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Nothing Phone builds a blue bubble iMessage bridge while Google and Apple fight over RCS
(www.androidcentral.com)
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this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
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when did SMS go out of style?
Probably when it was beaten in both features and cost by the alternatives.
More than decade ago when phones started to be capable to use Internet-based messaging standards, those that exists for computers for 30+ years.
Because SMS are paid. I only use them because I am on a dumbphone and the plan is like $3 anyway.
I've been waiting for average users to catch up since about 2010 when I was running Pidgin (XMPP) on my Android, since SMS is terribly unreliable.
SMS is a best-effort protocol, with zero error checking, meaning no error correction, no ensured delivery. It's known to lose up to ten percent of messages.
It's also tightly bound to cellular architecture, since it encapsulates messages into the mostly-empty management frames of the cell network.
It was bleeding edge in 1986 (IIRC), but it's long past it's retirement time.
Apple did it with iMessage so they can harvest data.
Google saw that and is now pushing for RCS to completely replace SMS because then they can harvest the data and sell ads and spam you ads with RCS and worse, they would control its backend so they would gatekeep everything about it.
They actually went so far as to forcibly enable RCS on my phone. While for now I can still disable it, I need to find an alternative to the default message app on android.
SMS is by far the worst standard. If you care about privacy use Signal or even WhatsApp. They both are far superior.
Thanks, yes SMS is insecure, but its also not routing through Google, so it is already more secure than RCS.
No, it's just
If Google could prove that messages are E2EE then I don't give a shit who it routes through, they can't read it.
If we're going only on security then Google Messages is a way better choice since they use Signal E2EE.
SMS has no encryption at all so Google, your carrier, and everyone in between can spy on the contents of all your SMS messages.
With RCS Google is only getting the metadata and no one can just listen in on your chats
I had to check mine after your comment. They did it to me too. Every time they asked to turn it on I was adamant to refuse it. Has caused issues with messages not being sent or received before. With email that's fine but messages are meant to be instant.
Everytime this comes up...
RCS is not a Google product. Google Jibe is their RCS product and if carriers choose to use Jibe, then it's on them.