I asked if people chose iPhone for the blue bubbles elsewhere a couple days ago, and while there was some good discourse on that post, the blue bubbles definitely also came up as a reason.
In my experience, when people find out my texts are green, they oftentimes would rather switch to a different platform altogether like Instagram or just not text at all.
Is this actually a deal-breaker in friendships out there?
I think in the past this was excusable because RCS has been such a moving target. First it was the carriers disagreeing about how to implement, and dragging their feet, then Google got tired of waiting for carriers and sort of bypassed them. But even then RCS is messy when it’s part carrier, part Google, etc. Even Google Fi doesn’t support RCS if you want its text-from-computer function working! Then came e2e encryption, which has been haphazard.
At this point though, it is starting to solidify. Apple should implement it, and if Apple drags their feet, regulators should intervene. Don’t rule out that happening in the EU, either.
If it’s a messaging protocol and it’s starting to solidify, chances are Google will abandon it soon anyway.
I feel like if regulators are going to intervene, we should be expecting something better than RCS though. Most of RCS’s problems have happened because there was nobody with enough pull to get anyone to agree to anything more extensive, so we ended up with a slightly upgraded MMS. iMessage is a lot more than just upgraded MMS, it has payment options, polls, games, interactive applets, and anything else that someone wants to make a plug in to add on to it. And the gap goes beyond messaging, Apple also has proprietary standards for airdrop, video calls, ultrawideband, location tracking (although that’s getting slightly better), and basically any other way that two devices can communicate with each other.
I don’t want regulators to force apple to adopt RCS, I want a cohesive standard for all of the ways that apple has broken device communications, and RCS doesn’t even start to cover that. The only things that do really cover everything is IM apps like facebook messenger or whatsapp, so what we really need is for phones messaging apps to become IP based IM apps. Maybe even something where each IM app can federate with all of the others
I think if you try to have regulators come up with standards for things like airdrop or location sharing, it’s going to be a bad time.
RCS you can just regulate as a telecom feature. It’s contained. It doesn’t touch things like finance (which vary by country).
Regulators don’t even necessarily come up with the standards themselves, they just need to enforce that companies need to make their services interoperable. Actually creating the standard should probably be up to a collaboration of apple, google, and other relevant parties, but regulators should just enforce that it needs to happen
That still does touch on the problem. The RCS group was formed in 2007. Let that sink in.