I predict one of two outcomes once Apple becomes aware of this. Either they’ll modify the iMessage protocol to break Nothing Phones compatibility, or they’ll sue Nothing Phone for violating some kind of IP law. Apple absolutely wants to maintain their walled garden and letting a non-Apple product transparently interact on equal footing with Apple products runs counter to that.
Outcome 3: they buy whatever company is responsible for creating this compatibility layer, slowly integrate it so they can skate past several international regulations/lawsuits trying to open iMessage, and declare victory.
Why would they buy a company that is using a workaround when they could just make an iMessage app for android
Because that’s not their goal, they absolutely don’t want iMessage to work on Android, at least not without severe limitations. They want Android to look like a second class citizen. If they bought the intermediary company it would be with the intent of strangling it not expanding it. They’ll just slow walk the murder so that regulators don’t take too much notice.
For one: it helps them avoid any adjudication that would force them to do just that while avoiding admitting they have the ability to.
Nah, Apple doesn’t care.
These bridges like the ones found in Beeper/Matrix require a Mac server to perform the handshake with Apple’s.
As long as these servers require Apple hardware to function Apple is making money.
It’s roughly equivalent to running iMessage on your Mac at home and making an Android/PC app that remotely sends/receives messages to/from that iMessage app on your Mac.
Nah, if it gets big enough, Apple will care. They literally said (based on court document) that iMessage on Android is a horrible idea because it’ll make it easier for people to switch platform.
The messaging is provided by a third party who is dedicated to working on their iMessage compatibility. Apple has no reason to stop this because this is a good move for them in the larger battle between mobile messaging standards.
Google owns Jibe, the company behind RCS messaging found on all Android phones and an emerging, competent product from the only game in town that can compete with Apple. Google has decided to take this to the government level and push for a unified phone messaging standard, normally a good thing, but proposed their own RCS solution. The one they own and whose servers Google scrapes for user info.
Apple is pushing iMessage as a protest against Google and their inevitable lawsuit to conform with RCS adoption. Android may win unless Apple shows it has parity and provides a non-legislative option: if enough people use iMessage then governments don’t have to make any laws or enforce changes. The company Nothing is using iMessage, which helps Apple prove there is both a significant user base, which would cause a burden on Apple and it’s customers to change, and there is no monopoly on iMessage or messaging in general. So if enough people use iMessage, Apple sees it as a good thing.
RCS is not a Google product, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSMA
Apple has been pushing iMessage for quite some time, but they want to keep it just to their platform and have made no attempt to make it open to other users. That’s Apples way and it’s not as a “protest” to Google lol
That’s like saying they made the lightning port as a protest to USB standards, nah they just want their proprietary shit.
Google’s RCS service is unique in that it is not telecom based. I would advise looking at the RCS Wikipedia article here.
Can you please point to me where it states Googles “version” of RCS can’t also interface with telecom based RCS?
Because it seems from my reading the Google just has some enhanced features on top of RCS (like e2e encryption) when both sides are through Google, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work with telecoms as well, unlike Apples walled garden of iMessage which doesn’t work with anything else lol.
Google RCS was designed to be interoperable. Apple iMessage was not.
And…? I don’t get your point, that’s what I’m arguing, Apple specifically made iMessage unable to interact with anything else intentionally, they very well could have figured out a way to bring it to other platforms but specifically chose not to.
No worries, I’m just sharing information and answering questions. Not trying to argue a point.
Reasons why Apple iMessage does not support RCS has way too much speculation around it from what I’ve briefly read so I prefer not to comment.
Apple’s ideology behind not expanding iMessage to other platforms has been - at least in part - due to the security of the iMessage platform and how it authorizes senders and recipients (like many encrypted services on Apple devices, tokens are encrypted/decrypted in the Secure Enclave on the SoC). Apparently, Apple has low confidence in the diaspora of Android devices and just decided to forget even trying to create a client for Android it could tie down to hardware authentication due to not having a reliable hardware base. This was many years ago.
I don’t know if this is still true or even necessary today, or if they’ve even bothered to explore it recently, but that’s Apple’s main issue. Sure, it also benefits them in other ways such as driving users to their platforms, but this is their main issue.
Not according to the leaked emails… https://x.com/TechEmails/status/1589450766506692609?s=20
Also, the secure enclave wasn’t added until the iPhone 5s in 2013, whereas iMessage had already existed as of 2011.
Clearly they also saw the benefits of keeping it to Apples platforms, but that doesn’t remove the technical limitations, at least, early on.
Like I said, I don’t know if those limitations still exist. Clearly, the profit motive would if it weren’t for all of the legal and regulatory liabilities that exist abroad. This is why I suggested in another comment that purchasing and integrating this compatibility layer would be a good workaround for them in that regard.
The limitation was added after the fact anyway, like I mentioned in my edit, secure enclave wasn’t added until the A7 chip, which was first used in the iPhone 5S in 2013, two years after iMessage became available.
Although true, it was added to make iMessage (and every other service) more secure, not just as some sneaky way to keep iMessages off android devices.
That’s like saying they made the lightning port as a protest to USB standards, nah they just want their proprietary shit.
They wanted a new, compact, durable, reversible plug for their mobile devices. There was no industry-standard option that met their requirements, so they made their own. If USB-C had existed at the time, they would have used it (though as a physical connector, Lightning is still just plain better).
Do you really think that?
Back when that would’ve been a good argument… but why then when USB-C did become a thing, and became robust and well-supported enough that even Apple used it on every other device they sold, didn’t they adopt it onto the IPhone despite lightning being an inferior standard in basically every way?
Why did they literally have to be forced by the EU to adopt the very standard they helped to create, a standard that was de-facto almost everywhere else?
Because they wanted that sweet, sweet proprietary monopoly. Plain and simple, the rest is just excuses.
Back when that would’ve been a good argument… but why then when USB-C did become a thing, and became robust and well-supported enough that even Apple used it on every other device they sold, didn’t they adopt it onto the IPhone despite lightning being an inferior standard in basically every way?
What’s the advantage of using USB-C? Because it’s a standard, right? A standard means wide support and it works with what you already have. Except Apple had effectively already established that with Lightning. It was in hundreds of millions of devices before USB-C became mainstream. Sure USB-C was nominally standard, but Lightning maintained the advantages for Apple’s customers as a de facto standard. The switch to USB-C meant buying new cables, while Lightning meant using the cables you already had.
What’s the advantage of using USB-C? Because it’s a standard, right?
Other than support for superior data transfer speeds, energy carrying ability, and durability? Yeah, it would be that it is an almost universal standard outside of the Iphone.
A standard means wide support and it works with what you already have. Except Apple had effectively already established that with Lightning. It was in hundreds of millions of devices before USB-C became mainstream.
For well-established standards this is correct, but every standard has to start out somewhere, and you’ll find once upon a time lightning was faced this exact same argument.
Sure USB-C was nominally standard, but Lightning maintained the advantages for Apple’s customers as a de facto standard.
A defacto standard for more or less only Iphones, as Apple switched almost all of their other products to use USB-C once it reached mass adoption.
You’ll find that being locked into Apple’s proprietary charging standard maintained a much larger advantage for Apple than it did their customers in allowing Apple to demand royalties/licensing fees from any 3rd parties that wanted to make charging accessories.
The switch to USB-C meant buying new cables, while Lightning meant using the cables you already had.
You could make this argument against the adoption of any new standard, again baring in mind that once upon a time lightning stood was the new standard that faced this exact criticism.
Also, had Apple just allowed other manufacturers to make use of lightning as a standard, you wouldn’t even need to worry about this right now - thus this is a rod for Apple’s own back, which they won’t mind since they already got off with the money.
Other than support for superior data transfer speeds, energy carrying ability, and durability? Yeah, it would be that it is an almost universal standard outside of the Iphone.
I specifically said the physical design of Lightning is superior
A defacto standard for more or less only Iphones, as Apple switched almost all of their other products to use USB-C once it reached mass adoption.
The iPhone and all of Apple’s accessories (such as AirPods) used Lightning up until a couple of months ago. The keyboards and mice still use Lightning. A connector used on well over a billion devices has all of the practical advantages for consumers of being a standard even if it’s nominally proprietary.
You could make this argument against the adoption of any new standard, again baring in mind that once upon a time lightning stood was the new standard that faced this exact criticism.
Yes, which is why companies should always be reluctant to change unless the new option is significantly better. Lightning was way better than anything else available and was worth the inconvenience of the change. The benefits were real and obvious to all users. The transition to USB-C is … less compelling for users.
Which is literally exactly what Apple did when they moved from the older connector to lightning in the first place lol.
I don’t buy this argument at all, they could have contributed towards a combined connector with the usb-if, but instead they made their own proprietary connector.
they could have contributed towards a combined connector with the usb-if
There was already one in the works but it was still years ago. They wanted to ditch the dock connector and didn’t want to wait forever.
Lightning came out in 2012, USB-C came out in 2014, not exactly “forever”
This is just cope man come on
Yes, that’s two years, and we’re also needing to look at hardware engineering decisions made in 2011 (since major components are finalized long in advance). Even if they knew then that USB-C would be ready in three years, that doesn’t mean it necessarily justifies keeping the dock connector that much longer, but there was also no guarantee it would be a viable option in 2014. How long do you stick with inferior options when you can just to it better yourself sooner? We have to keep in mind the reason we like industry standards in the first place. Ideally they lead to a better customer experience; they are not a goal in and of themselves, just because they are a standard.
My point is that there were very real, entirely legitimate reasons why it was good for Apple’s customers that Apple introduced Lightning.
They did contribute towards usb c. And lightning came out years before c did. They had promised to only switch connectors once a decade because people got so mad about the switch from the thirty pin to the lightning.
Source for them contributing towards USBC prior to implementing lightning port?
Weird request when USB-C was released 2 years after lightning.
Lmao, how is Lightning better than a USB-C? They’re both practically the same thing, even in durability. Apple might’ve made Lightning first, yes, but then USB-C came out like 2 years later.
Be real here: Apple only stuck with Lightning because it’s stupid easy money for them. Cables are hella cheap to make, and if you make them in-house, you basically spend like $2 at most to manufacture 1 cable. Lightning has the upside of both that and forcing people into the Apple ecosystem because their old phone cables can charge the new phones.
how is Lightning better than a USB-C?
It’s physically smaller, doesn’t require the thin little piece inside the port on the device, and the rounded corners make it easier to insert without lining up perfectly. To clarify, I’m not saying this makes USB-C bad, but the physical design just isn’t as good.
Be real here: Apple only stuck with Lightning because it’s stupid easy money for them. Cables are hella cheap to make, and if you make them in-house, you basically spend like $2 at most to manufacture 1 cable.
Third parties sell Lightning cables and Apple sells USB-C cables (really nice ones, actually). There’s no significant monetary impact to Apple regardless of which connector they have.
Lightning has the upside of both that and forcing people into the Apple ecosystem because their old phone cables can charge the new phones.
I thought the whole argument in favor of USB-C was that because it’s a standard, people already have cables for it or can buy them for dirt cheap. If that’s the case, the fact that people also have Lightning cables wouldn’t be a major reason to stick with an iPhone when upgrading.
Man you’re just proving you have no idea what you’re talking about with every response.
With lightning, Apple essentially added DRM to the connector, requiring cable manufacturers to pay Apple for each sold cable.
“Lightning also introduced additional protocols that could only be officially supported through the MFi program.”
"The Apple MFi Program has no fee to join, but there are two costs associated with membership; a company wanting to join has to pay for a third-party identity verification and pay royalties to Apple once approved, and neither cost is mentioned in Apple’s MFi FAQ documentation. Royalty fees in particular are covered by an NDA, making finding actual pricing difficult.
According to an Apple Insider article from 2014 (which is the newest pricing source available), MFi royalties run $4 USD per connector (e.g., a lightning port) on a device. It is unknown if this information is still correct. I contacted Apple and received this response:
All publicly-available information about the MFi Program is available on our FAQ page: http://mfi.apple.com/faqs. Unfortunately, we are not able to provide further details about the MFi Program beyond those provided in the FAQ."
Additionally, the point of standards in general is to reduce waste and make interoperable devices much easier across manufacturers, something Apple consistently has proven they have to be forced to do. For example… iMessage and the lightning connector. They can provide excuses all they want but the truth is plain to see, they frequently hoard technology for themselves and intentionally make products that don’t function with existing products in the name of profit.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s smart of them to do from a monetary standpoint, but that doesn’t make it right and consumers should be smarter.
Apple has no reason to stop this because this is a good move for them in the larger battle between mobile messaging standards.
Uhhhh no? Don’t know if you’ve noticed but Apple is winning the battle between messaging standards, and they like it that way.
Apple is pushing iMessage as a protest against Google and their inevitable lawsuit to conform with RCS adoption.
What? iMessage is a decade older than RCS…
This could easily be blocked by Apple
Are these a Matrix/Beeper bridge?
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On a iPhone? Don’t think there is such a setting.
When I watched MKBHDs video on this, my first thought was whether or not we could selfhost a service like this. If I could run this through my own Mac mini server to my own / family’s phones, that would be great. I don’t think I’d ever feel comfortable logging into my iCloud account on some company’s server with just their pinky promise as a guarantee.
You can self host this already, most likely what nothing is doing https://github.com/mautrix/imessage
That is fascinating. Thanks for the link.
Well yeah it’s not. But it’s the first time something like this has been integrated onto an personal consumer device.
RCS sucks ass. I have had more missed messages and fucked up communications due to it NOT USING SMS FALLBACK. other person isn’t available via IP? Then FUCK YOUR MESSAGE.
Want a different app? FUCK YOU
Wanna sort your messages, or filter them, or run an automation? FUCK. YOU.
I don’t blame apple for not implementing this shit.
Also, fuck bubble shaming
There is a reason they don’t send it until someone is online. On iMessage, you know if someone read it, not if they actually are able to receive it. If they fix the bug where the time of the message is when it finishes sending, it will be a great feature because you know if they have access to their phone and data. It will try to send it throughout the down time. Also you can use other rcs apps and have things go through rcs messages because of desktop authentication.
iMessage indicates “Delivered” for messages that was received by a recipient device and switches to “Read [time]” when read.
Otherwise it’ll sit without a Delivered or fallback to SMS.
iMessage automatically goes to read if it doesn’t work correctly. Partner got a new phone number when switching providers. She has a Samsung phone, and kept it. The number they gave her came from an iPhone. All messages sent to her from iPhones were marked read on their end and never get delivered. All messages sent to iPhones appear to send, but don’t arrive. All texts from Android to Android still worked fine so we didn’t realize immediately as I had an android phone as well.
The phone number that isn’t owned by Apple is being routed to them even though they should have no part in the process. Apple’s advised solution is to acquire an iPhone to disable iMessages. Thankfully they have a website where you can remove a number from their service, but it is not intuitive to go to AT&T/Verizon/Spectrum/whoever and purchase a cellular plan and then have to reach out to a 3rd party company to shut down their invasive services on products they down own.
Do you know of a different RCS enabled app than messages? Honest question
Most carriers either have their own app or their own rcs network for rcs. It is also possible to use the web interface of Google messages to make one, not sure if anyone except beeper has done this though.
I haven’t used SMS for anything besides receiving auth codes and maybe sending some short info to a stranger (for example a contractor). But then again, I live in Europe.
SMS Is way more common I guess in the US because you can text anyone across the US, whereas before EU carriers may have charged more for intra-EU texts?
WhatsApp became popular (in the UK) around the time when SMS was free for most. It was a huge jump over SMS because:
- group chats
- read receipts
- worked on WiFi without a phone signal
- picture / video messages
- it was fast (or it certainly felt faster anyway)
From what I recall at the time, BBM was quite popular but WhatsApp won over in the end as it was cross platform. There was a big appetite to move away from SMS. WhatsApp wasn’t even free at the time, it had a small annual fee on Android or a one off installation fee on iOS and still gained popularity. It’s kind of surprising that the rest of the world seemed to make this jump at the same time but the US seems to be stuck on SMS.
There are always four decisions at play - country of origin of sender and receiver, current location of sender and receiver.
Whenever you enter a different country, you gen an automated SMS informing you of the prices of SMS, MMS, outgoing and incoming price calls per minute.
Rule of thumb used to be - SMS receiving is always free, accepting a call with local SIM card is also free. All the other combinations are usually extra if you are currently in a different country than the SIM origin.
But, now that most of EU is either in Shengen or is a partial member with contracts (like Croatia with mobile internet), you either don’t pay as much or pay no extra at all.
But, yeah, that’s probably the reason SMS never really got off.
Asia represent!
Solving the “blue bubble” problem is easy. Stop giving a fuck about what iPhone users care about.
They bitch about it constantly
I’m an adult, and I deal with family members bitching at me that are over 50. I explain to them every time that this is 100% Apple’s designed problem, and they like to roll their eyes in response.
Apple users CAN be really fucking annoying to deal with. In my admittedly limited experience, most of them are this way.
Or Apple can stop being a bitch and just change the hex code.
They want iPhone users to have want they want and need when switching to Android. I think it’s not a bad idea. Personally, I find MMS to be horrible. Not because of lack of features but because it is different for everybody in one group chat. The messages become out of order, things don’t send but say they do, etc. iMessage isn’t the best solution, but if I’m being kicked out of group chats because I’m that one person making it MMS, then I’m all for iMessage on Android.
No. Just no. Apple does not get to unilaterally make new protocols for the world.
I don’t want them to either but we both know rcs will not be supported on Apple. At least not easily.
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I am wondering if there is any other alternative to SMS and MMS that works on all mobile & desktop platforms. Hmmm, let me think… Hmm… Probably not. 🙆
I’m an iPhone user and I don’t care about this. Not everyone who has an iPhone gives a shit about what phones other people use. Use whatever phone you want and whatever computer you want and whatever OS you want and stop giving a fuck about what other people use like it’s some sort of crime.
My problem with that is that a lot of them then insist on using an outdated standard that lacks encryption and high resolution media instead of just downloading something like WhatsApp, Signal, or Matrix.
This sounds promising. But given how much money there should be in this, their timidity is puzzling. Perhaps the solution is brittle or subject to legal or technical challenges. Just read between the lines on this. They’ve got the cure for cancer but there keeping it in animal testing for now…
The app is currently in beta and we’ve decided to keep availability more focused to ensure the best user experience at this time. Although we’re excited to be the first mobile company to introduce a blue bubble solution and we’d like to make it as widely available to Android enthusiasts as we can, we’re prioritizing delivering an optimal user experience before committing to expansion at this time.
This is just retarded. If you need those bubbles or whatever features Apple provides - just use an iPhone.
I am using Android and I have no issues with Apple users. 🙆
They’ve stated that they are using Mac minis as relays. They claim that they do not store messages or credentials, but I don’t see how that’s possible if it relies on a Mac or iOS relay server that they control.
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They might be able to relay them in a way that the end to end encryption is actually handled on the phone and the relay only relays encrypted messages.
That would likely still give them a capability to MitM but it’s plausible that they couldn’t passively intercept the messages.
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They might be able to relay them in a way that the end to end encryption is actually handled on the phone and the relay only relays encrypted messages.
They’d need to control the app on both phones in order to control what it’s encrypting/decrypting. Their system only works because they’ve got a device in the middle separately decrypting/re-encrypting each message. Google’s Messages app can’t read iMessages; Apple’s Messages app can’t read Google’s proprietary encrypted RCS messages.
Of course if you want universally cross-platform messaging, complete with full-resolution photos and available with end-to-end encryption, there’s this crazy new technology called “email.” I feel like there’s a missed opportunity for making setting up S/MIME easier.
You give them the credentials for your Apple account. The security concept is “trust me bro” and that’s really the best they can do unless Apple helps them (which they have no reason to)
“Trust me bro” is always the security concept of any service where you don’t control the client - that includes regular iMessage (you have to trust Apple) and Google’s RCS (you have to trust Google). They can always instruct or update the client apps on people’s phones to start doing something they weren’t previously doing.
That being said, I would not trust some random sketchy company with something so important. Even if you trust their intentions, you cannot trust their competence in preventing breaches. Stuff gets hacked and leaked all the time.
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Absolutely. The iMessage network isn’t some unknowable beast, it “just” requires an Apple device be involved and activated to work. In order to spoof that far, you’d essentially need to emulate quite a bit on device.
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If it’s anything like Beeper 's Matrix bridge then it’s E2EE Matrix encrypted between your device and the bridge server and then using Apple’s iMessage encryption between the bridge server and Apple/the other user.
The weak point is always going to be the bridge software as by necessity the message must be decrypted there to re-encrypt for iMessage.
At least in Beeper/Matrix the bridge software is open source and one can host their own bridge while continuing to use the existing Beeper/Matrix main server.
Doing so gives you no-trust security since the Beeper/Matrix host cannot decrypt the messages between you and the bridge you control and rubbing your own bridge eliminates that weak point.
Lol really ? Who the fuck cares ? I think its just the stupid media hyping it all up, Over a color of a fucking msg? Man Losers born every minute. Smh
Didn’t read the article, did ya?
Naa…its looked so useless so I just read the comments. Can someone tldr please ?
This sounds like The Onion, ridiculous.
The blue vs green bubble thing never really bothered me. As long as I can communicate with the person I’m talking to, I don’t care how the messages are sent, unless maybe if I don’t want a message to be sent over plain sms. It’s ridiculous how it has become a status thing.
It is though. I’m the only developer in an agency of designers. Yes, they all have iphones and I’m the only Android lol
It’s absurd, but i get the blue bubble looks of superiority all the time.
I knew it lol
So they use iPhones, but you’re the only one who Thinks different ™ 😎
I’m the only developer in an agency of designers
In the US. Outside of the US no one uses iMessage, not even iPhone users.
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WhatsApp for the older generation, Signal for the younger (Germany).
Yes. And the younger generation uses Telegram, at least here.
I’m in Germany, at least my designer colleagues love iMessage, but not for work. Since we know each other for a long time, there’s lots of semi private messaging going around.
Not only someone using iMessage but at the same time not using Signal or Whatsapp? Thats the first time I’ve heard of either of these two.
I hear this a lot, I’ve not known a single person who has considered it a status thing. There are people who have cheap phones from both apple and android and they were made fun of for the price of the phone, not the bubble color. iMessage just made it much nicer to talk to people. “I can send messages over wifi!” made it so you could send messages in school or anywhere with a big metal roof. “The images are better!” These were limitations of the SMS standard that Apple designed around. Now? Yeah, there’s other options, but back then iMessage made its hold by being able to be used by people who couldn’t use SMS or didn’t want to for whatever reason
“The images are better!” These were limitations of the SMS standard that Apple designed around.
Apple intentionally sets the MMS size limit extremely low, much lower than any other manufacturers or carriers.
This is done intentionally to make communications with non-apple devices a worse experience.
They weren’t just “making the best of what they had”
They were/are actively making the non-proprietary experience worse.
On purpose
That’s because you’re looking at it from an adults perspective, if you go into a HS you’ll see it (Source, used to be a substitute in a past life) and there have even been some articles on it that the whole blue/green bubble thing is targeting by Apple towards teens in HS rather than adults.
Many people never mature past high school so I wouldn’t be surprised to see this amongst older people.
It’s not just about the color of the bubble. If you go on an outing with a group of iPhone users, there’s a high chance they’ll create a group chat with and without you, because the group chat with you won’t let them send HQ photos. Even if they aren’t trying to be exclusionary, someone will inevitably forget to send messages to both group chats. iMessage incentivizes situations like this which socially punishes Android users.
when did SMS go out of style?
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Probably when it was beaten in both features and cost by the alternatives.
Because SMS are paid. I only use them because I am on a dumbphone and the plan is like $3 anyway.
I’ve been waiting for average users to catch up since about 2010 when I was running Pidgin (XMPP) on my Android, since SMS is terribly unreliable.
SMS is a best-effort protocol, with zero error checking, meaning no error correction, no ensured delivery. It’s known to lose up to ten percent of messages.
It’s also tightly bound to cellular architecture, since it encapsulates messages into the mostly-empty management frames of the cell network.
It was bleeding edge in 1986 (IIRC), but it’s long past it’s retirement time.
Apple did it with iMessage so they can harvest data.
Google saw that and is now pushing for RCS to completely replace SMS because then they can harvest the data and sell ads and spam you ads with RCS and worse, they would control its backend so they would gatekeep everything about it.
They actually went so far as to forcibly enable RCS on my phone. While for now I can still disable it, I need to find an alternative to the default message app on android.
I had to check mine after your comment. They did it to me too. Every time they asked to turn it on I was adamant to refuse it. Has caused issues with messages not being sent or received before. With email that’s fine but messages are meant to be instant.
Everytime this comes up…
RCS is not a Google product. Google Jibe is their RCS product and if carriers choose to use Jibe, then it’s on them.
SMS is by far the worst standard. If you care about privacy use Signal or even WhatsApp. They both are far superior.
Thanks, yes SMS is insecure, but its also not routing through Google, so it is already more secure than RCS.
No, it’s just
- not encrypted
- harvested by your carrier (but at least it’s not Google !1!1!1!1!1!1!)
- interceptable by the government
If Google could prove that messages are E2EE then I don’t give a shit who it routes through, they can’t read it.
If we’re going only on security then Google Messages is a way better choice since they use Signal E2EE.
SMS has no encryption at all so Google, your carrier, and everyone in between can spy on the contents of all your SMS messages.
With RCS Google is only getting the metadata and no one can just listen in on your chats
Nice one, not sure why it’s geo restricted to the US, Canada, and Europe though, unless that’s a limitation of the bridge software they’re using. Could be a pretty neat selling point for a small subset of users, but I don’t think it’ll make people reconsider which Android they choose to upgrade to.
Also nice to see e2ee RCS implemented outside of Samsung and Google’s apps.
For anyone looking at alternatives, there’s AirMessage (if you have a mac, real or virtualized), and Beeper (not free, in any sense of the word, but supports even more messengers)
Its not really a problem being restricted to the US and Canada since they are the only countries having that ‘problem’. No one uses iMessage outside of the US.
