5 ms·

Yes, but also why should they? It’s not really in their interest to do so. The only reason they’re doing anything is because of regulatory pressure.

alt227 2y ago
> but also why should they? Because allowing communication with open standards allows more freedom for your customers?
- MBCook 2y ago
  Normal people don’t care about open standards. They only care about outcomes. I know people who have wondered why texting to/from Android phones “doesn’t work” since pictures/video look terrible. This is a problem for their customers. It wouldn’t surprise me if they would’ve done this without regulatory pressure, just perhaps not as soon.
sunshowers 2y ago
If you care about your customers, you care about them having a good experience when communicating with your non-customers.
- kredd 2y ago
  Outside of small bubbles, it’s hard to believe that anyone really cares, since it’s a resolved problem in most of the world. Without exaggeration, every person I’ve met from Europe, LATAM, East/West/South Asia, Africa, and Australia has by default asked me, “Do you use WhatsApp (or its local equivalent)?” when we decided to keep in touch. I agree it has some monopolistic tendencies in the US and Canada and signals “iPhone is better!” when someone is what they call “a green bubble.” However, in the end, every group chat just gets created in an OS-agnostic app if one of the users has an Android. So, from my perspective, it’s a wasteful allocation of resources if you’re trying to “make it a good experience for the customers to communicate with non-customers” since it doesn’t really get “much better” than what we have now.
  - MBCook 2y ago
    Have you seen the quality of video that comes through MMS? I promise you people who have Android friends/family will enjoy this update.
    - kredd 2y ago
      As a person who has friends with Androids, I have no idea about the video quality through MMS. We just use WhatsApp, and although it affects the quality, it’s generally good enough. My point isn’t that this upgrade isn’t useful. I meant, why would a private company allocate resources to fix a problem that barely affects their users?
      - MBCook 2y ago
        > why would a private company allocate resources to fix a problem that barely affects their users It doesn’t barely affect users. That’s the point. In the US 50% of people use android. In the rest of the world that numbers a lot higher. Anything that goes over MMS sucks. Having a single android person in a group chat means falling back to SMS/MMS and everything sucks. RCS is a huge quality of life improvement when texting non-iPhones for people who do that on a regular basis.
        kredd 2y ago
        Again, this argument ignores the existence of OS-agnostic apps like WhatsApp. Who uses MMS? I might be extremely wrong, as I couldn’t find numbers online. But just from personal experience as well, outside of US, WhatsApp and its alternatives are defacto standard over SMS/MMS. Significant chunk of countries offer free data for WhatsApp/Messenger usage, and SMS/MMS is still paid per text. People are not going to switch to using SMS just because iPhone added RCS either.
  - sunshowers 2y ago
    "every group chat just gets created in an OS-agnostic app if one of the users has an Android" This is probably true for you and me (actually everyone I know regardless of platform uses Signal) but not for many people it seems.

alt227 2y ago

> but also why should they? Because allowing communication with open standards allows more freedom for your customers?

MBCook 2y ago
Normal people don’t care about open standards. They only care about outcomes. I know people who have wondered why texting to/from Android phones “doesn’t work” since pictures/video look terrible. This is a problem for their customers. It wouldn’t surprise me if they would’ve done this without regulatory pressure, just perhaps not as soon.

sunshowers 2y ago

If you care about your customers, you care about them having a good experience when communicating with your non-customers.

kredd 2y ago
Outside of small bubbles, it’s hard to believe that anyone really cares, since it’s a resolved problem in most of the world. Without exaggeration, every person I’ve met from Europe, LATAM, East/West/South Asia, Africa, and Australia has by default asked me, “Do you use WhatsApp (or its local equivalent)?” when we decided to keep in touch. I agree it has some monopolistic tendencies in the US and Canada and signals “iPhone is better!” when someone is what they call “a green bubble.” However, in the end, every group chat just gets created in an OS-agnostic app if one of the users has an Android. So, from my perspective, it’s a wasteful allocation of resources if you’re trying to “make it a good experience for the customers to communicate with non-customers” since it doesn’t really get “much better” than what we have now.
- MBCook 2y ago
  Have you seen the quality of video that comes through MMS? I promise you people who have Android friends/family will enjoy this update.
  - kredd 2y ago
    As a person who has friends with Androids, I have no idea about the video quality through MMS. We just use WhatsApp, and although it affects the quality, it’s generally good enough. My point isn’t that this upgrade isn’t useful. I meant, why would a private company allocate resources to fix a problem that barely affects their users?
    - MBCook 2y ago
      > why would a private company allocate resources to fix a problem that barely affects their users It doesn’t barely affect users. That’s the point. In the US 50% of people use android. In the rest of the world that numbers a lot higher. Anything that goes over MMS sucks. Having a single android person in a group chat means falling back to SMS/MMS and everything sucks. RCS is a huge quality of life improvement when texting non-iPhones for people who do that on a regular basis.
      - kredd 2y ago
        Again, this argument ignores the existence of OS-agnostic apps like WhatsApp. Who uses MMS? I might be extremely wrong, as I couldn’t find numbers online. But just from personal experience as well, outside of US, WhatsApp and its alternatives are defacto standard over SMS/MMS. Significant chunk of countries offer free data for WhatsApp/Messenger usage, and SMS/MMS is still paid per text. People are not going to switch to using SMS just because iPhone added RCS either.
- sunshowers 2y ago
  "every group chat just gets created in an OS-agnostic app if one of the users has an Android" This is probably true for you and me (actually everyone I know regardless of platform uses Signal) but not for many people it seems.