4 ms·
This is why I'm glad Google is supporting RCS [1] to improve our outdated SMS system. Many of the reasons I use these chat apps (and I think my friends as well)
by _august 7y ago
This is why I'm glad Google is supporting RCS [1] to improve our outdated SMS system. Many of the reasons I use these chat apps (and I think my friends as well) are having a responsive and modern chat system.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services
- JohnFen 7y agoPersonally, I am very much not on board with RCS at all. But if I had to choose between RCS SMS and anything by Facebook et al, I'd learn to tolerate RCS.
- _august 7y agoBecause of a lack of end-to-end encryption? I'm still trying to wrap my head around it, but it uses TLS, so I'm not sure of the differences.
- JohnFen 7y agoNo, because of the added complexity and the introduction of the need to be more on-guard about it (because of things like addressbook discoverability and so forth). One of the main things that I like about SMS is that it's a simple, no-nonsense text-based service. If it were to resemble the various chat services that are out there, it would make it less useful and appealing to me. However, as I said, this wouldn't be a dealbreaker. I wouldn't like using it as much, but it would still be better than nothing.
- frosted-flakes 7y agoDon't forget "universal". Everyone has SMS, so it's the fallback to everything else. Also, it works without a data connection.
- parliament32 7y agoThe longest lived and most used services are always federated and have open standards, like SMS and email. Like you say, everyone has SMS and everyone has email, so they're the defacto standards for communicating with people you're not quite familiar with. This is why FB chat, whatsapp, etc will never gain the traction that these services do -- putting time and effort into making them work is just a fool's errand until they open up the network to third party clients and make the specs an open standard.
- fabrice_d 7y agoThe difference is that with e2e encryption the carriers don't see your plaintext, while they do with TLS since they terminate the TLS connection on their end.
- CarriersSuck 7y agoIf RCS is a standard what's stopping someone from writing an app that encrypts your plaintext? Sure, it'll leak meta data, but at least the actual plaintext is encrypted.
- buzzerbetrayed 7y agoCouldn’t you just do the same thing with sms today?
- parliament32 7y agoAlready done ~10 years ago, it was TextSecure, the predecessor to Signal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TextSecure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TextSecure
- fabrice_d 7y agoNothing, but you need all your contacts to use a compatible client. I really hope something like https://messaginglayersecurity.rocks/ https://messaginglayersecurity.rocks/ takes off and that we end up with good e2e interop without having to rely on a single vendor.
- tapoxi 7y agoWill Apple actually implement RCS though? iMessage is a selling point for iPhones.
- tantalor 7y agoIs it though?
- chess_buster 7y agoYes.
- saghm 7y agoIf Apple added RCS support into iMessage, I'm guessing it wouldn't hurt their sales too much.
- CarriersSuck 7y agoExactly. There should not be a reason I can see that they can't incorporate it like they've done with SMS.
- ungzd 7y agoWhat are key differences of RCS from MMS?
- JohnFen 7y agoThis covers it pretty well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services