It’s all about the bubbles.

Samsung has released a new video in support of Google’s #GetTheMessage campaign which calls for Apple to adopt RCS or “Rich Communication Services,” the cross-platform protocol pitched as a successor to SMS that adopts many of the features found in modern messaging apps… like Apple’s own iMessage.

  • float@feddit.deEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    The Tesla comparison would work better this way: while you’re driving to another Tesla owner’s place, you’re having a smooth ride, no bumps, car works as expected. Then you put your other friends address into into the navigation and the radio switches to noisy FM and one of the headlights starts to flicker. It’s lock-out because no non-iphone user can join that club. It’s not lock-in, because every iphone user could easily switch to one of the “cross-platform” messangers. Not that I like Google. They’re both sh*t. But just opening up your infrastructure for others doesn’t mean you have to develop and maintain apps for other OSes.

    • whofearsthenight@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      SMS works the same as it ever has. Apple hasn’t broken anything, they’re not polluting SMS, it’s always been shit. The Tesla (probably touching a little more on real life) shipped with shitty QA that gave you a crap light and bad stereo. If you take Apple completely out of the equation and just process standard SMS between two Android phones, it’s still going to be garbage. If you add an iPhone, nothing changes. When you add iMessage into the mix, it’s still not breaking anything, only adding a shim on top of SMS, which admittedly sucks, but I think users would rather see “float liked your message” rather than no acknowledgement. This is also what’s happening on Android (and also iOS) a lot of the time.

      But just opening up your infrastructure

      “Just” is doing a frick-ton of work in that sentence. At a minimum, they would have had to build and maintain data centers, or at the very least add a lot of capacity to existing centers to support potentially quite likely a few hundred million to a billion Android users. Now you have to design and document APIs for other people’s use. This alone is why I said just build the app themselves, believe it or not it’s probably easier/less headache in the long term. And then there is supporting the API, the users on non-Apple platforms…

      And why do they want to do that? We’re talking about many millions in expenditure per year for Apple for which they get nothing except less competitive advantage.