Samsung joins Google in RCS shaming Apple
Samsung joins Google in RCS shaming Apple
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
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).
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.
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.
If the messages are E2E encrypted (which is the case here) does it actually matter?
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.
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.
Say that to Apple who plays pretend with their teenager service.
