I’m not a fan of the “war” between Android and Apple when it comes to SMS/texting. The rest of the world doesn’t use SMS/RCS/iMessage as much as WhatsApp and the like, so the US is pretty much lagging behind everyone else on this anyway.
That being said, I have to admit Android did a good job with this!
What a weird dig coming from Google. Who is Google to complain about outdated messenger tech when they don’t even built RCS into Android? The RCS Google wants you to use (the one with encryption) is part of their messenger, not part of the operating system itself. It’s not even standardised.
The iMessage/SMS situation is stupid, but Google isn’t exactly doing much better here.
I’m not using RCS until it is available with no vendor lock-in. Call me when third-party apps like Textra can use it, and I don’t need to use Google’s relay.
Google’s relay is a requirement for carriers who don’t host their own RCS infrastructure. Google set up a fallback server because outside of a few specific carriers, nobody bothered implementing RCS in their networks. In theory your carrier could set up a server and you wouldn’t need Google at all.
In theory apps could build an RCS implementation and take control of your RCS account, in the same way that apps could reverse engineer iMessage.
I trust my carrier even less than Google, which is saying something.
Give google a break, its hard for them to keep track of what message backend is in which app. They have created and killed 5 messaging apps in the time I wrote out this comment, how can you expect them to know whats going on?
Google is taking the “monkeys with typewriters” approach to messaging apps, if they release enough of them they’ll eventually stumble across a messaging app that’s compatible with iMessage.
I miss Hangouts 🥲
I miss Messenger with XMPP