Why celebrate a feature that was added for non-customers? Why celebrate a feature they were forced to add rather than chose to? Don’t get me wrong, I think this should have been done long ago, but what’s in it for Apple to waste some of their precious announcement time? The fallback mode of iMessages doesn’t fall back as far? Yay?
What do you mean added for non customers? The entire purpose of not adding RCS or supporting iMessage for Android devices is to create a worse experience for their customers if they interact with non-customers. Sure it likely drew more people to buy iPhones, but it’s also arguably pretty awful for any society that plays apple’s game rather than just downloading a cross platform app.
Or it’s great for society because they support text for every phone, even feature phones (do those still exist?) and it’s a good business choice for Apple to support more features for their paying customers
The detriment to society came when the standard for text messaging between all phones was updated to support more features and a major manufacturer intentionally didn’t update to drive sales. The US used to heavily punish that sort of behaviour, but in this case it took
EUChinese action to reign in a US company.Samsung, Google, Sony, and a million other manufacturers could have implemented their own messaging system, but instead they chose to facilitate the use of devices however customers want without punishing them based on the personal preferences of their friends. In some circles people may even choose not to communicate with people who don’t have iPhones or exclude them from group chats which is bad in just about any way you spin it.
The US used to heavily punish that sort of behaviour, but in this case it took EU action to reign in a US company
FWIW in this case it was Chinese action - China is requiring all phones sold domestically to support RCS. The EU DMA would have forced Apple to open up access to iMessage, not implement RCS, but they found that in the EU, iMessage market share is too small for the DMA to kick in (probably due to the overwhelming popularity of WhatsApp).
Thanks for the correction. Now that you mention it I do remember that issue from the EU. I just defaulted to thinking it was EU since they managed to get Apple to change to USB-C and this is pretty minor compared to that.
IIRC, it’s controlled by the carrier and not encrypted. If that’s the case, it’s bad. We’ve been moving away from carriers and internet providers, and got some privacy back by various means. Why would be roll that back?
Because everyone is too distracted by “Apple bad” to realise how truly awful RCS is.
Except RCS isn’t awful at all. It’s also end to end encrypted on androids. If Apple’s participation isn’t encrypted, that’s on Apple.
More awful than sms?
No, but that doesn’t make it good.
The whole world except a minority moved away from SMS a long time ago.
There always will be a divide between those who use technology as a means to an end and those whose end is technology.
If you think I’m taking a “side” with that statement you’re the latter.
If you think that’s a dig at anyone it’s probably because you think people care what phone you have, or that I’m trying to sneakily insinuate that you’re not doing anything by installing another flavor of Linux so you can get your dock to line up perfectly the way you want it to.
If you think people care what phone you have it’s probably because you know people who do.
If you think you have to be around those people I’m here to tell you I don’t know anyone who cares about what phone I have.
Some people think their phone is a status symbol. I just love tech for what it does. Personal phone is on Android, work phone is an iPhone. They’re both good.
Apple pretending RCS doesn’t exist would be like Google acting like RCS isn’t a 15 year old protocol without e2e encryption
Oh wait…
