Google has failed totally and completely to make a SMS fallback messaging app that could rival iMessage. It’s easily my biggest gripe with Android. Without Facebook messenger it was like pulling teeth to get my family to download one messaging app so we could all keep in touch. I hate it!
Check out this article, looks like the major US Carriers are banding together to make a potentially terrible default messaging app for Android phones. I don’t even want to imagine how bad this is going to be. I can nearly guarantee it will steal your data or inundate you with ads or more likely both.
I’m not convinced an “iMessage but Android” would have us any better. They probably would have gotten hit with anti-trust even sooner given their reach. But most of all, at least in the US, this doesn’t solve the crossplatform issue. Sadly, FB is the best bet on this right now, but even then, I have some folks that refuse to use that. So SMS or Hangouts while it still exists (I feel the changeover to Hangouts Chat will not go over well) for me.
Frankly, I think RCS was actually the smartest move to make because forcing carriers to upgrade SMS/MMS forces Apple to as well. I guess what Google didn’t account for was the carriers not willing to give Google a cut. And so we’ll have this mess.
I still feel the WhatsApp model is best. No weird fallback to SMS (in turn, no need to work with carriers). But I understand the pain of getting someone to download yet another app. Telegram seems like the more likely bet, but if encryption isn’t on by default for everything, we’d have better luck getting people to use WhatsApp itself (yes, still FB, but at least slightly removed).
I’d had some success gathering my flock under the Hangouts umbrella. Everyone got used to it just in time for Google to pull the plug. Now we’re back to awful group SMS. I’ve got a select group of friends that use the Discord platform, but I really can’t imagine how I’d onboard my parents and their ilk to it.
Symptomatic of the larger problem at Google of serially abandoning products.
I think RCS is great don’t get me wrong but I do not in a million years trust the giant US Carriers to get this right. A worldwide rollout of RCS from Google would be better but it looks like it’s never going to happen.
WhatsApp seems to be the de facto iMessage alternative in UK/Europe, similar deal as Facebook, I’m not overjoyed to be on it, but it’s where the whole family is.
RCS went live here in the UK this summer, I assume my Google Messages app now supports it? I wouldn’t know though, as everyone is on WhatsApp…
We’ll see about RCS. It could be good but I have no faith in the telecom companies. Let us not forget the original creator of this kind messaging platform: Blackberry. Creator of Blackberry messenger, the foundation from which iMessage was built.
