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Google Renames Messenger To Android Messages as the Company Pushes RCS (betanews.com)
We have come a long way from the age of flip phones and nine-key texting. Even as if group messaging and instant messengers took over, the SMS has largely retained its core standard over the years. Google wants to change that, and for this, it has been working with hundreds of carriers and manufacturers around the world to bring the text message into the 21st century. Using a standard called Rich Communications Services, the group plans to make a texting app that comes with your phone and is every bit as powerful as those dedicated messaging apps. This would make all the best features available to everyone with an Android phone. From a report on BetaNews: Just last week we were talking about Google's championing of RCS (Rich Communication Services), the successor to SMS. Now the company has renamed its Messenger app to Android Messages as it aims to become not just the default SMS app, but the default RCS app for Android users. Part of the reason for the name change is to convey the idea that the app is now about more than just one type of message. Google is betting big on RCS and this is hinted at in the app update description which says it adds "Simpler sign-up for enhanced features on supported carriers."
Google's purest approach (pushing RCS vs just making something up that works and transition away from it over time) and also their fragmented approach (too many messaging products, each of which is poor and shallow) has hurt adoption badly.
I wonder why senior Google executives put up with this?
Who is asking for this?
Having installed the update today, they have at least not renamed the application like they so commonly do. It is still called just messenger on the app drawer. Had they renamed it to Android Messages it would have shifted spots on my app drawer.
This has happened in the past to a lot of apps. Gmail to Inbox, People to Contacts, Chromecast to Google Chromecast to Google Home. I'm sure I've missed a few others, but the name changes get annoying when you get used to apps being in certain places based on their name.
I for one am SURE that Google will respect our privacy and not use my personal messages to
monetize me
...or send customized ads to me
...or profile me
...or track me
...or geo-locate me
1. easier to data mine
2. easier to deliver targeted ads
3. more control over the ad revenue
As soon as Apple adopts RCS too, everything will be fine!
Right?
#DeleteFacebook
It's called iMessage.
just in case ou were wondering why Google is pushing RCS now... who knew that the part of iOS 10 many people laughed at, iMessage stickers, would be a smash ht for Apple that had Google scrambling to come up with an answer for?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If google ls pushing this, there must be more scanning happening here somewhere that they can profit from. I will stay with plain text and less invasion of privacy thanks.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Hangouts? Allo? Duo?
Are they getting this same feature?
It's getting confusing with Google now with them spawning, killing or changing a messaging client so often....
I like Google, but this is yet another half-assed "standard". AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon are not on board, there is no endpoint encryption, and it looks like it can be another vector for exploits because of "rich" content (i.e. ads.)
Heck with this. Give me something like Signal or TextSecure as a messaging app which stores received stuff encrypted.
Rimmer also asked for it so he could write, "I am a fish" even appier.
Really? I use a flip phone and nine-key texting. If I've got something more significant to communicate it can wait till I can sit down and compose it with a real keyboard and screen.
Brought to by the Millennial Scum.
Just send me a plain text message.... fuckers.
I don't want flashing, bouncing, swipie, seizure inducing, system crashing bullshit in all of my SMS messages recieved. The only thing they should do is try to increase the char. limit (still an issue with Obama phones) and thats it. Otherwise, lease SMS alone.
Unless a messaging systems comes with open federation standard and p2p encryption, it is dead in the water to me. We could have had that with XMPP but Google got their panties in a twist when some of the other federations were only doing one way federation.
No good deed goes unpunished.
Never going to happen.
Too many people want to get to that information. For various reasons. Some commercial, some investigative, some malignant.
I wonder if this is in response to the updates to "Messages" in iOS 10...
From a couple news articles that i saw, certain Cell Providers are islands to themselves. e.g. RCS on T-Mobile doesn't necessarily work with RCS on Verizon and vice versa,.
In other news, yet another yet another messaging protocol from google. I guess im the one who needs to add the XKCD: Standards Image
It will happen. As soon as enough people start demanding it. Most people are ignorant, the remainder are either people who do care but lack the numbers to cause change, or the few doomsayers that desperately want a dystopia. (Both the groups you cited and the people who keep saying it will never happen because of sadism.)
Change will come. It just needs a good strong push to get going.
I would not trust most of todays "application developers" with a hello world program. I refuse to use this proposed shit.
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Google, your design of Android has been so phenomenally bad that you issued 115 patches for Stagefright/Mediaserver CVEs in 2015. Let's just review exactly how terrible the design of Android's media system really is:
Anything that you are doing with attachments in a new messaging app should fork any outside processes in separate chroot() jails as individually-distinct, non-root users.
If you can't figure out how to write secure code, then just stop writing code.
It sounds like you might have switched from an iPhone, if so de-regsiter your phone number and disable iMessage. Or if it's a new phone, perhaps the number was on an iPhone before.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It may come sooner or later. Here in the US, one side is scared shitless of the Commander in Chief. The other side is scared shitless of the BLM/SJW types. Either way, both sides want confidential, secure endpoint messaging without a third party trying to inject worthless garbage into a protocol that has been simple and worked for decades.
Thankfully we do have Signal. Hell, even Facebook builds the Signal protocol into Messenger, although I don't trust FB's implementation. (It might be secure, but FB just has a conflict of interest there.) I would like some add-on that supported both S/MIME and PGP keys, so I could use that on top of an existing messenger protocol (SMS, MMS, etc.) transparently.
Because Android Messages is so different from Messenger.
Some executive has way too much time on their hands.
Please don't fuck it up. I was using Hangouts as my SMS client because the default app was so shit and slow. But Hangouts wasn't exactly a panacea either. 3rd party clients were also sucky, focusing on themes and colours and dancing ponycorns... Messenger from Google was a good SMS app, so I switched to it when I found out it existed and I've been using it ever since. Please, please, PLEASE DON"T FUCK IT UP.
SMS is unencrypted plain text. Everyone with an interceptor can see your text (Also See Stingray). Google doesn't need it anyway because you're using their keyboard and OS.
Come on Google... It was cool when you get web search or the email and improve it in a way nobody was pushing. But you're talking about improve SMS when since more than 5 years ago we started to use Whatsapp (or Facebook messenger) or whatever. Remind me of the aliens on Simpsons saying they improved our table tennis sport in an electronic way and the result was a game like Pong.
How is Apple supposed to know your phone number is no longer in use by an iPhone?
Or furthermore that you no longer want ot use iMessage... since if you had a mac laptop or an iPad you could use iMessage on those platforms as well.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Nobody could figure out how to pronounce AlloDuoWave+HangoutsTalkVoice?
fencepost
just a little off
Oh goody, git was too hard to learn. svn was cvs warmed over. Perkins sounds too snooty .... so back to the basics and we'll manage our texts with a traditional RCS version control system.
That will show the Apple bigots just whose in control!
In France, where SMS and MMS are usually free, SMS is the standard for phone-to-phone text communication. SMS is reliable and works on all phones.
MMS despite being more technically advanced is rarely used except to send the occasional picture. It is less reliable, and not all phones support it well. If that RCS thing is just an evolution of MMS, it will most likely suffer the same fate.
In countries where SMS/MMS is not free, will RCS be different? If it isn't, people will just keep using WhatsApp.
I tried Google Messenger; talk about a dumbed-down piece of shit. I went back to the built-in app, Google Messages. Modern SMS supports lengthy messages, unicode, emoticons and embedded video; what can Google offer?
Somebody please build a messaging app that allows RTF too: Then everyone can use email without an email address. That might be a bad idea, I avoid linking my online identity to my real life.
Just fucking stop already. Pick one, make it work well. This is what, the 5th different google messaging app?
STOP ALREADY!
I just had a look at Rich Communication Services at Wikipedia. Given the large feature coverage, it is just impossible that this will be implemented without security holes. The attack surface is too large.
I don't want to get stuck in traffic behind someone messaging more than 140 characters at a time.
Have gnu, will travel.
the iMessage client on Phone1 (sender) should be attempting to contact Phone2 (recipient) in the background asking them "have you been actively connected to iMessage in the past X seconds?" and if it does not get an immediate answer of "yes" from Phone2 it should be sending over SMS.
Wow, I love your universe where no phone loses power or connectivity ever...
That said, the system DOES do that. If my phone is somewhere I can't get data I get messages via SMS instead of iMessage. But if the system just doesn't know what happened to the phone, it has no good way to know it should give up on iMessage forever and some very good reasons not to send it via SMS (because that costs Apple real money vs. queuing the message up on iMessage to send out as devices connect).
The whole system is a lot more complex than you are thinking it is, it does handle real world failure cases very well. Just not complete disconnection, erring on the side of "they may still want to use iMessage" and like I said I think that's good call because there are other ways to use iMessage other than just a phone. If you even reset a phone (like you should do before sale or transfer) it will even know that number should be disconnected from iMessage...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
with my google glasses?
Yet another messenger app along with yet another renaming of service that no one asked for and will be confused at, backtracked as soon as Google realizes that a lot of companies don't want to help them with the new standard and are not willing to open their platforms to an alternative app that will outright kill their own efforts on their own messaging solutions.
Apple and Apple users won't adopt it because they already have iMessage, people who already uses WhatsApp will keep at it, specially because it already offers hassle free messaging with encryption and folks who uses other stuff like Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, among others won't migrate to a new thing that no one else uses. The one thing SMS is good at is exactly the stuff RCS won't ever be able to achieve, which is working in all cellphones independent of OS or carrier.
In summary, RCS is offering nothing new. In fact, it seems to have several disadvantages when compared to the competition.
I dunno why Google continues with this strategy of shooting in all directions with a peashooter, but it's not gonna work. Consolidate your messaging to a single app under the Google/Android umbrella and focus on getting it right or just stop it. How many electronic payment systems has Google been through now? How many people don't use it because they don't know the difference between Pay, Wallet, the defunct Hands Free which was another lame attempt on fragmenting the whole thing, among others? Does the company really expect every consumer to keep track and test between half a dozen of their offers for each single service because they cannot decide which to focus and keep?
It's such a stupid strategy that I can't even anymore. I'll be disabling this crap as soon as it comes out and defaulting to Signal for SMS. WhatsApp for regular messaging because that's what everyone in my contact list uses. There is no need for a new standard that does what others already do. Either come up with something new, or consolidate all your other services into one thing.
Because their initial success was luck not design and now their culture reflects that; no strategy, no design thinking, no coherency.
Dialectician. Archology.
They can call it whatever they want but it's still a horrible messaging app. Did they do any UX testing? The thing is a nightmare. The only good thing about it is that it works; otherwise, it's complete crap.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
Great, now I'll get even more boobs in my text messages! I'll finally find out that one weird trick to get the search box in Amazon to show the characters I type in real time instead of 3 seconds later. Messengers hate me, click here to find out 15 reasons why.
Now ask yourself why.
Who said anything about giving up on iMessage forever? On a proper system Phone1 would be asking Phone2 if they want to use iMessage before the sending of every message so if the person does regain data connectivity, or is still a user of iMessage, their device would be replying "yes" to "are you still on iMessage?".
Yes, there are multiple ways to use iMessage, such as on desktop PCs or on iPads, and they would all also be replying "yes" to the connectivity check, if no device is connected to Apples messaging service on the recipients end the sender should not be trying to send through that service.
As someone who has a built an XMPP first (checking for activity on the phone first, then the desktop application) / SMS as fallback messaging system, I know firsthand that ensuring proper message delivery is absolutely not "more complex" than this.