I’m not a fan of the “war” between Android and Apple when it comes to SMS/texting. The rest of the world doesn’t use SMS/RCS/iMessage as much as WhatsApp and the like, so the US is pretty much lagging behind everyone else on this anyway.
That being said, I have to admit Android did a good job with this!
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Give google a break, its hard for them to keep track of what message backend is in which app. They have created and killed 5 messaging apps in the time I wrote out this comment, how can you expect them to know whats going on?
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And then cancel it two weeks later.
I miss Hangouts 🥲
I miss shouting and whispering with Allo
Wheres my Google circle crowd at? Y’all move over to Wave?
I miss Messenger with XMPP
This kind of shit is why I’ve been working on replacing things, and leaving their ecosystem. There are 57 ways to do everything, and nothing ever works properly.
I am all about tweaking and changing things, or adopting something new, but that’s all under the assumption that it works. One of the reason why people like iMessage is because they don’t have to fuck with thirdparty apps, half of which can’t even receive a text message without issues
I’m not using RCS until it is available with no vendor lock-in. Call me when third-party apps like Textra can use it, and I don’t need to use Google’s relay.
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I trust my carrier even less than Google, which is saying something.
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When RCS first came out, my carrier provided their own app to use it lol
Canadian carriers did, but they since have started moving towards Google’s RCS servers instead. Probably realized it wasn’t worth hosting a server, and then maintaining it. I remember some carriers wouldn’t update their servers, so not all RCS features would be available to them.
It should just be an API that any text messaging app can use on Android, with the ability to define your own relay if desired.
The rest of the world doesn’t use SMS/RCS/iMessage as much as WhatsApp and the like
SMSes use a standard available to any app. WhatsApp is controlled by a single company.
If you were arguing that XMPP or something like that should be used instead of SMS, okay, that’s one thing, but I have a hard time favoring a walled garden.
For real. I’d rather use shitty SMS than be locked into a meta company.
Ok, I’m gonna get into this.
2005: Google Talk released.
2013: Google Hangouts released.
2015: Google announces Google Talk shutting down, encourages people to move to Hangouts.
2016: Despite Hangouts being a one stop shop for SMS and Chat, Google discourages people from using it for SMS, asking people to use the Google Messages app instead.
2016: Google Allo released.
2016: RCS adoption begins.
2017: Google Talk shuts down.
2017: Google Chat released.
2017: Hangouts is re-targeted for business and moves to some sort of consumer freemium model?
~2018(?): YouTube Chat released, a 1:1 messaging system inside of YouTube. No idea when it was discontinued but it didn’t last long.
2019: Google Allo discontinued.
2022: Whatever was left of Hangouts is discontinued.
2023: RCS through Google Messenger is now default instead of SMS and group messages are finally encrypted.Compare this to:
2011: iMessage released. As far as I can tell, it’s been e2e encrypted since at least 2012 and potentially since release.Google, you have no fucking leg to stand on. Get your shit together. If you had had a coherent messaging strategy, maybe Apple would have been amenable to working with you, but what incentive do they have right now? For all anyone knows, you’ll drop RCS by 2026 in favor of moving everyone to Google Heythere, the new ridiculous app for messaging!
Your comment is disingenuous.
Adding the 2018 YouTube Chat isn’t fair. Google has products that allow communicating between users. It was never meant to be any replacement for SMS, it was simply a chat system within YouTube. You know, the same YouTube that has had DM’s since day 1?
You also said in 2016 Google encourages people to use the Google Messages app. The same app being used today.
Google also launched other apps around the same time. Apps that were in development for a while. Then they shut them down, to focus all of the features/time into Google Messages.
You’re also adding very specific apps that Google never intended to make into an SMS app. Like Google Chat or Hangouts Rebrand.
Your timeline is disingenuous. Essentially from 2016 - NOW Google has been working on making Google Messages the one stop shop. Only 5 years less than Apple has been making iMessage.
Samsung supported RCS natively in their messaging apps since about 2013, and my carrier released their own RCS+SMS messaging app around that time to bridge the gap for non-samsung android users
Google was pretty late to the RCS boat lol
Can some custom rom group do the same type of video but about Google not allowing third party sms apps to use RCS?
Signal. Use Signal.
I would like to use it but no one else does
Make them
Signal removed SMS integration, making adoption less likely.
When I could install Signal on my parents phones, and they could SMS and Signal message in the same app, it was great. Especially since any contacts that happened to have Signal, it just worked. My parents didn’t have to do anything.
After Signal removed SMS, my parents just open up Google Messages and message everyone from there. They don’t want to juggle two apps. They also don’t really understand it. They just go back to the “main menu”, select their friends name, and type. Signal shot themselves in the foot.
Google picked up the pieces. Now my family uses Google Messages, but now it automatically switches to RCS for any of their friends that use RCS. Exactly what Signal should’ve been.
Here’s the thing - the rest of us do use SMS, we just weren’t gullible enough to fall for Apple’s bullshit about text bubble colours
That’s fuckin infantile 😂
How about we adopt open standards
WhatsApp certainly dominates Europe but I’d love to see a universal standard to replace SMS. The less messaging apps the better. WhatsApp is owned by Meta after all…
The rest of the world doesn’t use SMS/RCS/iMessage as much as WhatsApp and the like, so the US is pretty much lagging behind everyone else on this anyway.
Not sure I want to end up with Facebook controlling my messaging…
War?
Oh, right, that wrist cutting thing Apple users do in that one single continent I never visited. That. Right. They do need the help.
Good for them.
Google put more thought into this commercial than they did into their actual messaging strategy and it shows.
They should ask MS how well that Scrooge campaign worked out for them a few years back.
Lol this is funny. I wouldn’t really call it much of a war, it’s Apple holding back easily implemented features to cater to elitism. Would platforms like WhatsApp have taken over so heavily if basic texting was actually good enough?
Yea, basic texting is ass. As much as I don’t like WhatsApp or Meta, it’s still better than plain SMS.
I guess the iPhone sales numbers in the US are keeping them awake. I personally think Apple will only bend if they are forced somehow by the US government, like the way EU did with type-C.
So do people in the US chiefly send messages via SMS rather than WhatsApp and others like it? That’s so bizarre to me haha.
It is less that people use SMS and more that people just don’t use WhatsApp. I have a mix of group chats, including some with SMS and Facebook Chat. However, no one uses Whatsapp.
Yeah I use Facebook Messenger and Snapchat to keep up with friends and RCS/SMS mostly for family. Never used WhatsApp before though.
I would say that was the case in the UK generally about 5 years ago. But WhatsApp increasingly took over as the norm because it was clean, quick, relatively well encrypted, and made sending gifs and stickers easy and fun for the average user. Plus, the youth aren’t only wedded to iPhones unlike the US increasingly.
I use RCS, except for the handful of iPhone users that receive an SMS from me. The group is small, because more and more people are switching over to Android.
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Open source community have their own chat system since 2014 (Matrix).
I think that IRC is kind of the original open chat system.
EDIT:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat
IRC was created by Jarkko Oikarinen in August 1988 to replace a program called MUT (MultiUser Talk) on a BBS called OuluBox at the University of Oulu in Finland, where he was working at the Department of Information Processing Science. Jarkko intended to extend the BBS software he administered, to allow news in the Usenet style, real time discussions and similar BBS features.
Lol what a shittake
Google Messages has been around since 2016, and Google has been shutting down their other apps and porting the features over to Google Messages. Google has shown they’re dedicated to RCS, and have not displayed any signs of shutting down Google Messages.
It’s constantly being updated to add features, like actually implementing iMessage reactions. When an iOS user sends a reaction, it converts it to an actual reaction on the Android side. When an Android user sends a reaction to an iOS user, it just says “x liked this message”. Google is doing what they can to make the experience the best.
From your 2012 timeline of iMessage, that’s only 4 years after Apple.
FWIW, and I’m still a bit sore that hangouts replaced it, but Google talk was around for a fair while and was based on XMPP
But I hate Matrix
