AAA 444: Conspiracy Ears

Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…

What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!

The issue with the CCMI is it’s unclear if their claimed support for the Universal Profile will actually pan out. And we’ll not likely see end to end encryption. So I’ll echo Ron’s “just get on WhatsApp/Signal/Telegram”… except… which one, heh.

And yes, I forced RCS, but if you thought getting people to switch messaging apps was difficult… heh (sadly, I found out my friends on VZ have a 3a and S10… both not supported by Verizon’s RCS, lol)

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There will be no e2e encryption, end of story. Steve Gibson made a good point on SN today that Apple will have no choice but to get on board with it. The carriers intend for this to REPLACE SMS. Unless Apple is will to say “we don’t support the current form of SMS aka RCS” then they will have to get on board at some point. I suppose they COULD resist, but I doubt they will in the end.

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No way will they resist. SMS/RCS is too important in the US. Maybe not overseas (I personally haven’t used SMS is years) but in the US everyone does.

They’ll have to implement it.

As an aside: I do not trust the carriers to implement RCS correctly. If they create their own app it’ll either be inundated with ads/be bloatware or they will take all your data. Or both.

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I have to say in hearing Ron’s joke about the Rand McNally road atlas then talking about the TCL folding phone. Put Waze on the TCL phone then you could have a “Waze McNally” road atlas.

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Re: encryption, I may have been unrealistically hopeful of Google’s words, heh.

But yeah, I had the same thoughts on Apple. However, that requires the world to switch. Until they do, SMS will live on and be the fallback. So we need dumb phones that support RCS to be cheap and ubiquitous enough. This will take decades :slightly_frowning_face:

On the show they brought up the small low res videos that you get from imessage to android. Why is it that only videos from iphone users are so crappy. if i send or receive a video to my wife (both on pixel’s, verizon, sms/mms) the video is actually pretty decent! is this something apple does to the green bubbles or is there something else I’m missing?

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That’s a really great question. It FEELS punitive, but I’m not sure it is intentionally. But it never gets fixed, so there’s that.

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Most of the people I know send pics/video over WhatsApp regardless of whether they have an iPhone or an Android. Maybe iPhones aren’t as popular here in the UK, so it has become the ‘done thing’? A lot of people have dumped SMS and iMessage (as a way of texting) in favour of WhatsApp as well.

I would argue for Signal. It seems to do a great job with pics and videos for me. The only downside is that it seems to be one device per phone number, so you’re not going to have it syncing on multiple devices, such as how Hangouts (formerly Google Talk) does (or is it did already, considering it’s supposedly already been issued a death sentence.)

Same problem with WhatsApp. Why they don’t have a tablet app, that could still be tied to your phone number is one of the greatest mysteries in tech.

Not used Signal. The problem is that most people won’t have it on their phone, or have even heard of it. Nearly everyone I know has WhatsApp.

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While understandable, please know that Whatsapp is [mis]using the Signal protocol… with the difference that Facebook gets your data too.

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I have a problem!!! I used the trick to activate RCS forgetting that I already have it. So it is now broken any idea how to fix it? Just so you know I’m Canadian so the fix may be slightly different.

which texting app are you using? If you’re both using the verizon one, doesn’t it have RCS-like features (within network)? If you have Pixel 3/3XL (not 3a) and using Google Messages, you’re likely using RCS as those are the Chat supported phones.

But it’s not dead, they confirmed they are moving to Hangouts Chat (the enterprise one) for consumers as well (granted, they confirmed this really late…). However, I use Chat. It’s ok. It’s clearly enterprise-y focused, though. And who knows how the transition will go… and still isn’t really an upgrade from a personal standpoint

It did not work for me. I am not on a US carrier either. It basically cleared my carriers settings out and once I finished the steps I had no service at all lol.

I just removed the Activity Launcher (or you could just put the settings back to normal) and changed my data settings back to original.

That is the key. We can argue about encryption and other features, but at the end of the day, people will use what their contacts use. What’s nice about iMessage is that if you’re messaging another iPhone user, you don’t have to worry about whether they’ve downloaded the correct app.

WhatsApp also does this well - everyone gets the same experience regardless of phone, carrier, or operating system. RCS will likely fail imo. Good luck convincing anyone already on WhatsApp or iMessage to switch.

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But they won’t have to? Isn’t the idea Apple and Google add RCS support to their existing messaging apps. I’ve already got it in Android Messages, and the networks here have turned it on, so if Apple adds RCS support to iMessages (in the same way they support SMS at the moment) then bingo. All my friends and family can chat irrespective of what phone they have without the worry we’re leaking data to Facebook. The only people left behind are non-smartphone people, assume SMS will live on to support them.


What you described is the way it should be done, but RCS requires carriers to implement it. We’re already seeing different carriers implement it differently. If you’re messaging someone, you have to worry about whether their carrier has implemented RCS. That isn’t the case with WhatsApp. Signal, Line, etc.

Agreed. It’s supposed to be fully rolled out here (UK). Bit confused if this is Google rolling it out over their infrastructure, or the UK mobile carriers, or both?? But without Apple onboard it’s yet another messaging service that only a subset of my contacts use. Plus folks may be put off by the lack of encryption, which is probably of little benefit in the case of WhatsApp.