Yeah. I don’t really think it’s better either. I just think it’ll fall flat on its face like Google’s many many previous attempts at messaging unless they actually tell people it exists.
The worst part is that Google Messages once was pretty good, actually. Supported a wide range of clients and even interoperated with XMPP servers in a limited way.
Their Hangouts app was actually not that bad to use! Until it became slow and laggy for some reason. They could easily have gone full iMessage and included an XMPP client in their Android messenger! Samsung could’ve reused the same code with their own servers as well! Oh, the things we could’ve had.
But no, Google had to go through five different messaging and video calling apps instead. They dropped the ball, kicked it by accident, and keep kicking it right when they bend over to pick it back up again.
RCS is federated in a way (between service providers, you can’t easily self-host this stuff). The unencrypted protocol is also open.
In practice, nobody but spammers cares about RCS. Google wrapped the whole thing into a “you won’t get shamed by iOS users anymore if Apple would just pick this up” envelope to gain support, but I don’t think that many Android users are using SMS/RCS for their messaging anyway.
Google’s RCS has 800M active users and it’s projected to hit 1B by the end of the year matching iMessage’s usage. Whether people actually know that it’s RCS or not, it’s been a pretty successful service for Google so far.
I don’t know how much better going to another closed system is. AFAIK it’s only Google running these servers and only their implementation.
Yeah. I don’t really think it’s better either. I just think it’ll fall flat on its face like Google’s many many previous attempts at messaging unless they actually tell people it exists.
The worst part is that Google Messages once was pretty good, actually. Supported a wide range of clients and even interoperated with XMPP servers in a limited way.
Their Hangouts app was actually not that bad to use! Until it became slow and laggy for some reason. They could easily have gone full iMessage and included an XMPP client in their Android messenger! Samsung could’ve reused the same code with their own servers as well! Oh, the things we could’ve had.
But no, Google had to go through five different messaging and video calling apps instead. They dropped the ball, kicked it by accident, and keep kicking it right when they bend over to pick it back up again.
RCS is federated in a way (between service providers, you can’t easily self-host this stuff). The unencrypted protocol is also open.
In practice, nobody but spammers cares about RCS. Google wrapped the whole thing into a “you won’t get shamed by iOS users anymore if Apple would just pick this up” envelope to gain support, but I don’t think that many Android users are using SMS/RCS for their messaging anyway.
Google’s RCS has 800M active users and it’s projected to hit 1B by the end of the year matching iMessage’s usage. Whether people actually know that it’s RCS or not, it’s been a pretty successful service for Google so far.
I use RCS with all of my Android user friends. It’s always been turned on by default for us.
Not sure what you mean not many Android users are using it?
Meanwhile, Google Voice doesn’t even have it enabled!
T-Mobile and Samsung have their own implementations (which are compatible with Google’s)