What is up with Android Messages and RCS?
by Volker Weber
Android Messages makes it easy to communicate with anyone by using SMS, MMS, and more.
Google's handling of messaging rivals only its social network fumblings. There is Hangouts, and Allo, and Duo, and now Android Messages, formerly Messenger. Why all the fuzz? It's because Google is failing time and again.
Android doesn't have something like Apple's iMessage. They don't really have something like Facetime. So they created Allo and Duo. Both are tied to your phone number, copying a successful push by the likes of WhatsApp. And since Google+ bombed, they could not make Hangouts to fly, so that is moving in the direction of enterprise, where it meets the big boys like Cisco. Do you know anybody who uses Allo or Duo? See?
And now RCS? Puleeeeze. That is the follow-up to texting, designed by carriers. They want you to pay for messages, just like you did for texts. I am sure you were just waiting to do that.
Comments
Puleeeeze? How Faaancy... ;)
People are definitely going to switch from WhatsApp/Signal/whateverotherchatapp to RCS, because they love their carriers so much :-)
I still don't get why Apple didn't do more with iMessage: it's 2017 and messages (like faces in Photos) are not synced between devices, because of 'privacy'. On the other hand, there's iCloud keychain where syncing is no problem.
iMessage ist stuck as 70-80% of users (at least outside us and uk) have android now.
What I like about iMessage is it can fall back to SMS and it doesn't require a phone number.
Christian, Apple does not really care. You can message everybody with iMessage. As Torsten says, it falls back to SMS where needed.
Volker, why would one want to bother with iMessage and its SMS fallback when everybody (in my adress book) uses WhatsApp and/or Signal and one can even setup iOS to use WhatsApp as a 'default' for messaging and calls?
Ralph, I can use it without configuring/clicking/caring.
Markus, you're right. It's the best point i seem to miss about iMessage: its simplicity.
