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Why not use regular text or email? Is it just about green vs blue bubbles? I've never understood why anyone thinks this is important.
I guess you aren't living in the US either.
The iPhone is extremely popular over there, especially amongst teens the market share is over 80%. Also, because of cheap SMS and MMS people actually continued to use SMS while e.g. most of the EU quickly switched to internet messengers.
At the same internet messengers started to appear, Apple released iMessage which is a internet messenger with an SMS/MMS fallback for chatting with non-iMessage devices. This experience is worse for many reasons, notably the terrible 500KB media size limit makes videos unwatchable.
Additionally, MMS group chats are a thing in the US. This means a single non-iMessage device in a group makes the experience worse for everyone.
This lead to most people using their pre-installed messaging app, which is a worse experience on Android (SMS) than on Apple (actually modern messenger). It's not an issue in other countries because people are accustomed to instantly installing WhatsApp on their new device.
Edit: As a teen, I didn't even know MMS could do groups because ten years ago it would've been prohibitively expensive anyway.
Important to note that all of this is intentional by Apple. They intentionally degrade the experience when a non-Apple device is involved.
Which is why they broke this product last time, and why they'll break it again.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-confirms-imessage-locks-users-into-ios-and-putting-it-on-android-would-hurt-apple/
This hasn't been true for years. Android has had full RCS support built into the default Messages app (and all major Android manufacturer third party apps also support it). RCS includes every major feature iMessage feature that differentiated it from SMS, but Apple refuses to implement it on iOS because that removes their iMessage monopoly.
You're right, except the missing e2e encryption and lack of proper carrier implementations RCS seems pretty great. Hopefully with Apple adopting RCS they'll push for a proper e2e spec, but I won't hold my breath to have e2e with anything except Google Messages.
A bit off-topic: My other complaint about RCS is missing open source implementations. The only client available on all devices is Google's Messages and even that doesn't work without Google Services.
Also many carriers don't implement RCS themselves, and instead use Google's server [1]. This is bad since Google has access to all messages (and probably governments too, similar to recent news about push messages).
~~Why use RCS with Google Messages through Google servers over WhatsApp? I'm just frustrated about the state of messaging.~~ Broad support across all countries is a big advantage.
[1] https://9to5google.com/2023/03/27/vodafone-rcs-messages-android/
I am trying to figure out why I want videos in my chat. Just link it. It is weird that media size if limited by carrier, not mms itself. So that is a pain, where the range (again depending on carrier) is say 3 megabytes to 500KB. Artificial limitations and inconsistency is annoying.
In any case I have Apple and Android, I have family with a mix of both as well, and I do not get all the whining. Messages work, group chats work, images work. so Meh. No big deal. Even with family in Africa, the UK, and the US.
Sometimes I want to send a private video which isn't publicly available, so there's no link to send. E.g. a video of a relative's performance.
Since they are auto backed up to my server, or icloud, or google drive, or whatever the person is using, we just link to there. Not public of course. I get that you save a step of course.
IDC about the colors, but being able to respond to individual messages within a conversation, being able to edit, and seeing which images a friend responded to is a nice to have. Android does all this stuff too, but until this Beeper app, neither phone OS played nice with the other. So that's why it's nice to have over regular SMS. As for regular email for an ongoing group conversation between friends? What is this, 1999? :P Email is not a good format for instant messaging like text messages are.
Hmm ok. Yeah I'm used to IRC for group chats and I thought there were some hipster counterparts like Matrix that I hadn't tried. I didn't realize iMessage wasn't just SMS with blue bubbles. I still don't understand what it has vs the bazillion other chat apps out there but I guess it's a Steve Jobs thing. Thanks.
People need to agree to download and use the same app, which they don't want to do in my experience.
What it has is that it's the default app on phones and people are lazy to install another one.
It's not about lazy, it's about getting a group of people to agree to download and use the same app, which is harder than it should be.