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- cross-posted to:
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The same company that shamed Apple for omitting the charging brick from the phone package (or the headphone jack) just to do so themselves shortly after?
They also made fun of Apple for the “notch” only to incorporate it in their own devices (though differently)?
By extrapolating the data, we should expect Samsung to drop support for RCS and launch a proprietary competing service any day now.
Same with removable batteries, headphone jack, etc.
While we’re there, can we fix the security to prevent 2FA hijacking?
Honestly everyone should just stop offering 2FA over SMS
Passkeys are replacing MFA and passwords.
Its called app based 2fa or yubikey
Maybe android should create it’s own proprietary bs. They do have a significantly larger market share.
They did. RCS.
It technically isn’t proprietary. But many implementations are reliant on Google’s Jibe system. So even if you’ve avoided Google completely. If you use RCS there is a strong chance all your messages are going through Google.
RCS relies on the carrier to implement. With many carriers using Jibe, even if your doesn’t the people you message likely are. So you can’t get away from Google.
At least with iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal (plus Allo, Hangouts GChat, meet, GmailTalk etc). You know who controls the messaging service. You can then made a decision to engage with that messaging service.
With RCS this isn’t clear. You may think your using your carrier or the person’s your communicating with carrier. Or you may be using Google’s Jibe. Or some other implementation.
As long as the protocol is open and has encryption you don’t need to care much about that. Packets on the internet travel through thousands of different machines around the world. You are either using encryption or the whole world is reading your message anyway. There is nothing in-between. If you even want to hide metadata, you would need to use something like Session.
Problem is, there is an between. The problem is peolple confusing E2EE and Zero Knowledge thinking they’re the same thing, and they’re not.
RCS is E2EE, but is it zero knowledge? The Goog says yes, and that the key pairs are generated on device, so in theory its just as good as Signal, but is it? We’ll never know if Google has those keys or not. The protocol itself being open is useless once its wrapped in proprietary shit. Still better than SMS, and sadly still a better choice for the masses than even Signal as you have a better shot at more E2EE being used sadly. I had a LOT of Signal users in my circle (my doing) but since signal became cunts and dropped SMS so many go pissed at using multiple apps so they dropped it. Kills me as a de-googler and Graphene users to use Google Messages a lot, but its the best shot sadly.
I’m so happy to see someone else is finally talking about this. RCS, as implemented by Google, is distinct from the actual open RCS standard. Google added a proprietary middle layer which is how they get features working which RCS doesn’t support.
And that proprietary middle layer (Jibe being part of it) is why there aren’t a million third party RCS clients out there. Google must give API access. They are gatekeepers. And they only share keys with strategic partners (Samsung being one of them, telcos with their own app like Verizon used to have being another).
But in the end Google did what Google does best: fragmented a product. And now Google holds the leash for RCS proper. I bet Apple isn’t too keen to route all customer data through Google servers even when encrypted. Because it’s another piece that Apple doesn’t control.
Well, RCS was originally more fragmented before Google. Each carrier wanted to handle RCS messaging differently. T-Mobile made their own, but it only worked with other T-Mobile users.
Google was tired of waiting for all the carriers to agree and come up with their universal cross-carrier RCS platform, so they decided to come up with something that works with Google Messages, which is generally accepted as the RCS standard now.
If the messages are E2E encrypted (which is the case here) does it actually matter?
The fact is that with iMessage it’s pretty obvious that you and the recipients of a message are in a private conversation whose contents is only visible to the participants. With RCS it is not crystal clear. That is an Apple advantage and I see no reason they should give that up. Google likes collecting all that meta data about a conversation. Unlike apple they directly or indirectly sell that data.
The EU is breathing in their neck to force them to allow cross platform compatibility. Also, Google messenger, like WhatsApp, is end to end encrypted (just the message, not the Metadata).
What a contrived drama to stir up.
If anyone is “stirring up” anything it’s Apple which is disgustingly playing with the psychology of teenagers and is happy with pushing them to be mean to each other over green bubbles.
Google’s messages app also uses different colours for SMS and their RCS. Many phones/network operators rely on Google to provide the RCD service.
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You’ve said in your edit. They use a different colour.
They do this because it’s important for the user to know.
SMS isn’t encrypted. It also costs a lot to send images via SMS/MMS. The user needs to know, they are using a different chat mechanism.
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This is literally the reason Apple changes the bubble color. iMessage is encrypted by default and uses normal data instead of MMS. That’s the indicator.
This entire spiel about bubble color envy is ridiculous. Features are the separation. The media will whip things up with their sample size of a handful of cherry picked anecdotes. But almost every teen has an iPhone and uses iMessage in the USA. Apple has over 80% of that market.
What Google wants is for Apple to implement Google’s proprietary RCS implementation, not RCS proper. Because RCS proper lacks a lot of features that people take for granted with iMessage. That is presumably one reason Google forked it and requires it to run through their proprietary middleware.
Edit: Don’t get me wrong. I would love for an open standard to overtake the proprietary bits from both Apple and Google. But Google is disingenuous here. They are complaining because, despite their efforts, they can’t crack the market. Teens aren’t bitting for Android. iMessage has network effect going on, so Google is trying to crack that open since they can’t get a compelling overall product and ecosystem for a valuable demographic.
I’d rather there be open standards. But that means Google RCS has to change as well.
Can you show media produced by Apple that encourages bullying?
People on iMessage don’t like “green bubbles” because a number of features are missing — real-time location sharing, message thread replies, high quality media, games directly in iMessage. Some, but not all, of this is fixed in RCS.
Google could try solving this with a unified messaging app of their own, but they’ve failed to build a cohesive product around this without getting bored, and Samsung would inevitably try to build and run their own for no good reason, fracturing the Android community.
Before Samsung starts trying to throw stones, they ought to look at their house first. They’re doing more to fracture Android than Apple ever could. To my knowledge, their object tracking tags won’t interoperate with Google’s service. They push two app stores on phones. They push their own separate tap-payment ecosystem, Samsung Pay.
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It’s more than green/blue bubble stuff though. There are a lot of features that end up being useful in chats.
It would be nice if Apple released iMessage as an app for Android to end this nonsense. Apple wouldn’t even have to open up iMessage.
Sure, but then people wouldn’t need to buy an iPhone to get iMessage, and that would be bad for Tim
While I agree with most of what you said (about Google and Samsung), Apple is pretty clearly encouraging the stigma when it comes to iMessage. They wouldn’t outright tell people to bully, but they are doing as much in an underhanded way.
- Tim Cook says the solution[1] to the issues is to have the people you are talking to change to an iPhone. Hard to see this as anything other than encouraging, or at least accepting bullying.
- Messages in iMessage used to be green, but when the blue messages were introduced, they changed the green ones to make them less readable and break their own guidelines[2]. There is no good reason to do this other than to encourage upset at green messages.
- The Epic vs Apple lawsuit made information public[3] that Apple purposefully doesn’t make iMessage cross-platform in order to lock users in.
[2] https://medium.com/@krvoller/how-iphone-violates-apples-accessibility-guidelines-6785172eb343
Can you show media produced by Apple that encourages bullying?
That’s some head-empty logic.
“Preferred Company doesn’t do bad because they don’t outright admit it!”
Say that to Apple who plays pretend with their teenager service.
