The long fight to make Apple’s iMessage compatible with all devices has raged with little to show for it. But Google (de facto leader of the charge) and other mobile operators are now leveraging the European Union’s Digital Market Act (DMA), according to the Financial Times. The law, which goes into effect in 2024, requires that “gatekeepers” not favor their own systems or limit third parties from interoperating within them. Gatekeepers are any company that meets specific financial and usage qualifications, including Google’s parent company Alphabet, Apple, Samsung and others.
Google is pushing RMS, which they would control, and is designed to push you ads and usage metrics back to them.
I haven’t seen a valid reason to get rid of SMS though.
It’s RCS not RMS and Google didnt even want control of it in the first place, it’s well documented Google has been trying to get US carriers to stop dragging their feet on RCS for a long time. They never did until Google literally went “Fine, I’ll do it myself then”
AND RCS is an open protocol, nobody really has “control” over it, Google runs some RCS servers but if it disappeared tomorrow (Or you changed the defaults) RCS itself would run just fine on whatever including if Apple supports RCS
ETA: Also SMS is absolute trash, it’s from the early 90’s (it’s older than me FFS) it doesn’t really support what we want out of it media wise today, and what it does support it was forced to. It’ll send “video” but it’ll be completely unrecognizable. It needs to be put to pasture already.
It will be an easier sell if Google manages to get their proprietary extensions to RCS into RCS version 10, rather than only being supported in Google Messenger
Hardest of hard passes, even if I were on Android.
Again, Google don’t have their own iMessage that is widely used, so instead of compete on that level, they want to own the whole system.
Anybody remember Hangouts? Google’s iMessage that was better in every conceivable way than its Apple analog, integrated with Google voice, could be accessed anywhere you could get on Gmail etc? Dropping the ball on Hangouts to favor carrier pre-installed messaging Apps was such an incredible and short-sighted blunder. I concede that exactly like their many app deprecations/cut-and-runs that did not take the long-term sentiment of the end user into account and damaged their reputation and adoption. And now here we are… trying to grovel back into iMessage’s purview.
When they killed hangouts was when I think everyone stopped trying to adopt google products. What’s the point, it will be killed.
I think you’re right. I got some people to start using Hangouts and then Google killed it. I don’t even bother to learn what Google has available now for chats because I know now there’s no point to trying to get people to switch, no matter how good/bad it may be.
Name a better duo than Google and killing off products
https://killedbygoogle.com/
Yes, duo is on that list.
oof
*EA enters the chat
Wait you thought hangouts was good? Holy shit would that be one of the worst Google offerings of the decade if it wasn’t for the ten other Google chat and video systems they have made. My god I can’t think of a worse communication platform than hangouts. You might be the first person I’ve heard of liking it.
I don’t want to make assumptions, but your reply makes me think you arrived at Hangouts once it was already being deprecated by Google. Granted, being US based I didn’t need the coverage of WhatsApp (limited as they was even then to phone # accounts), the scant usage of Viber or the other innumerable messaging apps I touched in that time period. Hangouts integrated seamlessly with SMS, let me send media/stickers/map embeds to mixed-platform groups never worrying about quality downgrade. And did I mention that one could access Hangouts (and its SMS pass through server) from any machine in the world through Gmail? iMessage makes you jump hoops to do that shit today.
this was actually one of the things I hated the most about it. It doesn’t really matter what features you provide when the product is so bad it can’t even make up for it. I had no clue it had sms passthrough, it was just a shitty chat/voice client integrated into my email client, slowly making things slower and slower the more they added.
Bingo. This whole case is designed to make Apple look like the bad guy whilst Google hides their real agenda of forcing Apple to use a protocol Google controls and thus stamp out Google’s competition.
From what I’ve read, Google just owns the reference implementation. Apple could implement it themselves, but then lose out on certain non-cross-platform features, like e2e encryption.
I’ve read the specification. Google’s implementation is the only real implementation (raw RCS is basically a dead project) as Google have added a load of custom extensions to RCS that means, to be interoperable, you’d need to use Google’s (which I imagine requires licensing since it doesn’t appear to be open source).
That’s basically what I said, but better.
You’re like a lot of people on Lemmy: so eager to paint everything even tangentially connected to Google as some kind of grand conspiracy that you can’t even get the most basic facts right.