This sounds like a nice step towards modernizing texting, but it’s a shame that Messages doesn’t have an open RCS API to encourage broad adoption across messaging apps.
This sounds like a nice step towards modernizing texting, but it’s a shame that Messages doesn’t have an open RCS API to encourage broad adoption across messaging apps.
They’re in control of their own services. They could probably disable SMS if they want. Their customers don’t seem to care and those are the only people Apple have something to prove to. I suppose it’d be an unpopular enough measure to make them actually lose sales, but I don’t see what Apple and their users stand to gain from any of this.
RCS is an international telecommunications standard, used by both Google and mobile carriers. iMessage is more of a WhatsApp-but-built-into-iPhones. One was designed to be implemented by as many devices as possible (which took ages, because carriers and phone makers really didn’t care about RCS, and Google had Hangouts), the other is something Apple invented and provides their users for free.
Hell, Google could’ve easily brought their Messages app to iOS and bring RCS to Apple’s platform, but they don’t want that.
The EU has a law that could’ve made Apple open up iMessage, but it turns out iMessage is such a failure over in Europe that they’re not relevant enough to be branded gatekeepers (lol).
On the American side, at least one important member of the FCC has called for an antitrust investigation following the Beeper Mini story, but as far as I know there’s nothing explicitly illegal about what Apple is doing under current American laws.
I hope the investigation forces Apple to open up, but Apple doesn’t control anything they haven’t built themselves.
The right way forward is for Google to stop being like Google, and take the necessary steps to standardise their encryption extensions and any other features they may or may not have planned. Right now, Google is turning Google Messages into just another iMessage, and that’s solves absolutely nothing. They don’t open source the messenger app on their open source operating system anymore!
Have you looked into running your own RCS server or connecting to existing RCS servers? As far as I can tell, it’s proprietary infrastructure built on top of an open standard.
RCS just lets the servers talk to each other, and there is no reference implementation for a server. On the off chance that you do manage to write your own implementation, it’s unlikely that Google or Samsung’s servers would be willing to talk to yours unless you’re a telecom.