Google Is 'Pausing' Work On Allo In Favor 'Chat,' An RCS-Based Messaging Standard (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader shares an exclusive report from The Verge about Google's next big fix for Android's messaging mess: Instead of bringing a better app to the table, it's trying to change the rules of the texting game, on a global scale. Google has been quietly corralling every major cellphone carrier on the planet into adopting technology to replace SMS. It's going to be called "Chat," and it's based on a standard called the "Universal Profile for Rich Communication Services." SMS is the default that everybody has to fall back to, and so Google's goal is to make that default texting experience on an Android phone as good as other modern messaging apps. As part of that effort, Google says it's "pausing" work on its most recent entry into the messaging space, Allo. It's the sort of "pause" that involves transferring almost the entire team off the project and putting all its resources into another app, Android Messages. Google won't build the iMessage clone that Android fans have clamored for, but it seems to have cajoled the carriers into doing it for them. In order to have some kind of victory in messaging, Google first had to admit defeat. Some of the new features associated with Chat include read receipts, typing indicators, full-resolution images and video, and group texts. It's important to keep in mind that it's a carrier-based service, not a Google service. It won't be end-to-end encrypted, and it will follow the same legal intercept standards. The new Chat services will be switched on in the near future, but ultimately carriers will dictate exactly when Chat will go live. Also, you may be persuaded to upgrade your data plan since Chat messages will be sent with your data plan instead of your SMS plan.

Comments

Nope ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't have a data plan, don't want a data plan.

Fuck you and your data plan, you better keep supporting SMS, because it's not going anywhere.

SMS will stick around

[Comboman]

Since SMS is baked into the cellphone signaling protocol (and is the last thing still working in an emergency when data and voice are overloaded), I suspect it will be sticking around for a while.

Why does it need to be carrier based?

[nine-times]

Maybe I'm missing the point, but why are we working on a carrier-based replacement for SMS at all? Building services into the fabric of cell carriers makes everything less transparent and portable, and opens opportunities for them to play hanky-panky with pricing and restrictions. In my view, carriers should accept a role as a dumb-pipe wireless Internet service, and services should be platform agnostic.

Could we just come up with a messaging standard that everyone can agree to? Get Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft all to agree on a set of protocols and standards. The same way that a Gmail user can email and Office 365 user, a user of Apple Messages should be able to message a Facebook user. Why is that so hard?

As far as I can tell, it's not. It's just that all these companies all want their own little walled gardens so that they can abuse their customers, or else are suffering from Not-Invented-Here syndrome.

Re:Why does it need to be carrier based?

[gehrehmee]

It's called XMPP. It's an open IETF standard, and it supports federation in exactly the way you're talking about -- multiple organizations can run their own infrastructure, and talk to each other, just like you can with email. It's extensible, and it *used* to be exactly how Google Talk works.

The key feature it's missing is the lock-in walled-garden features all the major players want.

Re:Why does it need to be carrier based?

[Anonymous Coward]

Could we just come up with a messaging standard that everyone can agree to?

Good (no-brainer!) idea.

Get Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft all to agree on a set of protocols and standards.

Whoa, stop. You suddenly jerked to 180 degrees away from the previous sentence. Those are the enemies of standards. Those companies are why you're not already using a standard. The only reason to invite them to the table, would be if you'd like them to sabotage progress.

Use a standard (XMPP). All the power is in users' hands. And then those companies can join the game, or they can be left out. But they need to be led; under no circumstances should you be asking any of them to lead, because they have reasons to prevent you from using a standard. They want you to use their app and look at the ads they were paid to show, and have your plaintext go through their marketing analytics. We've been through this before and it's part of the reason why people switched away from standards to proprietary IM where users are locked into using specific apps instead of having competing implementations using interoperable protocols.

You have to choose between getting what your want xor using those companies' products.

Re:Why does it need to be carrier based?

[TheRaven64]

The problem with XMPP is fragmentation. The core protocol is an IETF standard, but it's very minimal (messages, presence notifications, basically nothing else, including how clients authenticate with servers). Everything else is handled via XEPs and for every feature there are 3-4 XEPs describing incompatible ways of providing it. Google did a pretty good job with Jingle, which provided file transfer and a way of setting up streams to use for video / voice, but clients all implement different file transfer mechanisms. I don't think I found a single pair of Android XMPP clients that could exchange files, for example. There are multiple mechanisms for publishing avatars. The last time I looked, the most widely supported one was vcard-temp, which involves setting an base64-encoded image in an XML encoding of a vcard that you publish inside your presence stanzas. This XEP was deprecated as soon as it was published because it had a bunch of well-known problems and was intended as a temporary stop-gap. The replacement was built on top of PEP (personal eventing via PubSub) which was, in turn, built on top of PubSub. The PubSub XEP is fiendishly complicated to implement and PEP adds even more complexity, so it was years between the standard being published and any clients or servers properly supporting it.

This last point really highlights the problem with the XMPP standards process. The IETF requires two interoperable implementations for an RFC to advance. The XMPP Foundation happily publishes standards-track XEPs with zero implementations. They never produced a reference implementation of a client library. Some newer open IM standards have learned from this mistake. For example, Tox provides a client library that is used by multiple clients and serves as a reference implementation. Unfortunately, it's not GPLv3, so anyone wanting to implement a non-GPL Tox client must reimplement the protocol (it's still better than no reference implementation though, and providing an incentive to implement a second client library may be good for the protocol in the long term).

Color me surprised

[OneHundredAndTen]

Google dropping the ball on a project. Who would have thunk. Google has shown to be pretty good at two things. First, at launching products that are supposed to be kind of flagship, only to abandon them completely after a while. Two, at making sure that their product naming is as confusing as possible. The Google culture, indeed.

Re:Color me surprised

[Dragonslicer]

Microsoft Office has been the de facto standard for so long that nobody notices how bad the names are anymore. Word is the only one with an obvious connection between the name and the functionality. Outlook, Excel, and Powerpoint are all pretty meaningless names.

Re:Color me surprised

[TheRaven64]

These names are all pretty self explanatory. Outlook is a pun, as in 'look out, you're forced to work with Exchange!'. Excel is also pretty obvious. The ex- prefix means dead, and cells are the things that you find in spreadsheets: it's where data goes to die. Powerpoint refers to mains sockets, as in 'I would rather stick my fingers in a mains socket than watch another Powerpoint presentation'. Access is a credit card brand, and the name is intended to signify that you'll pay for putting your data in an Access database. Word is used in the singular to highlight the fact that it doesn't work so well with sentences or paragraphs.

Because using standards is so 2000 & late

[ArhcAngel]

XMPP (formerly known as Jabber) has been around since 1999 and has most if not all of these features. Any it is missing can be submitted and added as it's an open standard. Google has essentially embraced its role as the new Microsoft and has begun their EEE march. Chrome has become the new IE6 with all of the non-standard extensions they've rolled out without so much as submitting anything to W3C for consideration. I'm now looking for alternatives to all Google properties.

Re:Because using standards is so 2000 & late

[geek]

I've been 100% google free for a little over 2 years now. It's surprisingly easy to do.

Re:Because using standards is so 2000 & late

[jouassou]

This. I've recently gone through a phase where I've been trying to get monopolies and clouds out of my life myself. If you need any inspiration, this is what I've ended up with:

• * KolabNow as an email provider instead of GMail. They have a good privacy policy, are hosted in Switzerland which has fair privacy laws, and costs about $3/month.
• * Syncthing for making your own open-source "cloud storage" as a replacement for Dropbox and Google Drive. I've played around with a few alternatives, but this was my favourite; it's very straight-forward to set up, fully peer-to-peer so you don't need a centralized server if you don't want one, and it has clients for most operating systems. The Android app lets you set it to only sync when it's on WiFi and/or charging.
• * Maps is an alternative to Google Maps, which uses OpenStreetMaps, the "Wikipedia of navigation". It doesn't have the same knowledge of local shops and restaurants as Google Maps does, but it is "good enough" for most of my needs, and in contrast to other clients like OsmAnd, the interface is actually quite slick.
• * CopperheadOS for my phone. It's still partially in the Google ecosystem, by being an Android distribution that requires a Nexus or Pixel. But Android itself is still mostly open-source, and this comes with all Google apps and services stripped out. (Lineage works as well, but Copperhead is more focused on privacy and security.)
• * Yalp. Some apps are simply not available outside Google Store (e.g. online banking apps in my case); this helps you install such apps without having to install the full Google Services platform on your phone.
• * Firefox Focus/Klar. In contrast to the usual Firefox browser, this new app is actually useable on a phone; and last time I checked it had better privacy settings than the Chrome browsers you find on most androids.

Re:Because using standards is so 2000 & late

[omnichad]

If Google thought that XMPP was good enough, they would have used it. It was the basis for Google Talk and based their protocol for Google Wave on it. Phones don't have always-on connections despite our best wishes, so they would need something a little bit different.

Re:Because using standards is so 2000 & late

[Junta]

Strange to say email addresses should be considered antiquated and turn around and say that phone numbers shouldn't be.

email addresses continue to be a universally known thing and are popularly used.

The problem is that in practice, email is very permissive and as such you can email from your provider to a provider they've never heard of (with unfortunate security implications that have not been overcome). In XMPP, your chat server administrator has to explicitly do something to establish a relationship with every org that you might want to talk to. As a federated technology, it falls short.

Re:Because using standards is so 2000 & late

[sexconker]

You ever tried to coach someone weaned on modern tablet interfaces through the process of setting up an XMPP client and entering the arcane data you need to connect to a server? And then it doesnâ(TM)t work right and they didnâ(TM)t enter what you said exactly and you have to help them letter by letter?

And how do you get from your friendâ(TM)s tel number to find them on XMPP anyway? Or do a real name search? You canâ(TM)t.

XMPP is way too complex to catch on with the public and doesnâ(TM)t offer features like real name search that people want to find their friends and stuff.

Believe it or not the world is not solely the basement dwelling nerd set. People have lives and they donâ(TM)t want to spend all their time messing with arcane things.

Have you ever tried to tell an Apple user to use regular fucking apostrophes instead of the various curly abominations?

SMS is a useful "last resort"

[Chrisq]

SMS can be used when there is a very weak signal, and no data connectivity. It has been used by hikers, people in sinking ships, and all sorts. This is really the only reason to use it now, but it is important

Re:SMS is a useful "last resort"

[dryeo]

My main reason for using it is that it is free and just works. I don't want to pay extra on my pay as you go plan for data, which is even more expensive here in Canada then the States, and I don't need anything more then text.

Re:SMS is a useful "last resort"

[MMC Monster]

For me, the "always works" aspect is important. If you send a message and the receiver is a cell phone, they will get the message at some point.

That's much more important than getting it immediately or not at all (as is sometimes the case with Apple's iMessage). And Apple understands that. Which is why when iMessage fails, they give the opportunity to resend as SMS.

Re:Oh Greaaaaaat!

[Octorian]

I'd argue the most annoying feature of Apple's iMessage is convincing iPhone users that "texting" has all these features, so they'll freely use them when communicating with you... Thus forcing you to experience the pain of crappy MMS when talking with them.

The problem is timing...

[Junta]

Certain modern norms tha tbenefit the enduser are a result of happening at just the right time.

The network companies of the time could not keep up with the internet, and as such there were no players to prevent email from settling into the unassailable role it had gotten. It's possible that if AOL had played things a tad bit differently, we'd all be using AOL mail instead and email would be like XMPP, this idealistic concept that no one uses because it can't reach most people. None of the business folk at the time that had the resources was able to foresee a strategy to 'own' that. In this century however, federated standards have generally failed to succeed, as the stakeholders now have a handle on how to prevent that from happening again.

Same with drm-free music. When wired internet became feasible to transfer music, but maybe not quite stream it as well as music players that couldn't realistically connect to the internet, attempts at DRM failed so badly they had to give up on the concept. By the time video became feasible, so to had network connectivity evolved to the point where any video playback device could pretty much have some network access at all times, or maybe it was the move away from hardware device provided interface towards 'apps' to consume a video content providers product.

If you strike and get some fundamental truth about technology established, it's hard to get rid of, but the companies are *all* over messaging and won't stand for it.

Why there's no SMS 2.0?

[qaz123]

I don't understand why SMS is not updated. They create G3, G4, G5, VoLTE. Why SMS is still the same? They could at least make messages longer.

Re:Google Sure is good at

[Junta]

You jest, but on this front, Google has gone through so many trials and changed their minds to try a new approach, either because it failed to catch on or they didn't do it in a way that enables enough profit.

People use Android, Maps, Google search, and email. They use youtube, but google paid for that, unable to organically come up with something. Google Plus, Wave, Allo, and tons of other things have not achieved success, areas that Google desperately wants to be a part of.