Absolutely agree. Carriers have no rightful place in the discussion, they’re dumb data pipes and shouldn’t be able to nickel and dime customers on messaging quotas and features, as RCS is designed to allow.
Not so sure about that. We still call these devices "phones", with the expectation that any phone in the world can call any phone number in the world. With no other information than a phone number, you need to involve the carriers to deliver a message texted to an arbitrary phone number. That is why Apple need to fallback to SMS. They have no other means to deliver the message.
If Apple and Google teams up without carriers, they still don't have access to the full, true phone number database that carriers maintain.
Why, exactly, would Apple and Google not be able to fallback to SMS? Without involving carriers at all?
It's not like there's any real benefit to having the carriers in that conversation, you can already text from either device just fine. That would continue into the future.
SMS is not transferred over the internet. It is transferred over a telecoms network. Only the carriers can deliver a SMS message. I guess it is possible to deliver a message over the internet to a SMS gateway somewhere, but as SMS is telecoms technology, only internet is not enough.
First of all, SMS is based on a common protocol used across carriers. Each carrier does not need to individually support each model of device, and vice versa-- as long as both the phone and the carrier support the decades-old standard, your messages will get routed to a SMSC and from there to the recipient. The carriers are not involved in this process at all aside from setting up the industry standard protocols involved. It's also all or nothing, there's no identifying characteristic on a message saying "this was sent by that iPhone we don't want to support anymore".
Do we really need a single standard? I and many others use multiple messaging services and it’s fine. Each has their pros and cons. I can also contact people in multiple ways if one service fails.
I hate using multiple messaging services. I hate the annoying point in time when conversations with someone move beyond the needs of SMS/MMS, and we have to do the annoying dance to figure out which messaging apps we have in common. And god forbid it's a new group chat, then we have to figure out which messaging app several people have in common.
With an open, single, federated messaging standard that's integrated into the stock messaging app of every Android and Google phone, all of that just goes away. If people really want to use another app because it gives them some useful benefit, they can still choose to do so. But I want the default, universal messaging standard to be something that lets me send photos and videos without quality loss to the point that videos are unwatchable.
I would't even mind not having a _single_ standard, as long as all the standards were _open_ standards.
If I could use an Android iMessage client when I have to talk to iPhone users, that would be fine. Or we could even see the rebirth of multiplatform messengers like Pidgin, Gajim and Trillian.
The issue is that right now there is no way to have a modern text conversation with iPhone users (high quality media, reactions etc.) if they don't want to leave iMessage. (Most of them don't.)
