XMPP had more features than RCS even when RCS was being created and was actively developed for all those years unlike RCS.
It also much simpler to implement and you don’t have to be cellular provider to have a server.
They finally compromised and Apple agreed to jump over if the parts of RCS that Google was gatekeeping were opened up.
Phase 1 of RCS on iOS will be sans E2EE sometime this year. Likely iOS 18 this fall. Phase 2 will roll in the security once the new open encryption protocol is good to go.
All in all, RCS looks like a lock as the next thing. All the major players are in.
Once we get that new open end to end encrypted RCS protocol, that’s the thing to migrate to. Fuck SMS, MMS, Meta products, WeChat, etc. One end to end encrypted standard, that can be used by any messaging client, on any mobile OS.
RCS only increased the meta-data the cellular providers and messaging apps is selling on you.
They don’t care about the content in your message, so e2ee is useless in this case.
They’re selling who you message, when, and where you are when you do it. They collect data on which cellular tower transmitted your message. And now with RCS they also know when you read the message.
Which means RCS is just as useless in terms of privacy. They only enriched the data. So it’s probably worse.
DVDs are still not bad if someone really wants to buy a movie. Cheaper than BluRay and with much weaker DRM. Video is very low quality in today’s standards, but bitrate and autio quality is better than any streaming.
I know a nice comparason, faxes. Imagine a fax 2.0 protocol released just before sending documents by email become normal that do not got adapted, but all of a sudden Google start promoting it as nudging Apple to adapt it.
Advertised as a better quality, faster fax, with (yet ro standardize) encryption.
DVDs are still not bad if someone really wants to buy a movie. Cheaper than BluRay and with much weaker DRM. Video is very low quality in today’s standards, but bitrate and autio quality is better than any streaming.
DVD bitrate is only 9.8 Mbit and uses this very inefficiently due to the use of MPEG-2 encoding. When DVD was invented we did not have the processing power in affordable hardware for better codecs. Streaming services can do at least twice that bitrate and with much, much better codecs. Audio quality is similar, streaming services actually have higher bitrate audio than most DVDs (AC-3 at 448 kbit on DVD vs ~770 kbit EAC-3 on streaming). DTS could have higher bitrates (it was either 768 kbit or 1.5Mbit) but only supported 5.1 channels.
I get not defending the use of DVD over Blu-Ray at this point, but the downsides of streaming and digital “ownership” have been a sizeable portion of tech news for a while.
And honestly? US/Canada using the standardized protocol and Europe using the walled garden developed by an eviler-than-normal corporation sounds kinda backwards from the cultural differences between US and Europe we usually hear.
US is still stuck on SMS, so much that they even made an upgrade to it with RCS.
It felt like an upgrade to the DVD disk when you have the Internet.
It supports encryption and all they had to do was type “y” when setting it up.
There’s better standards than rcs? Over here Google’s been taking ads out begging apple to switch over
XMPP had more features than RCS even when RCS was being created and was actively developed for all those years unlike RCS. It also much simpler to implement and you don’t have to be cellular provider to have a server.
They finally compromised and Apple agreed to jump over if the parts of RCS that Google was gatekeeping were opened up.
Phase 1 of RCS on iOS will be sans E2EE sometime this year. Likely iOS 18 this fall. Phase 2 will roll in the security once the new open encryption protocol is good to go.
All in all, RCS looks like a lock as the next thing. All the major players are in.
IMHO, I’ll gladly take RCS over the world’s most popular messaging clients - Meta products.
I don’t know why people have more faith in cellular providers. They have been selling all of your data before Meta was a thing.
Which is why I said RCS and not SMS or MMS.
Once we get that new open end to end encrypted RCS protocol, that’s the thing to migrate to. Fuck SMS, MMS, Meta products, WeChat, etc. One end to end encrypted standard, that can be used by any messaging client, on any mobile OS.
RCS only increased the meta-data the cellular providers and messaging apps is selling on you.
They don’t care about the content in your message, so e2ee is useless in this case.
They’re selling who you message, when, and where you are when you do it. They collect data on which cellular tower transmitted your message. And now with RCS they also know when you read the message.
Which means RCS is just as useless in terms of privacy. They only enriched the data. So it’s probably worse.
Messaging sevices 😅
DVDs are still not bad if someone really wants to buy a movie. Cheaper than BluRay and with much weaker DRM. Video is very low quality in today’s standards, but bitrate and autio quality is better than any streaming.
I know a nice comparason, faxes. Imagine a fax 2.0 protocol released just before sending documents by email become normal that do not got adapted, but all of a sudden Google start promoting it as nudging Apple to adapt it. Advertised as a better quality, faster fax, with (yet ro standardize) encryption.
DVD bitrate is only 9.8 Mbit and uses this very inefficiently due to the use of MPEG-2 encoding. When DVD was invented we did not have the processing power in affordable hardware for better codecs. Streaming services can do at least twice that bitrate and with much, much better codecs. Audio quality is similar, streaming services actually have higher bitrate audio than most DVDs (AC-3 at 448 kbit on DVD vs ~770 kbit EAC-3 on streaming). DTS could have higher bitrates (it was either 768 kbit or 1.5Mbit) but only supported 5.1 channels.
Hmm, maybe you’re right :P. But the point is the second half.
I get not defending the use of DVD over Blu-Ray at this point, but the downsides of streaming and digital “ownership” have been a sizeable portion of tech news for a while.
And honestly? US/Canada using the standardized protocol and Europe using the walled garden developed by an eviler-than-normal corporation sounds kinda backwards from the cultural differences between US and Europe we usually hear.
iMessage is the same though… It only falls back to sms when required (like everything else) and people hate it when it does.