Google Is Taking Charge of the RCS Rollout (opens in new tab)

> * Carriers CAN and likely WILL charge for it, because they can and because sadly (as noted above) RCS is visible to them as something more than an encrypted stream of data

Exactly. Carriers will see this as another revenue opportunity with almost zero marginal cost. They'll pounce on charging a premium for it. They want the glory days of per-minute per-text charges where you had to buy large pre-paid packages or risk high per-message charges.

Google has failed themselves repeatedly at their chat offerings. I personally believe it is due simply to Google's incentives: You don't get a promotion for maintaining hangouts.

Wave, GChat/Talk, Hangouts, Allo. All failed by Google neglect. Why should RCS be any better. It isn't even dependent on Google's neglect. It is dependent on our already highly unreliable North American carriers.

There is historic reason for this : all carriers and phone makers see messaging experience as critical and want to control it themselves. Google didn't have enough pull to make messaging mandatory part of default google apps bundle.

Then iMessage and WhatsApp happened and Google desperately tries to rectify the situation. See Hangouts SMS integration.

Latest two-prong attempt is Allo and RCS. Allo failed. The reason RCS kinda works out is that carriers can't combat iMessage alone anymore. RCS was conceived as asymmetrical response to iMessage which aligns both Google's and carriers' interests. Many carries don't even try to implement it and rely on Google's default client implementation and route through default google servers.

> At this point everyone is too burned by Google releasing new messaging apps and then sunsetting them year later.

What if they just released an upgrade to their existing Messages app and enrolled everyone by default in a new Google version of iMessage?

That's basically what Apple did. Upgrade to iOS 5 and you're automatically enrolled in iMessage without any extra steps. Suddenly your messaging experience just got a whole lot better without any extra work.

* Phone number-as-identity is so stupid, even apple admitted it

iMessage automatically working with phone numbers was the main reason it catapulted to such high usage so quickly. People didn't have to change their workflow, they just got brought into it automatically.

> RCS is reliant on carriers

Isn't that exactly what this article claims is changing? Google leading the main implementation also means most others will have to follow, and they very well could have an E2E mode similar to Allo's incognito mode. Not as good as always on, but still. Having it free through Google also makes it harder for ISP's to charge for it.

And who knows how long until Google gives up on this tech and comes out with something different anyway. I give it 2 years max.

The main problem is that everyone wants to profit from messaging in some way (carriers, google etc.) whereas there is only nominal cost to run messaging (not including development hours). Whatsapp was able to do it with $1/year. So there is no way to break this conundrum in the standard capitalistic model. If they were looking for technical solutions, they could have implemented something like signal as an AOSP app and be done with it. But there's no money in that.

iMessage actually works with any email address.

I’ve found it more reliable to use an email address for sender and recipient, then it avoids the limbo of trying to send, SMS fallback, etc.

Not to be conspiratorial but I find all of this to be pretty intentional. It's currently very hard for me to stay on T-Mobile's legacy (i.e. true) PAYG plan which only supports regular texts. I often have to ask people I'm doing business with to send things as a regular text because emojis and pics don't download.

Looking at the overview on wikipedia and gsma, this thing is feature creeped to the absolute rim before overflowing. Including parts of the specification for APIs and app integration if I'm reading it correctly.

Frankly, if a corporation wanted to lay the groundwork for itself to be the private contractor for when the government wants to make use of the data that can be hoovered from these open channels. It would look a hell of a lot like Google. All this feature creep in abundance is a great way to lock people into centralized monolithic apps or force them into new revenue streams (again, they're already trying it with my PAYG plan for MMS).

I could take it to its greatest logical conclusion especially considering the API, app integration & visible protocol fingerprint and just say this is a great way to introduce WeChat by Google.

I hope this doesn't sound irrational. But I for one find it irrational that I'm even in this position with regular texting versus MMS. It's like phone carriers are the only ones allowed to have shitty interoperability of this kind. Getting really tired of it. Also I hope you're right that their fuckups are resulting in lower adoption, because 68 (including T-Mobile) carriers have already signed onto the Universal Profile part of the spec:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services#St...

Why would we want to move from SMS to a situation where Facebook ALSO has a copy of every message we send? Not an improvement.

iOS holds something like 50% of US marketshare and iMessage takes a lot of the wind out of third-party messaging apps.

WhatsApp has made significant inroads in the US but it isn't universal. If you have a phone, you can almost 100% get texts.

I'm guessing the only thing that comes close to texting in terms of marketshare is iMessage. And that's simply because it is on every iOS device AND enabled by default.

That's really stupid. Whatsapp is proprietary and controlled by a single giant corporation. I refuse to use it even though everyone I know has it.

I'm not in the US, and I stopped using WhatsApp for several reasons. It doesn't provide me any benefits over SMS (people still need to know your phone number, for example, and if they change phone numbers, there's the whole game of figuring out who is messaging you). Not that many people I communicate with regularly really cared if we used it or another communications method either. It is one more app draining my phone's battery. And I want to limit the apps that Facebook can use to gain information about me.

Not in China. Its WeChat all the way, even when they live and work abroad.

I think you'll find there's a diverse set of messaging users and requirements.

My 70+ parents for example only know and understand SMS (and they've only recently started using it in the last six months). My brother uses Facebook chat but because I'm not on FB we have to use SMS as a lowest common denominator. He doesn't have friends on Telegram so he sees that as unnecessary bloat to add to his phone.

Unfortunately SMS still has bar none the easiest onboarding experience as it is the default chat mechanism on every phone.

That's a little bit of recursive thinking though. No one uses SMS because SMS is bad, not because it's SMS. People used to use SMS all the time, before it fell behind.

I use Android and moved my entire family and friend base to Signal and no longer talk to people outside of Signal unless something automated sends me SMS/MMS. Encryption is a must for me. Thinking about moving to iOS because of the privacy & encryption.

Primarily because of interoperability. There is still no messaging format as ubiquitous as SMS, and it's a constant annoyance to me that my friends on Android don't receive my (photo/video/group) messages as easily as my friends with iPhones do. Sure, everyone could switch to one of the third party services out there, but it's been years and they still haven't. So I'm all for establishing a new baseline that doesn't try to do everything and just builds on the foundation already existing in SMS.

I'll try to explain why I'm excited: I think you hit it with the "anyone in the world" desire. If I truly want to communicate with anyone I know, I have three options: call, text, or email. No other messaging platform has anywhere near 100% coverage for the people I talk to. RCS won't initially have that coverage, but I do see a path to reaching that coverage since it doesn't require every single user installing and configuring an app. I'm already pretty happy with SMS, I just want some more features.

I think we've known for a long time there is nobody in charge of strategy at Google. Look at what they did to Android Wear, Hangouts, Duo, Allo...

>Is there no one in charge of strategy at Google? This is an embarrassment.

No. If there were, we'd have Hangouts with SMS fallback. Simple as that.

Guess what happens when they create a preinstalled default messaging app with SMS fallback all running on their own platform (like iMessage). You guessed it, antitrust. Influential OEMs and Carriers would complain and so would the EU.