The fewer things from Google the better. I totally agree with Tim. There's no reason for Apple to change to an inferior product. Rich Communication Services is a joke of a name, there's nothing "rich" about anything from Google.
I agree with this sentiment. I have been trying to have less Google in my life by avoiding their products... That includes no longer using Chrome, Gmail, Google Maps, and most importantly, avoiding friendly relationships with Android users if I can. YouTube is the only Google product I cannot live without.
The fundamental issue is that we live in a world where industry players cannot agree on an open standard for secure communications - largely because there is no money to be made from actually sending a message through such a system. Those old enough to remember when SMS was introduced can probably recall that it was ~30c to send a message (the same cost as a landline phone call in my country, but cheaper than a mobile phone call). ALL the telecom companies made money hand over fist and covered the cost of the infrastructure in an amazingly short amount of time. And then they started bundling text messaging into the monthly subscription fee so that you only paid extra after sending some moderately large number of SMS messages, and then they started routing everything as data rather than audio signals, and now we're at the point where sending a few hundred bytes has a marginal cost for the carriers of effectively zero. And the customers know it, so they're not going to pay for it. Data transmission (encrypted or not) is a commodity.
So any secure messaging system is going to involve upfront costs to implement and provide no marginal revenue - at best you'll get a flat subscription fee. And the competitive nature of the market for commodities means that the fee is not going to be meaningfully different from your competitors and you'll have to be extremely efficient to make even a slender profit. If you can differentiate your service you can make more profit, but differentiating is in conflict with standardising so it's no wonder that we end up with incompatible services.
Apple ate the cost of building and operating what they first called iMessage because it was a strategic move that helped them sell more iPhones. I can't think of another company that has done the same thing - Google comes close, but they could never even standardise on their own messaging products and protocols so that's a black mark. NONE of the players in the secure messaging space have ever tried to form an industry group to standardise on a single protocol, but most of them developed messaging client software for just about any device with networking capabilities.
In my opinion, that's the best we're going to get now. We traded the high cost of message transfer with ubiquitous access for zero cost message transfer with limited access. Apple's fallback to SMS gives the best tradeoff as long as you can live without end-to-end encryption of messages for those outside the service.
I don't understand Google pushing RCS. Only a small percentage of Android users can actually use RCS. We're talking about roughly 500M people here. A rounding error.
I don't understand Google pushing RCS. Only a small percentage of Android users can actually use RCS. We're talking about roughly 500M people here. A rounding error.
500M isn't a rounding error, it's a double digit percentage of all Android devices.
I don't understand Google pushing RCS. Only a small percentage of Android users can actually use RCS. We're talking about roughly 500M people here. A rounding error.
500M isn't a rounding error, it's a double digit percentage of all Android devices.
Fine. It's 15% that will likely not increase much, and may or may not work depending on how their carriers implement RCS. The other 2.5 billion will not likely get the RCS capability anytime soon. So much ado about something half the size of the iPhone market.
I don't understand Google pushing RCS. Only a small percentage of Android users can actually use RCS. We're talking about roughly 500M people here. A rounding error.
500M isn't a rounding error, it's a double digit percentage of all Android devices.
Fine. It's 15% that will likely not increase much, and may or may not work depending on how their carriers implement RCS. The other 2.5 billion will not likely get the RCS capability anytime soon. So much ado about something half the size of the iPhone market.
Why wouldn't it increase much? It's a feature of both Google and Samsung's messaging apps. You don't understand why Google would want to push a user feature that makes messaging on Android better? If Apple get on board then all of the other handset manufacturers will likely follow, as will any carriers that aren't yet part of the group. Big win and influence for Google, possibly licensing revenue too. And if not, Google have a line of criticism on Apple and proprietary systems, which of course they're likely to use as much as they can.
I agree with this sentiment. I have been trying to have less Google in my life by avoiding their products... That includes no longer using Chrome, Gmail, Google Maps, and most importantly, avoiding friendly relationships with Android users if I can. YouTube is the only Google product I cannot live without.
You seriously won't be friends with someone because of what type of phone they use? That's just pathetic.
iMessage does not allow participants to verify one another’s identities and their shared encryption key. The system requires devices to implicitly trust Apple’s servers to distribute user’s public keys. In Signal, you can scan a QR code to verify the encryption key; this prevents man in the middle attacks. See this for more info https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2015/09/09/lets-talk-about-imessage-again/
In terms of "everything else" -- Apple has access to a lot of iMessage metadata, and in many cases to your chats (via iCloud backups):
The fundamental issue is that we live in a world where industry players cannot agree on an open standard for secure communications - largely because there is no money to be made from actually sending a message through such a system. Those old enough to remember when SMS was introduced can probably recall that it was ~30c to send a message (the same cost as a landline phone call in my country, but cheaper than a mobile phone call). ALL the telecom companies made money hand over fist and covered the cost of the infrastructure in an amazingly short amount of time. And then they started bundling text messaging into the monthly subscription fee so that you only paid extra after sending some moderately large number of SMS messages, and then they started routing everything as data rather than audio signals, and now we're at the point where sending a few hundred bytes has a marginal cost for the carriers of effectively zero. And the customers know it, so they're not going to pay for it. Data transmission (encrypted or not) is a commodity.
So any secure messaging system is going to involve upfront costs to implement and provide no marginal revenue - at best you'll get a flat subscription fee. And the competitive nature of the market for commodities means that the fee is not going to be meaningfully different from your competitors and you'll have to be extremely efficient to make even a slender profit. If you can differentiate your service you can make more profit, but differentiating is in conflict with standardising so it's no wonder that we end up with incompatible services.
Apple ate the cost of building and operating what they first called iMessage because it was a strategic move that helped them sell more iPhones. I can't think of another company that has done the same thing - Google comes close, but they could never even standardise on their own messaging products and protocols so that's a black mark. NONE of the players in the secure messaging space have ever tried to form an industry group to standardise on a single protocol, but most of them developed messaging client software for just about any device with networking capabilities.
In my opinion, that's the best we're going to get now. We traded the high cost of message transfer with ubiquitous access for zero cost message transfer with limited access. Apple's fallback to SMS gives the best tradeoff as long as you can live without end-to-end encryption of messages for those outside the service.
Far too many people forget Apple Watch, iMessage, Apple Maps all came into existence because the larger market as usual was not supporting Macs and iPhones, so Apple had no choice but to roll up it’s sleeves and get to work developing new products to support it’s existing range of goods, and Apple has had to do this thru-out their history.
Note: at some point Apple will have do something in house with AAA gaming. (and I don’t mean buying out one of the existing perpetually losing gaming companies).
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So any secure messaging system is going to involve upfront costs to implement and provide no marginal revenue - at best you'll get a flat subscription fee. And the competitive nature of the market for commodities means that the fee is not going to be meaningfully different from your competitors and you'll have to be extremely efficient to make even a slender profit. If you can differentiate your service you can make more profit, but differentiating is in conflict with standardising so it's no wonder that we end up with incompatible services.
Apple ate the cost of building and operating what they first called iMessage because it was a strategic move that helped them sell more iPhones. I can't think of another company that has done the same thing - Google comes close, but they could never even standardise on their own messaging products and protocols so that's a black mark. NONE of the players in the secure messaging space have ever tried to form an industry group to standardise on a single protocol, but most of them developed messaging client software for just about any device with networking capabilities.
In my opinion, that's the best we're going to get now. We traded the high cost of message transfer with ubiquitous access for zero cost message transfer with limited access. Apple's fallback to SMS gives the best tradeoff as long as you can live without end-to-end encryption of messages for those outside the service.
The problems with iMessage are in two areas: the protocol itself, and everything else.
The iMessage encryption protocol isn't well designed:
In terms of "everything else" -- Apple has access to a lot of iMessage metadata, and in many cases to your chats (via iCloud backups):
Far too many people forget Apple Watch, iMessage, Apple Maps all came into existence because the larger market as usual was not supporting Macs and iPhones, so Apple had no choice but to roll up it’s sleeves and get to work developing new products to support it’s existing range of goods, and Apple has had to do this thru-out their history.
Note: at some point Apple will have do something in house with AAA gaming. (and I don’t mean buying out one of the existing perpetually losing gaming companies).