> That's why it's always a pain to figure out why a group chat is showing up green all of a sudden; you can't tell who brought the Android to the party.
Or as the rest of the world would describe it: That's why it's always a pain including Americans in a group chat – they usually don't have WhatsApp :)
I’m Dutch and so live in a WhatsApp world. Still I lobbied my family hard to keep our family group in Messages. Reason being that we often share photos, and nothing ruins a nice photo as much as the insane compression and low resolution that WhatsApp applies.
There's an option to send images in higher resolution these days.
I personally dislike getting full-resolution images in iMessage by default and wish there was an option to manually request the full-res one (the sender could just upload two versions, or maybe a progressively compressed one). It seems like the worst of both world (in that it still wipes metadata from the photos, last time I checked, making them annoying to save in my photo library).
As you’ll know when dealing with non-tech family, if it’s not the default it doesn’t exist But yes your idea of sending a low res placeholder and only downloading the full res on click sounds elegant.
I'm not saying the rest-of-world status quo is ideal or even desirable; I'd also much prefer an open and federated network, or at least interoperability.
But what I wanted to highlight is that SMS/MMS and generally carrier-based messaging is just as much of a weird communication island at this point as all of these OTT messengers are, from a non-US point of view.
RCS would just be a continuation of that, so I'm not sure if it's worth cheering on Apple for taking this path, further cementing Google's hold on Android messaging in the US – they run almost all the infrastructure and get all the message content, after all!
It’s not the messages I worry about so much — it’s the contacts.
I can’t use WhatsApp because on iOS it asks for access to your contacts, which I refuse to give. (Facebook already burned me once, there.) So in WhatsApp, all my contacts show up as numeric phone numbers, and there’s no way to change that, so it’s basically useless to me.
It's not discrimination to say "the message you just sent is green because it went over SMS (and now RCS) and we can't verify the E2E encryption, deliverability, etc like we can with iMessage".
In my view, it starts being a problem as soon as people start complaining about the person "causing" said lack of functionality, rather than the companies at fault for it. (Everybody who believes that unencrypted RCS, after a literal decade, is the best these two giants could come up with is deluding themselves.)
I'm fortunately too old to ever have experienced this myself, but so I have to rely on others' observations for this.
That said, I wouldn't quite call it "discrimination" yet, but it's certainly uninformed, targeted at the wrong entity, and on top of that is at least a bit icky given the quite large difference in retail pricing of iPhone and Android smartphones.
Why the past tense? Every US iPhone user can install a third-party messenger on their phone today if they wanted to!
The reality is just that people only install new apps if the preinstalled ones don't do the trick, or at least only if most of their friends already have too.
So in my view, the entire problem is that apparently no regulator has been considering it a problem for the better part of a decade that Apple is effectively running half of the country's communication infrastructure without being regulated anywhere close to the way landline or mobile carriers are from a competitive and interoperability point of view.
But this seems to already be changing; Apple definitely didn't implement RCS out of their strong desire for openness and interoperability. I just wish they'd picked a better protocol/system.
I don't want to use a third-party messenger app because I don't want to deal with separate apps, and none of them are very good anyway. FB Messenger is close, but it doesn't work well with non-"friends".
On the large scale, I agree. We have telecom regulations for good reasons.
Maybe you don't, and I respect that, but I wanted to push back on GP seemingly responding on behalf of all Americans, somehow ("we prefer to keep our messages out of the hands of Facebook" is evidently not true).
Or as the rest of the world would describe it: That's why it's always a pain including Americans in a group chat – they usually don't have WhatsApp :)