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Apple announced RCS with a whimper when it should have been a bang
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
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Why celebrate a feature that was added for non-customers? Why celebrate a feature they were forced to add rather than chose to? Don’t get me wrong, I think this should have been done long ago, but what’s in it for Apple to waste some of their precious announcement time? The fallback mode of iMessages doesn’t fall back as far? Yay?
What do you mean added for non customers? The entire purpose of not adding RCS or supporting iMessage for Android devices is to create a worse experience for their customers if they interact with non-customers. Sure it likely drew more people to buy iPhones, but it's also arguably pretty awful for any society that plays apple's game rather than just downloading a cross platform app.
Or it’s great for society because they support text for every phone, even feature phones (do those still exist?) and it’s a good business choice for Apple to support more features for their paying customers
The detriment to society came when the standard for text messaging between all phones was updated to support more features and a major manufacturer intentionally didn't update to drive sales. The US used to heavily punish that sort of behaviour, but in this case it took ~~EU~~ Chinese action to reign in a US company.
Samsung, Google, Sony, and a million other manufacturers could have implemented their own messaging system, but instead they chose to facilitate the use of devices however customers want without punishing them based on the personal preferences of their friends. In some circles people may even choose not to communicate with people who don't have iPhones or exclude them from group chats which is bad in just about any way you spin it.
FWIW in this case it was Chinese action - China is requiring all phones sold domestically to support RCS. The EU DMA would have forced Apple to open up access to iMessage, not implement RCS, but they found that in the EU, iMessage market share is too small for the DMA to kick in (probably due to the overwhelming popularity of WhatsApp).
Thanks for the correction. Now that you mention it I do remember that issue from the EU. I just defaulted to thinking it was EU since they managed to get Apple to change to USB-C and this is pretty minor compared to that.
Why does it bother you, the presentation is made for investors. Investors want to know if Apple will still be able to compete in the European market and that's all they really had to show.
The WWDC keynote isn't an investors meeting, it's for Apple to talk about their exciting new features that are coming and to prepare developers for what their sessions are going to be about. The announcement was made with little fanfare because it was like a "FYI, your communication with Android devices will be slightly better for them now"
It was originally for developers and press but it's mostly for investors and press now. They practically never talk about APIs and tooling anymore.
The place users are expected to learn about the products are in ads, on the website, their favorite news outlet, or the apple store. No regular customer even bothers sitting through a 3 hour presentation.
??? The keynote is immediately followed by sessions covering the APIs mostly for the features they just announced. It absolutely is for the developers as much as it is for the press and regular users to learn about what's coming.
Back in the day the whole presentation was about it though. Now says they don't talk about the toolkits and stuff in the actual presentations with demos and examples like they used to. Infact it was the job of most tech journalist to pull out the relevant information to the user because the focus was almost entirely developer focused.
They did announce hardware at the very beginning though. It was often followed by statistics on how many developers were actively developing for the platform and the revenue developers made as a whole so on and so forth.
I remember them explaining push notifications, how it works, what you might want to implement it for and tried to sell the fact it didn't really hit battery life much because it was pushed from apples servers etc. the whole presentation that was an hour long on technologies like coco demonstrating the fluidity and speed of the new tools and how they dramatically reduced the install size while improving stability etc. there was a 20 minute section on how apples iad's were going to make developers more money while reducing overhead and had a downloadable demo in the app store.