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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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[–] -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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