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this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
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Android
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Now, if only Google wasn't a cunt about allowing other apps for rcs, that would be great
Imagine cross-platform RCS support built into Signal. 🥹💭
Man that would be nice. Could finally have it be all in one again like Google Hangouts before it was killed.
I still miss Hangouts + Voice
Same I legit think it could've been Google's actual competition to iMessage but they fumbled the bag so badly it's crazy.
Oh that'd be nice but since no more SMS in Signal I can't see it going back in (unless they reversed course?)
IIRC their point was that SMS is insecure, so they don't want people using SMS in Signal to think that this is Signal. With RCS, they could do what Apple will - be interoperable while providing extras with own platform (iMessage).
Admittedly, that doesn't sound like enough reason to reimplement SMS and RCS alone would still be kind of inconvenient.
they could go the apple route and just make sms messages an ugly color
Why not have separate apps so users can opt to install one or the other?
Why do you use two apps for SMS or iMessage now.
I don't understand. I don't do that. But I have Whatsapp, telegram, signal and discord installed, and those are all quite separate apps.
The point being, why would I want my Whatsapp install to come integrated with a whole discord client? I can already just install both, which is much easier and keeps things separate.
The point is getting adoption. Especially in the US, where people actually use iPhone, no one wants to download a second app because iMessage is 'good enough' 99% of the time.
Samsung Messages is the only other, right?
Technically anyone who makes an android device could have their own. The API is a system-level API, so any app signed with system certificates (aka, any app packaged with your phone) can use it. Any app you download from the play store can't.
Afaik, yeah
What do you think Apple will do? 😁
Cue several years of Google and Apple pointing at each other and shouting "see, they don't want to be compatible with us!"
RCS was an idiotic take from the start. It should've been a layer of encryption over SMS and remain otherwise stateless and platform agnostic.
But of course companies and governments don't really want encryption. So it became something that's trivially easy to subvert by each company that implements it, because it needs to pass through servers, and who controls the servers gets to be an ass about it.
It's origin came from a good place. The wireless industry, not Google, started driving the standard to retire/replace SMS/MMS. However, then the wireless industry was reduced to a duo-culture and Google decided to drive RCS after many years of carriers/manufacturers trying to do their own thing to little success.
Another route: MMS could be enhanced to have some modern features while still being backwards-compatible. The datagrams are just XML and the syntax is akin to E-Mail. Larger message sizes could be supported, while the gateways still handle resize/reformat for older device backwards compatibility. There was even a format for a few minutes in the early aughts called EMS that had some promise but it died from disuse. Message delivery confirmation has existed since GSM and CDMA.
There's even a standard for IMS video calls that has been in the 3GPP stack since the 1999 release that would've allowed universal standard video calls. Since carriers hated building data networks and consumers weren't ready for video calls, it just sat stagnant until iChat AV/FaceTime came along and popularized video calls. It's still there, it could still be used.
Somewhere along the way, standards-based universal calls, video, and messaging took a back seat to tech bros and their proprietary stacks, and governments (at least the US) were too stupid and incompetent to understand what regulation was necessary to correct this path we are now on. Hopefully the EU can continue to help fix this.
Umm what?
SMS has a very short size limit. Implementing RCS as an encryption layer on top of it would require devices to send several messages just to cover a short one-word reply. They also often come out of order so they would need to include a numbering system so the client could piece them back together.
Granted that is already how SMS works on modern devices, but the underlying protocol is woefully inept at modern messaging and completely unviable for what you're proposing.
How should media attachments work? I assume you expect that to just use encryption built on MMS? So media can come through even more compressed than basic MMS? None of the actual benefits of RCS would be possible if it was built on top of the existing ancient standards.
Encrypting doesn't necessarily boost the size of the message. You can also use compression very effectively since it's mostly text.
You don't need to also solve media hosting, you can just leave it be links like it is now. Just adding encryption would be an amazing improvement.
There are no additional changes needed to the transport layer, it would be transparent for telcos. It can be an OTG encryption layer.
Initial key exchange would be the only part that would require a couple of additional one-time messages but it would be automated. And not all messages need to be encrypted, nobody cares that my package has been shipped. And it would be an improvement anyway from having zero encryption to being able to have encryption
The whole thing is so simple that it could be implemented today by all the SMS apps without missing a beat. The only thing missing is the willingness to do so.
In fact it could be added as an option in any SMS app very easily — only for people who are both on the same app of course.