244
Samsung joins Google in RCS shaming Apple
(www.theverge.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
244 points (94.2% liked)
Android
27940 readers
6 users here now
DROID DOES
Welcome to the droidymcdroidface-iest, Lemmyest (Lemmiest), test, bestest, phoniest, pluckiest, snarkiest, and spiciest Android community on Lemmy (Do not respond)! Here you can participate in amazing discussions and events relating to all things Android.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules
1. All posts must be relevant to Android devices/operating system.
2. Posts cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
3. No spam, self promotion, or upvote farming. Sources engaging in these behavior will be added to the Blacklist.
4. Non-whitelisted bots will be banned.
5. Engage respectfully: Harassment, flamebaiting, bad faith engagement, or agenda posting will result in your posts being removed. Excessive violations will result in temporary or permanent ban, depending on severity.
6. Memes are not allowed to be posts, but are allowed in the comments.
7. Posts from clickbait sources are heavily discouraged. Please de-clickbait titles if it needs to be submitted.
8. Submission statements of any length composed of your own thoughts inside the post text field are mandatory for any microblog posts, and are optional but recommended for article/image/video posts.
Community Resources:
We are Android girls*,
In our Lemmy.world.
The back is plastic,
It's fantastic.
*Well, not just girls: people of all gender identities are welcomed here.
Our Partner Communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Maybe android should create it's own proprietary bs. They do have a significantly larger market share.
They did. RCS.
It technically isn't proprietary. But many implementations are reliant on Google's Jibe system. So even if you've avoided Google completely. If you use RCS there is a strong chance all your messages are going through Google.
RCS relies on the carrier to implement. With many carriers using Jibe, even if your doesn't the people you message likely are. So you can't get away from Google.
At least with iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal (plus Allo, Hangouts GChat, meet, GmailTalk etc). You know who controls the messaging service. You can then made a decision to engage with that messaging service.
With RCS this isn't clear. You may think your using your carrier or the person's your communicating with carrier. Or you may be using Google's Jibe. Or some other implementation.
I’m so happy to see someone else is finally talking about this. RCS, as implemented by Google, is distinct from the actual open RCS standard. Google added a proprietary middle layer which is how they get features working which RCS doesn’t support.
And that proprietary middle layer (Jibe being part of it) is why there aren’t a million third party RCS clients out there. Google must give API access. They are gatekeepers. And they only share keys with strategic partners (Samsung being one of them, telcos with their own app like Verizon used to have being another).
But in the end Google did what Google does best: fragmented a product. And now Google holds the leash for RCS proper. I bet Apple isn’t too keen to route all customer data through Google servers even when encrypted. Because it’s another piece that Apple doesn’t control.
Well, RCS was originally more fragmented before Google. Each carrier wanted to handle RCS messaging differently. T-Mobile made their own, but it only worked with other T-Mobile users.
Google was tired of waiting for all the carriers to agree and come up with their universal cross-carrier RCS platform, so they decided to come up with something that works with Google Messages, which is generally accepted as the RCS standard now.