why?

If you are willing and able to enter a partnership like Samsung, you can do it fully (including encryption support etc).

Samsung can interoperate. We cannot. We cannot enter into partnerships with Google. We are people, Samsung is a massive corporation. You understand the difference, right? Google will not let us access their servers. They’re not making it difficult, they’re not making it possible at all.

you don’t just need to support the protocol, you need a server to communicate with your client, and Google is not here to federate its RCS service with Bob’s summer Github project.

Matrix is the federated messaging network. It’s also end to end encrypted, although people have pointed out issues with server security and with metadata—which is why they’re working on peer to peer tech.

RCS is not similar to any federated technology at all. It’s operated exclusively by Google in the US and most other countries. The technology was created, from the ground up, for carriers. But even carriers couldn’t actually make it work in practice, so they asked Google to take over. It’s a fucking albatross. We, as a society, need to drop it.

Google is the exclusive RCS provider for all carriers in the US and many other countries. The desire for an AOSP android API is for developers to be able to write clients the way they do SMS clients, not to replace Google’s servers—that’s a pipe dream. IIRC, Google actually helped Samsung develop RCS support in their app. I’m not sure why it’s so difficult to implement.

There is an RCS test app, we could theoretically modify that, but I guess nobody has for some reason. I don’t particularly want people to use it, Matrix makes so much more sense.

It’s kind of open. It’s pretty much open for carriers to implement on the server side, and for OEMs to develop on the client side. There is an open source client in AOSP’s RCS Test App, but for one reason or another, as far as I know nobody’s attempted to implement it in an actual usable client app. I don’t believe there’s a server reference implementation. And, in the US, all the carriers’ RCS services are run exclusively by Google, so there’s no real point in attempting to set up your own server. Apple might be able to navigate the politics with carriers and with Google to make something work, if it wants to, but it’s really not a standard for us to play with.

Use Matrix Instead.

I disabled the Google App back when “Google Now” was still a thing. Remember when it would give you directions to get where you were going after you were already on your way? I’d be on the train, it’d tell me “oh, you wanna go somewhere? Get off the train, take a cab to the nearest train station, get on the train…”

They removed everything but sports score tracking, I kept using it for a while, and then I realized that I could just fucking use my browser for search, since that’s where I wanted to read search results anyway. And that’s what I did.

They’re going to keep doing this again and again, making their app worse and worse.

No idea why I would ever want the Google app back.

they will back a super narrow conception of “right to repair” that only hurts their competitors, but doesn’t inconvenience Google at all.

I found, ages ago, that I never used the google app for something I couldn’t do in my browser. Like, this was back in the days just after Google Now died—all the features that almost worked just got scrapped because they really didn’t work. It allowed me to keep up with one college sports team, but other than that, opening the app was just a slower version of opening up my firefox and searching there.

So that’s what I do now. I disabled the Google app, and I don’t miss it at all.

I disabled the google app years ago. I use my browser for search, and then when I get the results, the results actually show in my browser, and I don’t have to switch apps or anything to get to my browser.

Plus, I don’t have to look at the vestiges of all the features the app used to have, which now just feel like they’ve left the UI cluttered and pointless.

Plus, every time I open the app, I feel like I’m being spied on, because I am.

Plus, Google Assistant sucks ass. The voice commands are super unreliable, and as for search, I don’t want AI to guess what I’m trying to search for, deterministic imperative searches are actually better.

it’s still going to be a distraction, especially if it’s the rare type of meeting you actually need to listen to or engage with.

oh fuuuuckkk

well, I’m on f-droid, so I guess my only issue is that I’m going to stop getting updates… but I’ll need a new gallery eventually, what are people switching to?

Edit: it seems fossify is forking smt:

https://github.com/FossifyOrg

Koler was very pretty, but there’s no way to get back into a call once you switch out of it. This is really bad, partly because it makes it impossible to hang up without restarting your phone. Huge, glaring bug they never fixed.

I’m absolutely with you on Contacts.

I hate Google Photos for a number of reasons, I think my current app is just simple gallery.

Android has an easy remote backup system built in. You can save a file to any location, including cloud locations, as long as the cloud service provider plugs into the API. Signal actively disables this feature because they would rather spite users than risk even the shadow of a chance that a user upload an encrytped backup to an internet service that could theoretically then be hacked and hypothetically maybe one day decrypted.

Matrix doesn’t have this issue, it just stores encrypted messages on servers.

in other words: the default messaging protocol is imessage, unless that’s impossible, in which case it falls back to sms.

Apple’s biggest crimes here are creating a proprietary platform with an exclusive protocol and making it the default messaging protocol on their devices. None of this is really new, though. All that shit is common. We need Signal or Matrix to improve in user-friendliness and even do some marketing to the point where they become viable solutions.

So… Updates to Google messages, updates to WearOS, an update to AndroidTV, a few updates to Google proprietary apps, and one or two updates to the actual Android operating system.

there’s an “RCS Test App” in AOSP that nobody has managed to transform into a practical piece of software…

I agree that opening up an RCS API would be great but I don’t think that’s what the original comment was getting at

I think the original comment was implying that nobody, anywhere, would be using a locked-down Google-controlled messaging client in 2023 if it wasn’t preinstalled on their phones as the main messaging app. This little reaction gimmick doesn’t mean anything towards the end of freeing people from backwards-ass proprietary messaging services that don’t respect our damn privacy or freedom, it’s just another monopoloid trap.