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Apple announced RCS with a whimper when it should have been a bang (www.theverge.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 71 points 2 years ago (3 children)

IIRC, it's controlled by the carrier and not encrypted. If that's the case, it's bad. We've been moving away from carriers and internet providers, and got some privacy back by various means. Why would be roll that back?

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  • [–] 65 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Because everyone is too distracted by “Apple bad” to realise how truly awful RCS is.

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

    More awful than sms?

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  • [–] 18 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    No, but that doesn't make it good.

    The whole world except a minority moved away from SMS a long time ago.

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

    That's great that the rest of the world moved on. That doesn't mean that those of us in locations that haven't moved on have to use the most inferior version of messaging.

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  • [+] -7 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Yes toward corporations who sell your data. Great move, big brains

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  • [+] 15 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)
    [deleted]
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  • [+] -13 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Great point. I'm sure they're decrypting my rcs messages somehow and selling that data. And I'm sure your response here has nothing to do with riding apple wang

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  • [+] 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] -2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    You’ll still have Instagram! Don’t think of it as handing over your private communication to your phone carrier, think of it as “also having that choice”. It ps a step forward to have more choices.

    I’m somewhat hopeful, since mobile carriers are somewhat regulated. They can be forced to care. Meanwhile, something like Instagram is a private company with noe oversight, who can choose to do almost anything they think will bring in more money

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

    This makes no sense. Apple is bad, and also I want encrypted messaging. It's called Signal. It's free for iOS and Android both.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    I love Signal and use it with my family which is the majority of my messaging. But I was surprised to find out the rest of my family on iPhone are missing features I have on Android. This doesn't help bring the iPhone users.

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  • [–] -5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Except RCS isn’t awful at all. It’s also end to end encrypted on androids. If Apple’s participation isn’t encrypted, that’s on Apple.

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  • [–] 56 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

    Only Google’s proprietary extension has encryption. The actual industry standard specification of RCS has no encryption defined at all.

    Edit: It turns out Apple have refused to use Google’s proprietary encryption implementation and are instead working with GSMA to update the RCS Universal Profile specification to finally have encryption defined and standardised so that any RCS client can handle encrypted payloads (whereas only Google Messages today can do encrypted RCS and requires other users to be exclusively using Google Messages otherwise messages are sent unencrypted).

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago

    Yes, that’s the right thing todo. My understanding was that Google went down this path and didn’t succeed, so went ahead with their own. Maybe have the other major mobile os onboard will be enough to get the carriers off their asses

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Doesn't rcs depend on having mobile data or internet access on? If I understand it right it is strictly worse than sms.

    Many people just have data off most of the time and sending messages with the system app assumes things are delivered immediately and everyone easily receives them. If you forget your data is off or don't have internet for a while then you end up assuming people received stuff when they didn't.

    All phone isps have basically unlimited sms for free when data is paid in huge amounts of gold.

    Sms > Rcs

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

    It’s not worse than SMS in any fashion. Just like SMS, RCS will tell you when your text is actually delivered. You will never assume somebody received something that they didn’t. Furthermore RCS offers read receipt functionality which will additionally let you know your message was read. SMS is not capable of that.

    RCS also lets you actually send media to your contacts, like photos and videos without horribly mangling them with compression.

    And as for having no data connection, your phone will fall back to SMS same as iMessages do. Which shouldn’t be at all necessary as most people have unlimited data plans and even when throttled RCS has such a small footprint you shouldn’t have any trouble.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Most people definitely DONT have unlimited data plans. In fact they are so limited and expensive that many just have the data turned off and rely on public wifi connections everywhere they go to use internet.

    Nobody needs to bother with sms delivery because it just works. The only time it doesn't is if someone has their phones turned off.

    Sending media is just a nice to have, not necessary.

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

    Nope, most people do have unlimited data plans. And unless you live in some tiny, mountainous, Eastern European backwater, the plans aren’t actually that expensive either. And even if you truly are a time traveler from the year 2002 like you appear to be, and you have an incredibly limited 5GB data plan, you’ll be happy to know that even if you reach your data cap, you will still have data connectivity enough to use RCS without issue. All that happens when you “run out” of data on phone plans is you’re throttled down to a slower speed that is still more than sufficient to sent text messages over RCS.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago*

    RCS was designed to be implemented by the carriers, but all the carriers tried it, failed to gain any traction, and dropped support again, so now the only server is the Google one which is used automatically by the Google messaging app (which, to their credit, does support encryption, through a proprietary extension which they are now allowing Apple to use as well)

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