All because iOS refused to use the more modern RCS texting protocols.
The thing is that the only country that uses iMessage is US. The rest uses WhatsApp .
You can't schedule RCS messages on ios?
A basic features that has been around since the beginning of time is not included?
That’s more on the OS than the text protocol. The protocol doesn’t just hold a text in the ether until it’s time for delivery. A scheduled text is you telling the phone “hey, wait to send this message until it’s time.” Then your phone sends it at the proper time.
iOS still doesn’t have built in text scheduling. There are workarounds, (like using the Shortcuts app to build a “send this text” automation that runs at a specific time), but that’s not the same thing as native support.
Re-reading my comment, I see what happened. I didn't specify "RCS on iOS....", assuming it would be implied based on the thread topic. I have made the edits.
From the way article is worded, I thought maybe they finally added schedule send for imessages, but somehow excluded it from RCS messages.
"RCS chats are still missing many features Apple bakes in for iMessage conversations, like being able to schedule messages to send later"
That is an interesting way of saying Apple is finally supporting an industry standard. By the way what is it with people pretending iMessage is the only messenger? There are many great cross platform options like signal and also some not so good options like WhatsApp. May just be Europe, but the last time I used SMS was in 2021. And I always have used iPhones.
Calling RCS an industry standard is a bit... Questionable. Still, I'm happy to see Apple finally implementing it so there's a good cross vendor texting implementation.
RCS still sucks. It's a marginal improvement over MMS, and not more.
Basically all the stuff people actually care about are proprietary Google features because they had to use proprietary extensions and send everything through their own servers to make it work.
It's really not different than iMessage. It's no more open to any other messaging app or any other OS than iMessage is, and it isn't really capable of being so unless the standard improves.
This is just… super wrong. RCS is more open than iMessage by virtue of being supported on two different platforms from different vendors. Doesn’t really mean it is fully open, it’s not, but 2 is more than 1.
Most of the stuff people think are RCS aren't though. They're proprietary extensions to RCS that only work on Google's text message apps, transmitted through Google's servers, with RCS junk as fallback for other services.
It's not actually meaningfully different than Apple doing iMessage with fallback to RCS now.
Intercommunication is still going to be bad because the standard that carriers support isn't where all the features are.
Can I do the fireworks effect or the heart baloon in RCS?
The nice thing about SMS is its on everyone's phone by default.
No apps to download and no accounts to make. Adding someone is a simple 9 digit number.
imessage bridged the gap between bacsic SMS and feature-rich messages. With them both being in one app and handled automatically, it is very convenient to use. While the extra features are limited to apple phones, you can use imessage to universally message any other phone.
~~Google made a their own thing, RCS, to compete with imessage.~~ ~~They made it an open~~ RCS is a standard ~~and worked~~ that works with carriers to make it so any phone could use it. it took Apple ~~7~~ years since release to add support.
Finally, you can text pretty much anyone with a smart phone a message with the "extra features" without hassle.
Google did not make RCS; RCS is made by GSM consortium as succession of SMS, Google extended it to add some extra features such as end to end encryption (but only when messages are routed through their servers).
China mandated 5G sold in China must support RCS, hence why Apple added support for this. Since Google is basically banned in China, you can pretty much bet RCS going into/out of China is going to be unencrypted.
So you’re basically stuck between getting inferior unencrypted messages, or routing everything through Google.
Avoid RCS like the plague.
Thanks for the info. I adjusted that section a bit, probably should more effort into the edit. Will read up on it some more in near future.
My point about the simplicity of using the "stock*" messesing app is still relevant for non-tech people. Grandpa doesn't want 6 different messesging apps. The easy phone number/pre-installed/near-universal/moslty cross-platform nature of them is a huge advanatge. Only downside, it has a pricy subscription called "the phone bill".
*i say stock in this case to pretty much include any app that uses your phone number and accepts sms/mms from another phone. For most people, thatll be the stock message app their phone comes with.