News RCS is finally here for the iPhone, and Google had nothing to do with it

[AC News]

Apple's iOS 18 brings RCS messaging because China demanded it, not because of Google's online trolling.

RCS is finally here for the iPhone, and Google had nothing to do with it : Read more

 

[kiniku]

The overwhelming amount of phones that Apple was sending obsolete SMS text messages to had everything to do with Apple acquiescing to adding RCS support. Guess what, they are all Android based phones. Welcome to global text messaging standards, Apple.

Just out of curiosity, who develops and maintains Android versions?

 

[OmegaCerebro]

Why does this writer seem to have very thinly veiled contempt for Google despite writing for the Android crowd?

 

[notforhire]

Why does this writer seem to have very thinly veiled contempt for Google despite writing for the Android crowd?

I'm a part of the "Android crowd" and my contempt for Google is never veiled

 

[SeeBeeEss]

Why does this writer seem to have very thinly veiled contempt for Google despite writing for the Android crowd?

Couldn't it just be healthy criticism? I love my Google phone and I love a lot about Android, but there is plenty about Google I am less than enamored with.

 

[Jerry Hildenbrand]

Why does this writer seem to have very thinly veiled contempt for Google despite writing for the Android crowd?

As a user of Google's products, I want to hold them to a higher standard. All of us should.

It also doesn't help that much of what Google does, or what we know that Google does, is worthy of scrutiny and criticism.

 

[mmidgley]

now if only we could get the citizens of that country to demand RCS in Google Voice...

 

[Pickle6Pro]

This leaves me with one question: why has Google stopped demanding secure cross-platform messaging from Apple?

So glad you asked.

Google embarrassed themselves with this campaign because their own pixel phones do not support RCS messaging in 90%+ of the world. You need IMS registration to make RCS work and as the PixelIMS hack demonstrates, that is not possible in most countries.

The reason for that is simple - google is too cheap to certify their phones in most of the world so they just skip it to save a few bucks. Instead of working with carriers to support their phones worldwide, they hard region lock these features so they can't be turned on in certain countries without rooting your phone or using PixelIMS and Shizuku.

How many countries? Well google supports around 20. There are over 200 countries in the world so as I mentioned earlier, there's more than 90% of the world that is "unsupported". This includes the entire continents of South America and Africa.

So google has decided to take the PR win and run away before anybody starts questioning where they get the gall to shame anyone on RCS support. This was, after all, only an attempt to improve the android brand reputation in the US market by changing the color of a bubble. It has nothing to do with benefiting users.

Attached: a screenshot of the message I get on a Google pixel 6 pro in the RCS settings of the Google messages app.

 

[mckillio]

"This leaves me with one question: why has Google stopped demanding secure cross-platform messaging from Apple? It's not here, and Apple has made no effort to provide it."

Nothing in this article that I could find, I didn't select every link, supports that Google ever demanded "secure cross-platform messaging from Apple".