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Apple gets the message, RCS coming to iPhone in 2024 with same Universal Profile as Android (9to5google.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/android@lemdro.id
70 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

It's happening!!!

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[–] 80 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Now, if only Google wasn't a cunt about allowing other apps for rcs, that would be great

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  • [–] 36 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Imagine cross-platform RCS support built into Signal. πŸ₯ΉπŸ’­

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Man that would be nice. Could finally have it be all in one again like Google Hangouts before it was killed.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Oh that'd be nice but since no more SMS in Signal I can't see it going back in (unless they reversed course?)

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    IIRC their point was that SMS is insecure, so they don't want people using SMS in Signal to think that this is Signal. With RCS, they could do what Apple will - be interoperable while providing extras with own platform (iMessage).

    Admittedly, that doesn't sound like enough reason to reimplement SMS and RCS alone would still be kind of inconvenient.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Why not have separate apps so users can opt to install one or the other?

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Why do you use two apps for SMS or iMessage now.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I don't understand. I don't do that. But I have Whatsapp, telegram, signal and discord installed, and those are all quite separate apps.

    The point being, why would I want my Whatsapp install to come integrated with a whole discord client? I can already just install both, which is much easier and keeps things separate.

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  • [–] [S] 10 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Samsung Messages is the only other, right?

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago*

    Technically anyone who makes an android device could have their own. The API is a system-level API, so any app signed with system certificates (aka, any app packaged with your phone) can use it. Any app you download from the play store can't.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    What do you think Apple will do? 😁

    Cue several years of Google and Apple pointing at each other and shouting "see, they don't want to be compatible with us!"

    RCS was an idiotic take from the start. It should've been a layer of encryption over SMS and remain otherwise stateless and platform agnostic.

    But of course companies and governments don't really want encryption. So it became something that's trivially easy to subvert by each company that implements it, because it needs to pass through servers, and who controls the servers gets to be an ass about it.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    It should've been a layer of encryption over SMS and remain otherwise stateless and platform agnostic.

    Umm what?

    SMS has a very short size limit. Implementing RCS as an encryption layer on top of it would require devices to send several messages just to cover a short one-word reply. They also often come out of order so they would need to include a numbering system so the client could piece them back together.

    Granted that is already how SMS works on modern devices, but the underlying protocol is woefully inept at modern messaging and completely unviable for what you're proposing.

    How should media attachments work? I assume you expect that to just use encryption built on MMS? So media can come through even more compressed than basic MMS? None of the actual benefits of RCS would be possible if it was built on top of the existing ancient standards.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Encrypting doesn't necessarily boost the size of the message. You can also use compression very effectively since it's mostly text.

    You don't need to also solve media hosting, you can just leave it be links like it is now. Just adding encryption would be an amazing improvement.

    There are no additional changes needed to the transport layer, it would be transparent for telcos. It can be an OTG encryption layer.

    Initial key exchange would be the only part that would require a couple of additional one-time messages but it would be automated. And not all messages need to be encrypted, nobody cares that my package has been shipped. And it would be an improvement anyway from having zero encryption to being able to have encryption

    The whole thing is so simple that it could be implemented today by all the SMS apps without missing a beat. The only thing missing is the willingness to do so.

    In fact it could be added as an option in any SMS app very easily β€” only for people who are both on the same app of course.

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