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The long fight to make Apple's iMessage compatible with all devices has raged with little to show for it. But Google (de facto leader of the charge) and other mobile operators are now leveraging the European Union's Digital Market Act (DMA), according to the Financial Times. The law, which goes into effect in 2024, requires that "gatekeepers" not favor their own systems or limit third parties from interoperating within them. Gatekeepers are any company that meets specific financial and usage qualifications, including Google's parent company Alphabet, Apple, Samsung and others.

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[-] kirklennon@kbin.social 100 points 1 year ago

On the tech side, Android users also get lower-quality photos and videos when they're sent through iMessage.

Android users don’t receive anything at all through iMessage; the whole conversation becomes SMS/MMS. I suppose getting major, relevant tech details is hard for an outlet like Engadget.

[-] SinTacks@programming.dev -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Low quality SMS. There are lots of things Apple could do to improve the experience of texting people without iMessage, lots of things built into the SMS standard that they do t implement.

Edit: wow thought this was commonly known. Basically Apple hasn’t adopted industry standard SMS improvements. There’s a whole campaign to try to get them to. Here’s an article explaining https://www.android.com/get-the-message/

[-] fartsparkles@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 year ago

What on earth is “low quality SMS”? And what parts of the SMS communication protocols don’t they implement?

[-] lemmylommy@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago
[-] kogasa@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

RCS is not SMS and has nothing to do with the SMS standard.

[-] kirklennon@kbin.social -2 points 1 year ago

Basically Apple hasn’t adopted industry standard SMS improvements. There’s a whole campaign to try to get them to.

This is an advertising campaign to get Apple to adopt Google's proprietary version of RCS, which is not the SMS standard. It is, functionally, Google's own version of iMessage, running Google software on Google servers.

[-] SinTacks@programming.dev 5 points 1 year ago

This is just false, it’s sent over carrier networks and the carriers decide whose infrastructure to use. Google is one of several options. RCS is an open standard and it is the industry standard for SMS. It’s literally why every other non iphone can send high quality pictures to each other. Apple not adopting it is anti competitive.

[-] kirklennon@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

it’s sent over carrier networks and the carriers decide whose infrastructure to use.

The carriers never bothered to implement RCS; they just outsourced the whole thing to Google.

RCS is an open standard

That nobody uses.

it is the industry standard for SMS.

It's meant as a replacement for SMS. It's not just some new version of SMS that Apple hasn't upgraded to, which is what you were basically saying earlier.

It’s literally why every other non iphone can send high quality pictures to each other.

It's a messaging service used exclusively by Android phones. iPhones all support iMessage; Androids (mostly) all support RCS. All of those iMessages go over Apple's servers; all of those RCS messages go over Google's servers.

For what it's worth, iPhones have supported sending full-quality pictures to everyone over a legitimately open protocol since launch day. It's called email.

Apple not adopting it is anti competitive.

Google's attempts to legally force Apple to adopt its proprietary platform is transparently anticompetitive.

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this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2023
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