IcyButters

IcyButters t1_it2ywe6 wrote

Whenever this topic comes up in the tech media or in tech subs, people act as if the interaction between iMessage and SMS is some kind of massive, ongoing problem for everyone who has to communicate with both iOS and Android users. And it's just not. It works 100% perfectly fine for me with the exception of group chats, which aren't nearly as problematic as people claim, and which aren't relevant to me anyway because all my group chats are in other apps (mainly Signal). I don't think I'm unique in this regard, either.

If Google wants iPhone users to clamor for Apple to add RCS support, then Google first needs to come up with an absolutely perfect RCS deployment, and they're nowhere near that stage yet. Then they need to express to iPhone users what value add RCS provides, and they have not done that yet. Because again, this is not actually a day-to-day problem for the vast majority of users.

And RCS alone does nothing for me. Being able to have to an iMessage-like experience with Android users would be neat, I guess? But that's barely something I'd use, and I'm still going to prefer Signal anyway. What I would be really excited about is a truly standardized industry-wide messaging platform that meant you could use any client you want and securely interact with anyone else on any client of their choice, but that's not even remotely what RCS is at this stage, so I just don't strongly care about it. It's very much in the "nice to have" category.

Also, these assumptions always rely on one side pretending that people on the other side chose their phone for any reason other than that they genuinely like it. Fanboys are always claiming that iPhone users deal with constant issues that they ignore because they think they look cooler or whatever using an iPhone. And it's just not even remotely true.

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