The long-awaited day is here: Apple has announced that its Messages app will support RCS in iOS 18. The move comes after years of taunting, cajoling, and finally, some regulatory scrutiny from the EU.
Right now, when people on iOS and Android message each other, the service falls back to SMS — photos and videos are sent at a lower quality, messages are shortened, and importantly, conversations are not end-to-end encrypted like they are in iMessage. Messages from Android phones show up as green bubbles in iMessage chats and chaos ensues.
Apple’s announcement was likely an effort to appease EU regulators.
Who even uses sms/mms these days? The only cases I see myself using sms is the poorly implemented 2fa over sms, which is bad since sim hijack is a real threat.
Other than that whatsapp is the norm around here, whether we like it or not. Some also use facebook messanger, but no1 uses mms, it never picked up with the astronomical prices that carriers kept around for no good reason. I wish more people used telegram or signal, but 99% of my contacts don’t, so whatsapp it is.
Like 90% of Americans who have android phones use SMS. WhatsApp is more common in places outside the US. Not inside.
It’s still common in the USA for some reason. I think because SMS has been free for a long time and people don’t like change. Other apps gained popularity elsewhere in the world because SMSes were expensive.
I SMS my boss when I’m off sick.
I use it to communicate with my family
It’s more convenient than chat apps.
What is more conveniant about sms compared to other apps? You still have to open the app, choose the contact from the list and start typing. It’s the exact same options. If I do it on the sms app, signal app, telegram or messanger app it’s still the same 2 taps then start typing. The only difference is what’s on the other side. If they only use sms then it’s obvious you have no other choice of communicating with them, but you can’t say it’s more conveniant.
It’s convenient because I don’t have to tell my family to use a different app. It’s hard enough to get them to install whatsapp, let alone actually use it. And I don’t even like using whatsapp.
I try not to.
I’ll happily use one or more of any of dozens of proper modern, network-based messaging systems. A few off the top of my head, none of which must be tied to hardware/sim/phone number (Signal is working on moving away from phone numbers, and it’s still not tied to a phone number the same way RCS is):
Matrix
Signal
Conversations
Simplex
Wire
Or pick an XMPP server and client, there’s plenty out there. I was using XMPP on my phone in 2009, chatting, sending uncompressed videos to people on desktops/laptops.
Hell, even Telegram is a thousand times better than this RCS garbage.
Don’t get me started on the privacy nightmare of WhatsApp… Holy shit, may as well not even care about privacy or encryption.
(I have most of these messaging apps on my phones and my laptop, because they work).
Unfortunately, no matter how good the alternatives are, you are stuck with whatever is on the other end. I can’t force anyone to change their main app for comms. Even if I do manage to get them to install anything else, they will realise they only use it with me and probably drop it next time they change their phone.
While I do agree whatsapp is a privacy nightmare , I also see why it won’t go away anytime soon. You only need someone’s phone number to contact them, you get easy media transfers although compressed to shit, it’s still serviceable and it’s carier independant, and most importantly free even internationaly. People even started using it for audio calls due to higher quality audio over the plain voice calls. All these reasons create the perfect mix for the average privacy-ignorant person to overlook any competitors.
Deltachat too, FOSS, E2EE, it relies on users’ already existing email accounts to vehicle the messages (https://delta.chat)