ericthehalfbee

CheeseFreeze said:

lkrupp said:

sflocal said:

What is conveniently ignored is that for many commercial businesses, landlords also stipulate rent is not only a monthly amount, but also a percentage of sales.  Epic has it easy compared to others.  I hope Epic fails hard.

Yep. Back in the late 70’s I managed a music store in a large mall. Not only did we pay rent based on square footage, we also had to pay a percentage of our gross income just for the privilege of being in that mall. The concept was the same as Apple. The mall developers had built the mall, maintained the mall, marketed the mall. The mall’s existence attracted foot traffic thereby increasing tenant’s access to potential customers. We had to sell a lot of pianos, organs, and guitar picks just to make rent. We could have moved outside the mall to a standalone building but that would have been the kiss of death in terms of sales.

I see no difference in what Apple does with the App Store and what every other commercial landlord has been doing forever. Epic knows full well that they will make more money within the App Store than having their own store outside it. They want their cake and to eat it too.

Your analogy fails in the sense that in this case there are only two landlords in the world (set aside China): Landlord Google and Landlord Apple. That is a problem. A big problem.

Also, no modern real estate landlord (this is not the 1970s!) is demanding a 30% fee of gross income. That entity would quickly be sued out of existence and/or quickly ignored.

Skeptical said:

Are people so vapid that a green or blue bubble is a life altering event in their existence? God, having first world problems must be great. 

gatorguy said:

spheric said:

gatorguy said:

ericthehalfbee said:

Apple basically said “fuck you” to Google.

I’ve repeatedly said Apple should counter Google’s shame campaign by announcing they’ll support RCS when Google opens up their RCS APIs for everyone. Including competitors like WhatsApp or Telegram.

Google has their own RCS APIs in Android but Samsung is the only one allowed to use them. Developers have asked and Google has done nothing to allow other Apps to implement RCS via their system and use E2EE.

So Apple did one better and said they’ll work with standards bodies to improve RCS.

Now Google’s hopes of a messaging duopoly are finished.

Apple has no incentive to see E2EE come to RCS. For the sake of marketing, they need to be able to claim iMessage is more secure than any others. Once all of them are interoperably encrypted Apple loses a talking point. 

Nor does Google — if they did, they'd let other app vendors use their RCS API. 

Since they don't, we can assume that interoperability is not a priority — it's getting people to use Google's own messaging app. 

Ah, you assume because someone here said they don't that they were right? That person wasn't. Always check for yourself before believing everything someone here says.  
https://developers.google.com/business-communications/rcs-business-messaging/reference/rest

Then there are these current Google RCS users:

• 1-800 Contacts
• 1-800 Flowers.com
• Booking.com
• SnapTravel
• Subway
• Smooch
• Twilio
• ATT
• T-Mo
• Verizon
• Orange

Suppose you want to talk about the encryption specifically being unavailable to developers. In that case, it's only been available in Google Messages for less than a year, and group chat E2EE for barely more than 90 days. Did you expect fleshed-out API's for developers already? Reading Reddit developer threads, the high potential for misuse/abuse from some of them has been pointed out, and working on a way of vetting apps individually was mentioned as a reasonable expectation.

In the meantime, Google is still prodding GSMA to make encryption an essential part of the standard, an effort that pre-dates whatever assistance Apple might offer next year, and which would make Google's Signal-based E2EE no longer needed (unless it becomes the standard or part of it). It was the foot-dragging by GSMA that led to Google taking responsibility for doing it for them to begin with. To me, that shows E2EE is not a priority for the carrier-controlled GSMA and RCS wasn't going to have it (nor did carriers want it) without a powerful an capable Apple or Google. Apple had no incentive to get involved, so it was left to Google to figure out. 

They've also been an early advocate of MLS, which does make E2E encryption essential in the evolving standard.
https://www.ietf.org/blog/mls-secure-and-usable-end-to-end-encryption/

 As evidence of their intent to encrypt interoperable chat sessions, Google already added support for MLS, which BTW is what I expect will be the requirement for messaging apps to talk with each other in a secure and private manner. I don't think RCS is it, though it will obviously be a large part of the chat landscape, and a huge step up from SMS/MMS.