All good counter-arguments, but it’s coming regardless. The dominos are falling.
Sorry to disappoint anyone who is in Camp Never-Happen.
Isn’t RCS cross platform iOS to android and reverse?
Meaning those who do rely on sms style messaging can have a WhatsApp/imessage style experience to whoever they send sms to? Data provided.
I may be confused with something else though.
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Yes, that’s pretty much the entire point.
For those of us on one of the platforms who have friends who use the other platform it would be nice if the stock messaging system, then one that you could 100% rely on everyone having, would actually support rich content and functionality.
WhatsApp’s great, until you get someone who doesn’t want anything to do with Meta. Most of the others are so niche that in any random group of more than 2 people, at least one of them won’t have Telegraph / Signal / <insert app here>, so you either have the uphill struggle to convince them to install it, or you fall back to SMS, which … yeah, we all know just how great that is.
If Apple hadn’t kept the iMessage protocol locked down and proprietary, it would be the defacto standard by now, and RCS would never have had a chance, but that’s not the way Apple works, so here we are, with a new standard that everyone else can adopt, and, frankly, if Apple don’t join in, then in a few years their users might be the ones being told “oh, doesn’t your phone support that?”
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Coincidentally I just read a post on Reddit asking why everyone in the UK used WhatsApp/iMessage here because everyone in the US uses text.
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I’m assuming that “text” includes iMessage, though, because people I know in the US use it all the time.
In the UK, I still get people asking me why some of their texts are green and others blue.
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Maybe.
The post title is “do you use text or another third party app like WhatsApp?”
It only struck me as a bit of a coincidence that I read a post saying everyone texts then one that said no one texts.
The real answer is some do, some don’t, depending on their mobile (cell) plan. As I understand it (could be wrong) data is relatively expensive in the US.
In the US, iPhones are significantly more common than non-iPhones, so most people are on iMessage, and don’t actually realise that it’s Apple-only, and doesn’t work with Android. That’s what causes the mild confusion with why some people are blue and some are green, and why in the US, people are often puzzled why anyone would bother with WhatsApp when texting (iMessage) does it all.
Everywhere else in the world, Android phones are in the majority, so people default to WhatsApp (or similar), since it actually offers a featureset worth using, unlike literal SMS messaging. It also has the huge advantage that it’s cross-platform, so once you convince an Apple user to switch to it, they can then use it to talk to anyone.
Once RCS becomes common as the default messaging platform for Android, there will be far less incentive for Android users to install WhatsApp, since their messaging app will offer all the features they need, just like Apple users currently have with iMessage.
At that point, things will get interesting…
But since Apple won’t allow anyone else to access iMessage, and Google are actively encouraging everyone else to adopt RCS, unless one of the companies changes their tactics there can untimately only be one outcome.
According to statcounter, iOS mobile usage share isn’t much higher in the US than it is in the UK, and its actually lower than in some Scandinavian countries. Suggests to me something else is a significant factor in the relative reluctance of many US iPhone users to consider 3rd party messaging apps.
Statcounter iOS mobile usage share for Sept 2023: USA 56%, UK 51%, Denmark 65%, Norway 63%, Sweden 54%.
Probably not, but they sort of don’t need to. I believe that there are already 3rd party apps for iOS that implement it, so Apple users with friends on Android can just use that, and grumble that they need to use two different messaging apps… until their friends also start to use the 3rd party one and switch away from iMessage 
Do you have a 3rd party messaging app on your phone?
- Yes
- No
0
voters
Edit: hate discourse polls…
Actually, I have 5+1
8x8 work - phone/IM
Teams - IM/Video meets
Whatsapp - IM
Signal - IM for certain peeps
Meet - IM/Video meets
Then Messages, which is the default messaging app but one that isn’t baked in.
Wait you don’t have Allo any more? Or hangouts? 
I never liked Hangouts - it seemed clunky. So no loss there. Loved Allo though - that was ahead of its time in terms of UX. So was Duo for video stuff. Sad losses, but still nothing on the scale of rage I have for the loss of Inbox. Why the 
did they kill Inbox? One of life’s great mysteries. Feedly easily replaced the loss of Reader, but nothing - not even Shortwave - can do what Inbox did so well.
Anyway enough of https://killedbygoogle.com/ talk - back to Mobile Networks.
RCS is a solution for a North American problem. For a whole range of reasons, SMS is not where it is at in the UK and the blue/green bubble problem is not on the radar.
I’ve had RCS on Vodafone for maybe two years and it’s irrelevant to me because all I do is get one-time codes.
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Absolutely I would.
But it won’t happen. Which is why the carriers are adopting RCS as an alternative.
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+1 I loved Inbox, never found a true replacement
Killbygoogle is pretty relevant given google is running the RCS servers for so many and the messages app is closed source so google, they have done it so so so so so so so many times before.
The whole google privacy terms is also potentially poor from a privacy point, especially for apple, it should have its own policy.
With messages being closed source, if rcs took off, I honestly wouldnt be surprised if google started adding things that only worked with android and were closed off from others, they havent exactly been good with chrome after taking the lions share of the browsing market.
RCS should be open source with the apps also open sourced but instead its a supposedly open protocol with googles fingerprints all over it all to solve and issue that its 10 years too late to the party with.
Thats the thing, I dont honesty think there are a lot of people looking for a carrier alternative (esp with the mms huge charge fallback if data doesnt work)
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Lyca confirm data was ‘accessed’
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Lyca the dumpster fire that keeps on giving
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Been using hotspot, even out in the sea and the 4 of us able to video, stream, upload images, zero issues using lebara manually connected to Vodafone GR (to avoid connecting to Turkey).
Sadly no orcas though or dolphins.
Stunning little islands though.
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Am I reading this correctly?
As a Volt customer I can basically use all my data in the inclusive zone (250gb) not capped at the 25gb roaming allowance a standard customer is?
I’ve been annoyingly frivolous if so 
Edit:
Got it, I’m good to use as much as I can within my plan, as long as it’s not classed as abusing.