this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2023
1131 points (97.0% liked)
Technology
59424 readers
3379 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
While I agree, Apple is being obnoxiously stubborn and it truly only does benefit Apple users as well, it just feels disingenuous from Google. It more feels like they want to get their product onto Apple devices. If Apple could implement RCS the way they wanted to and interoperate with Google, then I think it would be a more valid argument (and I suppose they can, but Apple would be caught dead investing money into something like that). But Google clearly wants Apple to use their own version and is putting up this annoying ad campaign to mask it. (As far as I know, the standard RCS implementation doesn’t even include E2EE, rather it’s something unique to googles implementation, correct me if I’m wrong). Google uses encryption as a talking point in their ad campaigns and is honestly for me the biggest reason for it to be used in iOS. Otherwise the experience is only marginally better than sms, and I wouldn’t expect Apple to even bother with it. At least with encryption one can challenge Apple‘s stance on being a privacy focused company..
Im also a software engineer and it’s annoying as hell that Apple is stubborn, but from a business perspective, it’s a gold mine for Apple - ecosystem lock-in is just too valuable to them as a company.
Google's encryption extension is published so anybody could implement it (if you already have enough access to create your own client, like Samsung)
Has apple tried to work with Google on the RCS version? If not, I see everything you've written here as an invalid false equivalency
They haven't really. What they really should do is run their own RCS server and federate and support the e2e extension, but they don't want to.
The most annoying part is that the imessage encryption protocol is so far behind state of art (same underlying encryption protocol with small RSA keys and no deniability since ~2011 when Signal has been around since 2010 with a better protocol). Meanwhile Google based their encryption extension on the Signal production. It would be a solid security improvement if Apple adopted it.