RCS messaging is 'the new SMS'

Echohead2 said:

To be clear, I wouldn't respond that way to obvious joking around. But I have had a couple of people be serious.

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All good in that.

I said my piece earlier on; it's an immature attitude, similar to seriously criticizing someone for the make and model of their car.

I mean sure, crack jokes about the head accountant buying a corvette after the audit...

But actual criticism, without context, of people's choices are largely just a sign of immaturity.

lithven said:

Sounds a bit devious when you think about it. Kids "need" to be on iPhone to communicate with their friends and then the parents need to be on iPhone to have any parental controls.

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These two things have absolutely nothing to do with one another.

The parental controls of iOS vs. Android is one matter, while the communication is a matter of dominant messenger.

Here in Europe, the Messenger is WhatsApp or Telegram, so the first issue simply doesn't exist.

Or are you implying that it's the kids' communications that require parental controls?

wrylachlan said:

Because:

Yeah, that’s why.

I can’t imagine why you would want to hide the distinction between “this message is end to end encrypted and thus secure” and “this is totally unsecure plain text transmission”?

I mean it’s not like Apple has been subtle about what the blue bubble means. It’s all over their Messages section of the web site, they’ve made many many ads where it’s featured prominently and it gets mentioned at just about every key note when they’re unveiling something new for the iMessage platform.

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Do people really care about end to end encryption? I don't know if I have it, and don't care if I do or don't.

sword_9mm said:

I'm not a teenager or in college. I don't use that type of thing and never really 'social media'd' after IRC in undergrad.

I don't respond to every message and don't need to add some 'haha' or 'thumbs up' icon.

I also don't live on my phone which some people find insane.

You do you of course.

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Damn.....IRC in undergrad....You are OLD!

FYI...I think my ICQ member number was like 70,000...so...I'm with ya.

cateye said:

On this we can agree. Phone calls are the new fax.

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What about video calls?

cateye said:

Phone calls should be about !!! THIS IS ABSOLUTELY IMPORTANT !!!

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No...phone should be used anytime you need any time of lengthy back and forth. It is WAY more effective than texting a 1,000 times. You can take a 5-10 minute phone call which would take an hour or two texting back and forth. If something would take 2 paragraphs to explain...call.

Echohead2 said:

Do people really care about end to end encryption? I don't know if I have it, and don't care if I do or don't.

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I care…

I don’t people need to know about end to end encryption. Most people have no way of conceptualizing what that means. But they should care about secure vs not secure. And that’s really what is being signified by the blue bubble.

The average user doesn’t need to know why it’s secure - what technology is being used to achieve that security - they just need to be able to tell the difference between when they’re communicating securely and not.

Echohead2 said:

No...phone should be used anytime you need any time of lengthy back and forth. It is WAY more effective than texting a 1,000 times. You can take a 5-10 minute phone call which would take an hour or two texting back and forth. If something would take 2 paragraphs to explain...call.

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The longer the conversation, the less want to do it on the phone. Why? Because if it's written (in whatever format that may be—email, text, Slack messages, etc.), there's a paper trail I can refer back to. Phone calls are ephemeral. A long conversation that covers many different points in a process is essentially worthless as far as I'm concerned (unless I take excrutiatingly detailed notes, which I do, because not all conversations, meetings, etc. can be avoided).

Obviously, IMO and to each their own. There is no one right answer to this, of course. And I'm thinking of this more from a business perspective than a casual perspective. But, I want to talk to people even less on the phone if it's casual. That's what texting is made for.

cateye said:

The longer the conversation, the less want to do it on the phone. Why? Because if it's written (in whatever format that may be—email, text, Slack messages, etc.), there's a paper trail I can refer back to. Phone calls are ephemeral. A long conversation that covers many different points in a process is essentially worthless as far as I'm concerned (unless I take excrutiatingly detailed notes, which I do, because not all conversations, meetings, etc. can be avoided).

Obviously, IMO and to each their own. There is no one right answer to this, of course. And I'm thinking of this more from a business perspective than a casual perspective. But, I want to talk to people even less on the phone if it's casual. That's what texting is made for.

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Sounds like you need an "AI assistant" to transcribe all your calls so they're searchable - this is already a thing in Teams and Zoom, though I guess consent laws could get in the way.

Also, I'm more concerned about Meta / Apple / etc scooping up metadata about texting/calling patterns rather than having the contents of messages encrypted. I think Meta pinkie-swears they don't collect that info but I'm highly suspicious they're not doing a bunch of datamining in the background. Something about if you're not paying then you are the product.

One of the "selling" points for iMessage that I would discuss with people (in another career when I sold cellphones) is that it went across the wifi connection, not the cell one, so it would work in places where you have poor cell coverage but fine wifi. Between that and the "Delivered" you aren't wondering if your SMS was actually delivered, or waiting a while to get an un-sent notification.

cateye said:

The longer the conversation, the less want to do it on the phone. Why? Because if it's written (in whatever format that may be—email, text, Slack messages, etc.), there's a paper trail I can refer back to. Phone calls are ephemeral. A long conversation that covers many different points in a process is essentially worthless as far as I'm concerned (unless I take excrutiatingly detailed notes, which I do, because not all conversations, meetings, etc. can be avoided).

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Yeah, no. I can’t count the number of times I received (or sent) detailed emails that provide a wonderful paper trail of a misunderstanding or bad decision. Just because it’s on paper doesn’t mean that a correct understanding has been reached.

I prefer to have the call first to make sure we’re on the same page with all the benefit of being able to read Intonation, intuit when the speaker is out over their skis and needs more info to make a decision, etc. Then the meeting notes become an email that I send back to the other person documenting our shared understanding. I find that vastly more efficient than having endless email or text chains.

cateye said:

The longer the conversation, the less want to do it on the phone. Why? Because if it's written (in whatever format that may be—email, text, Slack messages, etc.), there's a paper trail I can refer back to. Phone calls are ephemeral. A long conversation that covers many different points in a process is essentially worthless as far as I'm concerned (unless I take excrutiatingly detailed notes, which I do, because not all conversations, meetings, etc. can be avoided).

Obviously, IMO and to each their own. There is no one right answer to this, of course. And I'm thinking of this more from a business perspective than a casual perspective. But, I want to talk to people even less on the phone if it's casual. That's what texting is made for.

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It also helps that here in Canada, we are one-party consent for recording phone calls nationwide. I can keep a recording of the phone call and there's nothing you can say about it.

wrylachlan said:

I care…

I don’t people need to know about end to end encryption. Most people have no way of conceptualizing what that means. But they should care about secure vs not secure. And that’s really what is being signified by the blue bubble.

The average user doesn’t need to know why it’s secure - what technology is being used to achieve that security - they just need to be able to tell the difference between when they’re communicating securely and not.

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It is important that communications are secure, because it helps the people that need it (e.g. if all traffic is encrypted, their traffic does not stick out).

However, regular people get 0 benefit from e2e encryption, and it might even have negative implications (multiple device usage is generally more complex).

Plus, the e2e is implemented by a blob you can't control. With centralized app stores, companies running those app stores in "problematic" countries might have bad incentives, and sabotage e2e in ways which are difficult to detect.

ant1pathy said:

One of the "selling" points for iMessage that I would discuss with people (in another career when I sold cellphones) is that it went across the wifi connection, not the cell one, so it would work in places where you have poor cell coverage but fine wifi. Between that and the "Delivered" you aren't wondering if your SMS was actually delivered, or waiting a while to get an un-sent notification.

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There's wifi calling. I really don't know if SMS extends to it, but probably it does?

That's one of the drawbacks of WhatsApp, Telegram, etc. they don't work at all over data-less connections.

koala said:

However, regular people get 0 benefit from e2e encryption

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??? Yeah, no. E2E allows you to use your phone for secure conversations that you would never put in SMS. “Hey honey, what’s your social for this form I’m filling out?” She sends it, I fill out the form then delete the message. Would never in a million years do that with SMS. “What’s the Netflix password?”, etc, etc.

E2E allows you to do lots of everyday secure things that you wouldn’t want to do over SMS.

Netflix passwords are not sensitive enough to bother. SSNs can be more sensitive, but E2EE is also not enough.

koala said:

Netflix passwords are not sensitive enough to bother. SSNs can be more sensitive, but E2EE is also not enough.

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The phone company probably already has your social anyway, they won't need to snoop your message to get it.

Entegy said:

It also helps that here in Canada, we are one-party consent for recording phone calls nationwide. I can keep a recording of the phone call and there's nothing you can say about it.

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This only applies if it is a private phone call and not a business call.

If you are a business and record a call you are required to disclose that. (Because it is assumed a business has an inherent advantage over a consumer making the call).

BigLan said:

The phone company probably already has your social anyway, they won't need to snoop your message to get it.

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Let me introduce you to Tower Spoofing and to the very ancient practice of "Roaming."

Granted if you're using a phone in a truly unfriendly location, you should probably be proactively using E2E Encrypted products if not that + VPN.

You don't need E2EE to protect you from tower spoofing. E2EE is distrust towards the service operator.

(edit: not saying that distrust towards the service operator is a bad idea. I'm just saying E2EE adds some complexity that only addresses some threat vectors. Most protocols have encryption now that will withstand tower spoofing.)

cateye said:

But, I want to talk to people even less on the phone if it's casual. That's what texting is made for.

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This just makes me weep. And definitely tells me that I am old.

Echohead2 said:

This just makes me weep. And definitely tells me that I am old.

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Would it surprise you that I'm also an olds? I'm 51. I'm just tired of talking to people.

koala said:

There's wifi calling. I really don't know if SMS extends to it, but probably it does?

That's one of the drawbacks of WhatsApp, Telegram, etc. they don't work at all over data-less connections.

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Yes, if your carrier supports WiFi calling, then other carrier phone services like SMS and voicemail will be delievered over WiFi as well. On iPhone you can test this by putting your phone into airplane mode, then turning WiFi on. A few seconds after reconnecting to WiFi, you should see your carrier name in Control Centre again. Back when iOS was less aggressive about preferring WiFi over cellular for calls (there's no toggle for the preference like there is in Android), I used this airplane mode trick to force my iPhone to use WiFi for calls.

cateye said:

Would it surprise you that I'm also an olds? I'm 51. I'm just tired of talking to people.

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I'm not even sure it's an age thing… I'm 54 and I've always despised talking to people on the phone, going right back to the days when your phone was attached to your house. Don't get me wrong — I like talking to people, I just don't like doing it on the phone*. For business purposes, I'm 100% "put it in an email", not just because of clarity and having it in writing, but because I can give an email my attention on my terms, rather than having to divert from whatever-it-is I'm doing and take/make a phone call. (Which will also inevitably take longer to conduct than it would to read an email.)

*I tolerated it when there was no other option, but it was a happy, happy day when it became the norm to arrange meeting in the pub/cinema/restaurant via text, rather than actually having to ring up multiple people, then try to remember who said they were/weren't coming, who was going to be late…

Entegy said:

Yes, if your carrier supports WiFi calling, then other carrier phone services like SMS and voicemail will be delievered over WiFi as well. On iPhone you can test this by putting your phone into airplane mode, then turning WiFi on. A few seconds after reconnecting to WiFi, you should see your carrier name in Control Centre again. Back when iOS was less aggressive about preferring WiFi over cellular for calls (there's no toggle for the preference like there is in Android), I used this airplane mode trick to force my iPhone to use WiFi for calls.

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Thanks, I suspected as much, but I was too lazy to verify. I actually switched providers because I spend a lot of time in areas with bad coverage but with a good wireless Internet connection, although really I don't do SMS anymore. (However, I'm now facing issues with dropped calls after switching providers and adding dual SIM. Why nothing works in this life?)

I don't know how many people are on dataless plans in this day and age. Certainly I think in Spain mostly everyone (even the elderly, etc.) has data, just checked the major provider and they don't show any dataless plan on their website. However, I think a "global IM" standard should operate without data. Which makes things more difficult (the phone companies must be in), and probably couples things to phone numbers (double edged sword- and hard to do an alternative).

I think a global IM standard should:

• Not require a data plan
• Not require disclosing your phone number to people you communicate with
• Have delivery notifications
• Support groups, images, video, audio messages
• Allow you to use third party clients using open APIs

However, I suspect 2 and 5 make spam again a terrible problem.

Echohead2 said:

This just makes me weep. And definitely tells me that I am old.

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It's just plain wrong. Texting is for when all of the above are true:
1) you don't care about an immediate response
2) you are OK with a permanent record of your communication being held by at least the recipient
3) the information being exchanged is simple enough to be held in a short one way message

Conversations are possible with text, but it's inconvenient and extremely slow compared to voice.

Shavano said:

Conversations are possible with text, but it's inconvenient and extremely slow compared to voice.

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That’s debatable. Voice calls can be extremely inconvenient and have no way of taking the recipient‘s situation into account.

The only thing „worse“ IMO is voice messages — there is effectively almost no difference between sending a voice message and just pressing the dictation button and then tapping „send“. But for the recipient it’s the difference between putting off hearing the message for a convenient time (in my case, usually hours later), often just forgetting about them, and being able to discreetly read and respond in a timely manner.

Shavano said:

Conversations are possible with text, but it's inconvenient and extremely slow compared to voice.

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My wife and I converse by text all the time, and we both work from home. (She's downstairs and I'm upstairs.) It's far less disruptive to whatever is it we're both doing at any given time than having an actual conversation.

Text can be very efficient when you just need a quick precise answer. The problem is that every so often you think what you need is a quick precise answer when what you really need is something more nuanced. I’ve had many a very inefficient argument/renegotiation based on misinterpretation of a text. When you add those into your calculation of the average efficiency of texting it goes way down.

So we still make a lot of use of texting but we’re extremely conservative in terms of when we think we can get away with just text. We do a lot of things over voice call that others would likely text for and find it substantially reduces miscommunication.

And of course hearing someone’s voice (and even more so seeing someone’s face on video call) has a very important side benefit: it increases your perception of connectedness in a way that is extremely beneficial to relationships. And if you find that it doesn’t increase your sense of connectedness it is fulfilling an equally important diagnostic function…

Diagnostic function? Careful. As a strong introvert, I've been told my entire life, starting from when I was a child, by a lot of well-meaning (and not so well meaning) adults that I just needed to "be more social" to "snap out of it."

As a fully-grown, responsible, married adult, I'm pretty strident in rejecting that line of thinking as a projection by people who are driven by their need to be social and expect everyone else to adhere to that methodology as well. My wife is an off-the-chart extrovert. And we work as a couple just fine, including texting to each other during the day (we both WFH) even through our home offices are literally right next to one another with a shared french door between us that's usually wide open. It's more efficient, it's less disruptive, it's respectful of our desire for silence as we focus on literally anything that is in front of us. Part of the reason why I left traditional employment 15+ years ago was I was exhausted of the constant social component to working in an office or other group setting. Not the main reason (I'm not that far off the spectrum), but still. It was part of the equation to follow the far more challenging route of doing it all myself. Challenging and rewarding, to be sure.

Yes, face-to-face conversations, voice calls and zoom calls and the like are an important tool in the box. Sometimes they're the best tool. But far too often, my experience as someone who neither seeks nor wants that kind of social interaction, people use it because they're far more interested in the social component than the functional component.

cateye said:

But far too often, my experience as someone who neither seeks nor wants that kind of social interaction, people use it because they're far more interested in the social component than the functional component.

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Heh. So much this. One of the best things about becoming freelance/self-employed was no longer having to put up with over-long phone calls, meetings, and chance conversations in corridors that, about a minute in, basically consisted of me no longer listening because I was just thinking: "Well, I'm glad you're clearly not busy, but some of us have Shit To Do™."

cateye said:

Diagnostic function? Careful. As a strong introvert, I've been told my entire life, starting from when I was a child, by a lot of well-meaning (and not so well meaning) adults that I just needed to "be more social" to "snap out of it."

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Social fatigue is absolutely a thing - my wife is very much an introvert and needs plenty of recuperation time after major social interactions. But social interaction - fatiguing though it may be - still increases connection. It’s a balance that all introverts need to achieve and those of us who are not need to respect and live with.

But that doesn’t mean that there are no downsides to avoiding these social interactions in an effort to manage your social fatigue levels.

My clients are better able to articulate what they want in a call rather than a text or email. Would it make my life easier if they could send me a cold hard spec? Absolutely. But they can’t. And I can’t get them to a place where they can over email. They need to look me in the eyes and trust that I’m guiding them in the right direction in order to get out of their own way and give me clarity.

There are plenty of times when my wife’s first instinct is to work something out over text. And when I see we’re not connecting I call her. More often than not that turns out to be the right decision.

And I absolutely stand by the comment that when you connect with someone and don’t feel more connected, that’s a sign of something wrong in the relationship. I’m not talking about ‘boy that was a draining meeting’. I mean ‘we talked for a while and I like them less’. The latter is usefully diagnostic.

I appreciate the subtle calibration of what should be a text and what should be a phone call (and why voice memos are the devil) but ultimately:

Phone calls are mandated to be equal on all platforms. Apple doesn't detect when you're calling an Android user or a land line and treat that call differently.

Messaging, and messaging with a rich feature set are critically important to most people. I'm sure some people on Ars are more outliers on various social and societal spectra than the random selection of people you interact with, but "sms is good enough for me" is a niche belief. sms exists, and it's a fallback. There are uses for it-- but really only within the context of "better options aren't available." If you want to text more, or text less and at what point you want to have a verbal phone conversation are all things we can trust individuals to calibrate. The point is that people need to have the option to use messaging in situations that make sense for them (of which there are many for most people.)

There's no universailty in messaging, and very limited ability to 'force' people to use the standard you might prefer. The uplift to get someone who doesn't use iMessage to get them to use iMessage for your benefit is the highest uplift of all because they have to change their entire computing platform, not just an app.

Apple is recalcitrant because they know that for N. America, iMessage is the overwhelmingly preferred option among Apple customers and it has a very high lock-in effect within that market. (Yes, yes, Europeans use WhatsApp-- I get it, no point in re-hashing the fantasy that as an American I can snap my fingers and get everyone to use WhatsApp.)

Adopting RCS moves texting between iPhones and Android (or potentially other platforms) from a 3rd class citizen to a 2nd class citizen due to their refusal to come up with an E2E encryption solution. Maybe Apple will get there eventually, but they have NO motivation to get there outside of the threat of government regulation or consumers changing what they demand from Apple and Apple responding to the demand from their customers.

Google has screwed around with messaging in the past, but they've proposed a solution that meets all the criteria of a modern messaging platform. Apple has only accepted part of the solution and signs point to them doing that only on threat of EU legal action. Apple hasn't proposed any alternatives that Google might choose to comply with other than "buy your mom an iPhone." Ironically for the US consumer, the best path forward appears to be legal action within the EU, even though we're also at the mercy of EU regulation because we can't vote within the EU.

Apple adopted the RCS standard as written.
Google is demonstrably a poor steward of extended standards, it would be a terrible move for Apple to adopt googles extensions before they are included in the GSMA RCS standard.

uno2tres said:

Apple adopted the RCS standard as written.
Google is demonstrably a poor steward of extended standards, it would be a terrible move for Apple to adopt googles extensions before they are included in the GSMA RCS standard.

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Apple has had more than enough time to open iMessage, or at a bare minimum provide client apps for Android.

They're more than happy to provide client apps for things like Apple Music.

Nevarre said:

but "sms is good enough for me" is a niche belief.

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I'd be amazed if a significant portion of the non-tech crowd is even aware of the difference between an sms message, or iMessage or RCS. All they want to do is sent a message to their kid/grandkids/parent/friend and don't understand how or why it gets there.

Apple used this fact to move all their users over to iMessage - nobody opted in, it just became the only texting option and the fallback to SMS for non-iphone contacts enabled that.

The plot thickens: Beeper, which up to this point had used a setup similar to Sunbird by relaying iMessages through cloud-based Macs (with the implied security/privacy problems), now claims to have reverse-engineered iMessage and is able to do direct iMessaging: Android to iPhone, no MITM other than Apple itself. It registers the Android-based phone number with Apple, same as a real Apple device, so their client has full privileges in the system. It "just works."

Assuming it's not implemented in some way that's trivial for Apple to disable or block, this could be a bit of a holy grail and force Apple's hand to create its own Android-based client, or otherwise risk losing control of the protocol as more people figure it out (axiom at play: Once one person can reverse engineer something, then anyone can).

EDIT: My bad, didn't realize there was an Ars story now as well. Verge linked above, Ars story here. Ars story offers more technical details, and dives into the possibility that Apple could indeed block this.

IMHO, irrelevant. WhatsApp has plenty of alternative clients. By default, Meta can choose to deny your service if you don't use their client- and they are well within their rights to do so...

... but the fact is, WhatsApp is so critical in my neck of the woods, that I will not risk Meta blocking me from using WhatsApp.

And this is why there's a problem.

Son of a Beach said:

I agree that most non-techies would be unaware of the differences by name (iMessage, SMS, RCS). However, many non-tech people use group messaging, and the difference between those who can be included in a iOS group conversation and those who can't is obvious and infuriating and I reckon that a significant portion of non-techies are well aware of that difference (albeit without knowing the techie terms for it).

And cross-platform group messaging is the difference between iMessage and SMS that will (I hope) no longer be relevant when SMS is replaced by RCS. I think that plenty of non-tech people will be very grateful that this difference is essentially eliminated (even if they never understand the difference between the various techie terms to describe why it is different).

Only yesterday I was listening to a very non-techie in my family bemoaning the difficulties of having a group chat on iOS without requiring friends to sign up to additional (and sometimes untrusted) services such as WhatsApp. I explained to them that Apple says they will finally resolve this issue next year, but I didn't mention iMessage, SMS or RCS to them.

(I hope that Apple really does do it right, so that group messaging works properly cross-platform!)

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There is already some suggestion that Apple's plan for RCS encryption involves adopting a future standard, not Google's current implementation, further delaying the day RCS interoperability meets a bare minimum level of capabilities. So if you think RCS will "finally resolve this issue next year" I expect you will be disappointed.