Comment by Aissen
3 years ago
This was posted in the Signal discourse on the same day of the announcement (and linked deep in 630+ comments of the HN post), and I'm glad it's reposted here because it paints a very different picture than the previous blog post.
The hidden gem is that basically Google is taking over control of RCS, and by proxy "text messages". There will only be one Android implementation, and it's Android Messages. It (finally) comes with E2EE messages with something resembling the Signal protocol, but you lose the possibility of writing a custom UX for that, as was possible since Android 1.0. It's particularly ironic during Google's campaign pushing Apple to support RCS.
I haven't looked into the RCS protocol myself but what is preventing others from building their own RCS clients? As I understand the protocol, it's IP based rather than modem based, so external apps should work, right?
As far as I understand it right now its a lack of exposed APIs in Android to access the message stores. I suspect this is something that will be standardized and exposed in a future API revision, but as it stands right now using the official APIs I don't think you're able to make your own...
hmm so how is Google to get Apple's iPhones to support RCS if Google hasnt completely opened their API?