Alternative to imessage

[RevePro]

I have been with the Android community for years and love it. For two years I switched to iOS and the only thing I miss is iMessage. So, while there is RCS messaging and apps like messenger, WhatsApp, etc. Why hasn't Samsung or Google on a whole created something like iMessage yet. Something where the default messaging app allows you to text over WiFi to anyone no matter their carrier or where they are in the world. As long as they have Android or maybe if Samsung created it; a Samsung phone you would have these capabilities.

It would make messaging so much better. iMessage is the one reason many people stay with iPhone.

It's 2018 and I'm tired of the basic SMS and RCS is not turning out to be what I thought it would.

 

[Rukbat]

Apple sued Windows for "stealing" the "look and feel" of a windowed operating system (back in the late 80s-early 90s), so I don't think that Google wants to "create" something they can get sued for. RCS will eventually make iPhone users ask why Apple isn't changing iMessage to do all the things that RCS can do. (One of the planned rumors is being able to use Android Messages on a phone (or tablet) with no carrier account (or, in the case of many tablets, no phone at all). And those are just the basics. But it takes a few years to add all the features and get them working. (At least years - it took about 4 years to get MMS to work across carriers - initially you could only exchange pictures with someone on the same carrier.)

But it's all coming, we just don't know exactly what and we have no idea when. (And the developers and project managers are in the same boat. "How about if we ...?" is the beginning of weeks of work until a few developers come to the conclusion that it won't work. It it will work, it's put on the "list of things to do sometime in the future". Then, maybe a year later, there's a rumor that RCS may be able to do ... some day.)

Unless you're like me (I'm 76 - according to the numbers, I have about 2-1/2 years left to live, average male life expectancy in the US being 78.74 years), wait and see it happen. Ten years from now, you'll wonder how we could use phones as primitive as the Note 10 and the Pixel 3. (Remember, early cellphones didn't even have a place to store phone numbers - you dialed each call manually.)

 

[chanchan05]

Samsung did have something like iMessage, however as I understand it, it's blocked/taken over by carriers in the US (I had conversations here where the setting was missing in some US phones, I'm in Asia). I remember using Enhanced Messages option on my S7 and it works fine, sending pictures and videos through Samsung's own servers, but only to other Samsung phones. I think Samsung removed it from their latest SMS app build though, since they rebuilt that to conform to RCS in the future.

 

[RevePro]

Hm, hopefully they work on something soon.