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Imagine doing this in 2008 or whatever. Google voice was the future. Pff, checking my voicemail? My voicemails get transcribed and texted to me! Then they didn

by paulmd 2y ago

Imagine doing this in 2008 or whatever. Google voice was the future. Pff, checking my voicemail? My voicemails get transcribed and texted to me! Then they didn’t update it for 10 years, rolled back a bunch of features, and still have not even implemented RCS despite their full-court marketing push for the mandatory adoption of the standard. Fully expecting they’ll sunset it entirely rather than comply with the EU. I’m trying to rearrange my life so that I can just hop to native iMessage and use that for everything, but I have to run two phone numbers in parallel thanks to all the sms 2fa out there. Oh and that’s degraded too, 99% of sites no longer take SIP numbers (and sendgrid will not send to my gmail address because it’s got “spam” in the name). So I have been having to switch back to my physical phone number over the years, meaning there's a lot of stuff to clean up. Thanks google. Even these core services are just actively enshittified, my experience is quantifiably worse than it was 10-15 years ago.

talldayo 2y ago
> and still have not even implemented RCS despite their full-court marketing push for the mandatory adoption of the standard. As a user, I find it hard to be upset about that. RCS as a standard is so bad that my running theory is Google intentionally ruined it so they could promote a broken standard and force Apple to standardize iMessage instead. It's like a thrown-over-the-fence spec that they expect other people to finish for them. I'd have expected the court to block it on the grounds of being an unfair business practice if it didn't promote the smartphone duopoly and surveillance network it entails. And it's not just the security issues, since both protocols suffer dearly for being centralized. It's a further fracturing of a system we can both agree is broken, pushing us towards Another Competing Standard that doesn't even want to compete. Since we're all in agreement that both iMessage and RCS are backdoored just like SMS, can't we just let the government coordinate text messaging and stop wasting everyone's time with proprietary products? It's exhausting and runs opposite to what we expect from modern communications infrastructure.
- paulmd 2y ago
  I honestly don’t know that level of nuts-and-bolts detail on it, what is bad about it? /curious (I know the encryption annex that google has tacked on would basically kill the promise of interop, but other than that, still bad?)

by paulmd 2y ago

talldayo 2y ago

> and still have not even implemented RCS despite their full-court marketing push for the mandatory adoption of the standard. As a user, I find it hard to be upset about that. RCS as a standard is so bad that my running theory is Google intentionally ruined it so they could promote a broken standard and force Apple to standardize iMessage instead. It's like a thrown-over-the-fence spec that they expect other people to finish for them. I'd have expected the court to block it on the grounds of being an unfair business practice if it didn't promote the smartphone duopoly and surveillance network it entails. And it's not just the security issues, since both protocols suffer dearly for being centralized. It's a further fracturing of a system we can both agree is broken, pushing us towards Another Competing Standard that doesn't even want to compete. Since we're all in agreement that both iMessage and RCS are backdoored just like SMS, can't we just let the government coordinate text messaging and stop wasting everyone's time with proprietary products? It's exhausting and runs opposite to what we expect from modern communications infrastructure.

paulmd 2y ago
I honestly don’t know that level of nuts-and-bolts detail on it, what is bad about it? /curious (I know the encryption annex that google has tacked on would basically kill the promise of interop, but other than that, still bad?)