Google Messages will help you shame your friends into finally turning on RCS (APK teardown)
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Google should open it up for other apps to use. Otherwise RCS is a power grab
Yup, no way I'm enabling play services and installing Messages just to use RCS. I mostly use Signal, anyway.
What we should really be fighting for is more federation between messaging platforms.
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Fuck RCS.
Twenty years too late for a "protocol" that is bound to hardware - something we decided was a bad idea forty years ago, and part of why TCP/IP became the standard.
XMPP is a far better protocol, and has had all the features of RCS for 20 years.
I will never use RCS.
XMPP does have something that breaks my heart: it bounds encryption to a very specific client. So forget about migrating to something else and keeping your history somehow. Which is very sad for supposedly interoperable protocol.
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I turned it off when it failed to failover to sms when there was no data connection.
Are both me and the recipient online? Send RCS. Are either of us not connected? Send sms. How is that so hard?
Otherwise RCS is just "worse SMS for people with intermittent data connectivity".
Because SMS costs money everywhere else and the world is not the US.
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Google should open it up for other apps to use. Otherwise RCS is a power grab
It is abuse of the dualopoly
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Yup, no way I'm enabling play services and installing Messages just to use RCS. I mostly use Signal, anyway.
What we should really be fighting for is more federation between messaging platforms.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Federation can be hard since you also need to protect privacy
With that bring said they could at least try. Honestly it would be better if we got some sort of RFC.
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Means nothing to me until there is an open source option for RCS. It is supposed to be an open standard, but in reality Google has a total stranglehold on the technology.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Google wants to eliminate any threat of competition outside of Apple and stock Android
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Fuck RCS.
Twenty years too late for a "protocol" that is bound to hardware - something we decided was a bad idea forty years ago, and part of why TCP/IP became the standard.
XMPP is a far better protocol, and has had all the features of RCS for 20 years.
I will never use RCS.
XMPP is for grey beards
We need something clean and modern
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Because SMS costs money everywhere else and the world is not the US.
That would be a reason for the feature not being available.
The feature is there, it just apparently doesn't always work reliably.
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No thanks, I think I'll pass on sending out messages that look like spam.
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XMPP does have something that breaks my heart: it bounds encryption to a very specific client. So forget about migrating to something else and keeping your history somehow. Which is very sad for supposedly interoperable protocol.
Are you talking about omemo and a scenario where you buy a new device and want to sync your entire history from the server?
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"Better then ever" is a bold claim. I switched to GrapheneOS and guess what it stopped working. Why? Because Google decided not to make it work on custom OS's anymore like a year ago.
To my understanding there is NO real technical reason for this. If I can have Signal work cross platform (a real secure messenger) then RCS can as well.
wrote last edited by [email protected]There are ways to make it work on graphene, but yes - it doesn't work out of the box.
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Are you talking about omemo and a scenario where you buy a new device and want to sync your entire history from the server?
You don't even need another device. You might just want to try another client app. You'd be screwed. That's very, very sad.
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You don't even need another device. You might just want to try another client app. You'd be screwed. That's very, very sad.
That is how perfect forward secrecy is supposed to work.
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Are you talking about omemo and a scenario where you buy a new device and want to sync your entire history from the server?
Most clients also offer OpenPGP which has the properties you are looking for.
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"Better then ever" is a bold claim. I switched to GrapheneOS and guess what it stopped working. Why? Because Google decided not to make it work on custom OS's anymore like a year ago.
To my understanding there is NO real technical reason for this. If I can have Signal work cross platform (a real secure messenger) then RCS can as well.
There is no technical reason. The carriers/cellular industry gave up on their efforts to push RCS and let Google own it all for the most part, and with it, everyone lost openness.
It's also why Samsung Messages is on a slow burn EOL. The Samsung/Google partnership had Google encourage Samsung to drop their RCS support and just push Google's app, after Google decided to sunset the openness of the messaging API. Third-party SMS apps will all slowly die. Probably also partly why Signal dropped SMS support. It was around the same time.
Android's weird changes are nothing but badness, and will likely get worse. Hopefully the open OS community can start focusing more energy behind alternative mobile OSes that aren't dependent on a corporation.
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That is how perfect forward secrecy is supposed to work.
That's a terrible UX. If you have a protocol independent from clients, at least the chat database backup should be standardized. It's not.
That means you'll forever get stuck to one client. This is absolutely terrible for any organization.
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There is no technical reason. The carriers/cellular industry gave up on their efforts to push RCS and let Google own it all for the most part, and with it, everyone lost openness.
It's also why Samsung Messages is on a slow burn EOL. The Samsung/Google partnership had Google encourage Samsung to drop their RCS support and just push Google's app, after Google decided to sunset the openness of the messaging API. Third-party SMS apps will all slowly die. Probably also partly why Signal dropped SMS support. It was around the same time.
Android's weird changes are nothing but badness, and will likely get worse. Hopefully the open OS community can start focusing more energy behind alternative mobile OSes that aren't dependent on a corporation.
The problem is inertia
Market share matters
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That's a terrible UX. If you have a protocol independent from clients, at least the chat database backup should be standardized. It's not.
That means you'll forever get stuck to one client. This is absolutely terrible for any organization.
Why would an organization use OMEMO if it doesn't fit their requirements? OMEMO isn't necessary for encrypting xmpp communications. Also, I get the concern that only the original client will have a full history of the user, but most people don't need a complete chat history. Or put another way, wanting a complete, unencrypted chat history is relatively orthogonal to wanting perfect forward secrecy.
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The problem is inertia
Market share matters
wrote last edited by [email protected]In the context of basic communications, market share really shouldn't. Phone calls are a standard, SMS is a standard, MMS is a standard. RCS should equally be a standard, along with IMS video calling that has been in the 3GPP spec since Rel99 (that's 1999). Flip phones in the early aughts could do video calls (in Europe) way before FaceTime was a twinkle in Steve Jobs' eye. Every phone right now could do out of box voice call/video call/text/picture messaging regardless of platform, if the cellular standard bodies would grow a pair.
Problem is, companies like Apple and Google became huge, unregulated, and monocultured.
How we humans allowed something as basic as communication to be put behind walled gardens is just a failure of humanity.
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Why would an organization use OMEMO if it doesn't fit their requirements? OMEMO isn't necessary for encrypting xmpp communications. Also, I get the concern that only the original client will have a full history of the user, but most people don't need a complete chat history. Or put another way, wanting a complete, unencrypted chat history is relatively orthogonal to wanting perfect forward secrecy.
Well, Signal can do it. That's where the argument ends. If Signal can do it, XMPP should too. But it doesn't.
