This is the best summary I could come up with:
Google has been waging a “get the message” campaign against Apple for the past year or two, imploring the company to adopt RCS.
Last year, Apple CEO Tim Cook was asked on stage if the company would make messaging with Android better, and he responded, “I don’t hear our users asking that we put a lot of energy in on that at this point” and told the audience member to “just buy your mom an iPhone” if he wanted easier communication with his mother.
The Wall Street Journal ran an article last year subtitled “Teens Dread the Green Text Bubble,” detailing the bullying that Android users were subject to due to SMS fallback dragging down the capabilities of iMessage group chats (87 percent of US teenagers have iPhones).
On the Android side of things, companies have been desperate to work better with iMessage, with Google hacking together an emoji response solution for Google Messages and Android manufacturer Nothing planning a wild “hack into iMessage” plan by running messages through Mac computers hosted in a data center.
Google has a few extensions on top of RCS that add important features like encryption, but that’s not part of the GSMA standard.
Apple’s statement carefully announcing support for “the standard as currently published by the GSM Association” seems specifically crafted to exclude all the fancy Google extras.
The original article contains 550 words, the summary contains 224 words. Saved 59%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Since when do companies like apple, give two flying shit what their users want. Apple is notorious for telling its customers what they deserve.
What does Google get out of all that RCS traffic flowing through their servers? That’s what I’d like to know.
They make Google Messages, which does RCS. Google Messages has full access to the unencrypted message content. (No evidence they are exploiting this access, but its a possibility).
Even just knowing that someone is sending messages means they are active on their phone, so probably an opportunity to more aggressively send ads?
And they can build a network graph for all the people you communicate with, and use their purchasing habits to target you.
Lots of opportunities for ad targetting fuckery. (And more malicious fuckery if they felt they could make money doing it)
If it can be scanned for keywords, it will be. Google scans everything.
If its properly E2E encrypted, as they claim their RCS implementation is, then hopefully no opportunity for keyword scanning. But my point was that even without direct keyword scanning, there is a lot of information that could be exploited.
fucking finally
I’d you don’t communicate via an encrypted app like WhatsApp, I don’t communicate with you. Easy.
I have all calls blocked that don’t come through my apps. All SMS and MMS blocked on my driver phone. They all get sent to a burner for the stupidly archaic US version of 2FA and then forwarded to me automatically via whatsapp.
This is great news for 2012. This is irrelevant in 2023.
