3 ms·

Yeah, completely don’t understand this. Do they mean FaceTime?

mattzito 6y ago
No, they mean iMessage - it's true iMessage falls back to SMS, but a lot of fidelity is lost. Reactions don't work, there's no stickers, images are lower resolutions, videos are potato quality, read receipts don't work. It's not complete incompatibility, but it's a much worse experience compared to what fully native users get.
- atom-morgan 6y ago
  Other than images and videos degrading, I'm always surprised by the number of people who care so much about iMessage. Is it even the extra features or do people primarily care about blue/green bubbles?
  - dangus 6y ago
    For me it's send reliability, delivery/read receipts, and file size limits (the aforementioned video/image/GIF quality). Those are all surmountable things with chat apps and other third party software, but the beauty of iMessage is that I can make all that work with all my non-technical family members without having to explain anything. I can't get my parents to install something like Discord or Signal. iMessage also recently introduced threading, and although it's not as good as something like Slack it's nice to have. Some other nice features include sharing of attachments that MMS doesn't support like PDF files and contact cards. The next big advantage is that seeing a blue bubble when you type in a phone number or receive a message is a relatively reliable indicator that you're about to talk to a human on a real cell phone and not a bot or spammer.
- dangus 6y ago
  Google sat around not prioritizing messaging and allowed the market to not decide on any sort of standard, except in countries that standardized on WhatsApp – basically, it's all a mess of different proprietary chat apps. Google themselves couldn't even decide on which proprietary chat app to stick with for their own services. They absolutely could have been WhatsApp (or bought them) but dropped a huge ball on that. Then you've got telecoms who are anti-innovators. Google struggled to drag them into the 21st century with RCS, and as a result Google has to run their own RCS service to make up for so many carriers not yet supporting RCS. Google has decidedly failed to make carriers do what they want where Apple has succeeded. The launch of the original iPhone was so disruptive in the sense that Apple found a carrier willing to allow them to ditch carrier-controlled app stores, implement visual voicemail, and offer an unlimited plan that was offered at a price point palatable enough for consumers. I once tried to activate my Nexus 5X with Verizon, and they refused to do so because it wasn't a allowlisted device. Even though the phone had CDMA radios and was compatible on a technical level, Google apparently didn't bother to work with the largest carrier in America to get it to work (at least, at the time). The fact that iMessage is built in to Apple's messaging app isn't really any different than someone deciding to use WhatsApp or Discord for chatting. SMS/MMS just happens to live in the same app. As antiquated and horrible as it is, SMS and MMS are the current universal standard, iMessage is not, and you can't expect Apple to be forced to make it so. That means that iMessage itself is and was never relevant to the discussion of interoperability. The interoperable standard is SMS/MMS and you still can't count on cellular telecoms to support anything better than that, including RCS. Now we're left with a duopoly where each party involved has zero incentive to cooperate. Perhaps this is the point where government intervention is supposed to kick in. Or maybe Google and Apple can scratch each other's backs to get Apple to climb aboard the RCS train.

No, they mean iMessage - it's true iMessage falls back to SMS, but a lot of fidelity is lost. Reactions don't work, there's no stickers, images are lower resolutions, videos are potato quality, read receipts don't work. It's not complete incompatibility, but it's a much worse experience compared to what fully native users get.

atom-morgan 6y ago
Other than images and videos degrading, I'm always surprised by the number of people who care so much about iMessage. Is it even the extra features or do people primarily care about blue/green bubbles?
- dangus 6y ago
  For me it's send reliability, delivery/read receipts, and file size limits (the aforementioned video/image/GIF quality). Those are all surmountable things with chat apps and other third party software, but the beauty of iMessage is that I can make all that work with all my non-technical family members without having to explain anything. I can't get my parents to install something like Discord or Signal. iMessage also recently introduced threading, and although it's not as good as something like Slack it's nice to have. Some other nice features include sharing of attachments that MMS doesn't support like PDF files and contact cards. The next big advantage is that seeing a blue bubble when you type in a phone number or receive a message is a relatively reliable indicator that you're about to talk to a human on a real cell phone and not a bot or spammer.
dangus 6y ago
Google sat around not prioritizing messaging and allowed the market to not decide on any sort of standard, except in countries that standardized on WhatsApp – basically, it's all a mess of different proprietary chat apps. Google themselves couldn't even decide on which proprietary chat app to stick with for their own services. They absolutely could have been WhatsApp (or bought them) but dropped a huge ball on that. Then you've got telecoms who are anti-innovators. Google struggled to drag them into the 21st century with RCS, and as a result Google has to run their own RCS service to make up for so many carriers not yet supporting RCS. Google has decidedly failed to make carriers do what they want where Apple has succeeded. The launch of the original iPhone was so disruptive in the sense that Apple found a carrier willing to allow them to ditch carrier-controlled app stores, implement visual voicemail, and offer an unlimited plan that was offered at a price point palatable enough for consumers. I once tried to activate my Nexus 5X with Verizon, and they refused to do so because it wasn't a allowlisted device. Even though the phone had CDMA radios and was compatible on a technical level, Google apparently didn't bother to work with the largest carrier in America to get it to work (at least, at the time). The fact that iMessage is built in to Apple's messaging app isn't really any different than someone deciding to use WhatsApp or Discord for chatting. SMS/MMS just happens to live in the same app. As antiquated and horrible as it is, SMS and MMS are the current universal standard, iMessage is not, and you can't expect Apple to be forced to make it so. That means that iMessage itself is and was never relevant to the discussion of interoperability. The interoperable standard is SMS/MMS and you still can't count on cellular telecoms to support anything better than that, including RCS. Now we're left with a duopoly where each party involved has zero incentive to cooperate. Perhaps this is the point where government intervention is supposed to kick in. Or maybe Google and Apple can scratch each other's backs to get Apple to climb aboard the RCS train.