For P2P communication. SMS is alive and well for B2C messaging, most importantly for 2FA OTP delivery, but also as a first line of defense against spam/bot account creation.
It's not a good solution to either problem, but it's slightly better than nothing (which apparently makes it good enough for many), so I suspect we're stuck with it for now.
> That'd be all well and good... the technology would die naturally, but all my American relatives continue to stubbornly use iMessage.
iMessage is not SMS, though. It just uses phone numbers as identifiers, but so do many other popular over-the-top messengers, including the most popular one globally.
I've got an Android phone so all iMessage transmissions come across as SMS (or MMS).
The iOS application is called "Messages"; iMessage is the over-the-top Apple-exclusive messaging service.
1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-...
Absolutely they are. Most of my friends and family are Pixel users and we all communicate using RCS. If Apple would just support the modern replacement for SMS (which includes end to end encryption), iPhone users would be much safer and would have a better experience.
Bullies will bully. Targeting the articles of bullying versus the source is fruitless; the former is unlimited.
RCS is an open standard that any carrier/OS/messaging app can support, unlike iMessage, which is exclusive to iPhones.
It apparently just doesn't work with dual-SIM phones, requires a phone number and an active plan with a supported operator (at least iMessage lets me use an email address!), the multi-device story is non-existent, to just name a few.
Using my phone number as an identifier and authentication factor for so many things these days is bad enough; I really don't want the messaging layer itself to touch my phone provider at all.
My preference would be that Apple drop SMS support from Messages all-together and market it as an iOS only communication method. People with iPhones would then have to pick some alternative, perhaps they would use Signal or perhaps something else.
I already have to install a handful of applications to talk to all of my friends and co-workers, at least I wouldn't have to continue to use SMS.
Dramatic exaggeration and attribution of evil intent is counterproductive and disingenuous.
My carrier charges an arm and a leg for international texting, and if distinguishing between texts and iMessages wasn't as easy as it is, I would probably have to pay hundreds in carrier bills at least once.
Should we also force luxury brands to offer stipends so that teenagers whose parents can't afford them (or simply don't want to participate in that nonsense) don't feel stigmatized?
It would be a completely different story if Apple were to ban third-party messaging apps on their platform, but as restrictive as they are in other areas, they aren't doing that.
It literally only takes a free app download to get a cross-platform messaging experience at least on par with iMessage (and in my personal view superior in many regards).
In Brazil, businesses use Whatsapp to communicate with consumers. You order pizza and book doctor appointments over whatsapp
It reminds me of the "Blue eyes/Brown eyes" exercise (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott) so let's say this was a real psychology experiment. Middle-schoolers and high-schoolers are encouraged to communicate via a chat application with rich multimedia functionality. But any conversation that includes even a single individual who belongs to an arbitrarily-defined "out-group" has its functionality degraded and the application highlights who the out-group member(s) are. After a year you compare the mental, social, physical, and academic well-being of both groups. Would your university's IRB approve such an experiment?
I initially gave Apple the benefit of the doubt that this was simply a technical limitation. And of course kids will always bully each other about something. But at this point it does indeed seem like a billion-dollar company is intentionally amplifying and leveraging this sort of bullying to drive marketshare. If you don't find this immoral then I'm not sure what to say.
IMHO, RCS isn't a solution to anything since it still requires phone carriers to adopt it. A quick check of the internet indicates that many of these phone carriers are actually charging more to send RCS messages than SMS, making it a non-starter all around.
Maybe Google could create an iMessage-like (internet only) alternative for Android... Although it still wouldn't work with the actual Apple iMessage protocol unless Apple adopted it. IMHO they'd have better luck getting companies like Apple to interoperate if it was pre-installed and worked on all Android phones.
And I would argue that the language used implies Google created RCS themselves (it was their idea): "RCS is Google's idea of a solution"
It's the Microsoft 90's playbook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...