Google Is 'Pausing' Work On Allo In Favor 'Chat,' An RCS-Based Messaging Standard (theverge.com) 146
An anonymous reader shares an exclusive report from The Verge about Google's next big fix for Android's messaging mess: Instead of bringing a better app to the table, it's trying to change the rules of the texting game, on a global scale. Google has been quietly corralling every major cellphone carrier on the planet into adopting technology to replace SMS. It's going to be called "Chat," and it's based on a standard called the "Universal Profile for Rich Communication Services." SMS is the default that everybody has to fall back to, and so Google's goal is to make that default texting experience on an Android phone as good as other modern messaging apps. As part of that effort, Google says it's "pausing" work on its most recent entry into the messaging space, Allo. It's the sort of "pause" that involves transferring almost the entire team off the project and putting all its resources into another app, Android Messages. Google won't build the iMessage clone that Android fans have clamored for, but it seems to have cajoled the carriers into doing it for them. In order to have some kind of victory in messaging, Google first had to admit defeat. Some of the new features associated with Chat include read receipts, typing indicators, full-resolution images and video, and group texts. It's important to keep in mind that it's a carrier-based service, not a Google service. It won't be end-to-end encrypted, and it will follow the same legal intercept standards. The new Chat services will be switched on in the near future, but ultimately carriers will dictate exactly when Chat will go live. Also, you may be persuaded to upgrade your data plan since Chat messages will be sent with your data plan instead of your SMS plan.
Nope ... (Score:2, Informative)
Don't have a data plan, don't want a data plan.
Fuck you and your data plan, you better keep supporting SMS, because it's not going anywhere.
SMS will stick around (Score:5, Informative)
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Since data is trivially tiered especially when dealing with services the carriers provide in house, expect to be able to get cheap limited data plans with unlimited "Chat". Or you might find even though Chat uses data, the carrier might charge a small premium to have access onto their Chat infrastructure.
It might also be similar how you can get a LTE phone where the operators do VoLTE, yet offer plans without data or charge you for minutes at voice rates instead of the VoLTE data rate.
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If you have a plan that doesn't have unlimited voice, it's because you either did zero research or wanted the cheapest plan you could find.
I have not seen a limited voice plan in 5 years.
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I've never paid for an unlimited voice plan. What's the point? Who wants to pay $30 or more for basic cell phone service?
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Which is fine. But then don't bitch that you are on a limited plan
Re: SMS will stick around (Score:2)
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I have not seen a limited voice plan in 5 years.
Most of the popular prepaid plans are limited.
People value data more than voice, and only want enough minutes to handle the occasional emergency or maybe the one month you're job hunting.
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Also: Based on SMS so that carriers can charge us per-message.
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Cash cow? Depends where you live.
My free.fr plan is unlimited SMS & 4G data for 15.99€/month.
What exactly does Google Chat bring me that I do not already have using MMS? Nothing as far as I can see, so I don't see this gaining any more traction than WEP [igi-global.com] did.
WEP, for those who don't remember, was a web portal tech that was pushed by operators so they could control (and MONETIZE!) cell-phone connections to the Internet. It had a minor point back when phones weren't powerful enough to browse the web d
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Nobody cares because we all have gigabytes of data in our plans.
Google needs to do some basic research. No European will ever use this if it's based on SMS.
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I think in the US they pay to receive SMS. Which is by the way a weakness of using internet data for a chat protocol : you'll have to pay for the bytes even to read messages sent to you. Unless.. the carriers sort this out. So in countries with cheap carriers or carrier competition perhaps this RCS carrier protocol may be interesting. In particular they may have offers that give RCS chat acess but no Internet access. That's good if you don't want Internet on a phone.
Back when we had a limited number of SMS messages we paid to send and receive. I admit it's backwards to pay to receive, but c'est la vie. With most of our plans carrying unlimited messages, we don't care anymore.
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I had to pay to read your post on my desktop. Whats the difference?
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I pay about $6.75/mo for my data plan. If I mainly use it for instant messaging and email, so there is no way I can use up even a tenth of my data plan.
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Google's new AI-enhanced image processing combined with unencrypted trafficing can automatically identify naked baby photos and upload them to child porn sites without any intervention on your part-- tremendously convenient, with your deniability completely protected. /P
Why does it need to be carrier based? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe I'm missing the point, but why are we working on a carrier-based replacement for SMS at all? Building services into the fabric of cell carriers makes everything less transparent and portable, and opens opportunities for them to play hanky-panky with pricing and restrictions. In my view, carriers should accept a role as a dumb-pipe wireless Internet service, and services should be platform agnostic.
Could we just come up with a messaging standard that everyone can agree to? Get Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft all to agree on a set of protocols and standards. The same way that a Gmail user can email and Office 365 user, a user of Apple Messages should be able to message a Facebook user. Why is that so hard?
As far as I can tell, it's not. It's just that all these companies all want their own little walled gardens so that they can abuse their customers, or else are suffering from Not-Invented-Here syndrome.
Re:Why does it need to be carrier based? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's called XMPP. It's an open IETF standard, and it supports federation in exactly the way you're talking about -- multiple organizations can run their own infrastructure, and talk to each other, just like you can with email. It's extensible, and it *used* to be exactly how Google Talk works.
The key feature it's missing is the lock-in walled-garden features all the major players want.
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Google Talk
Is all but dead. It was killed off for "hangouts". If anything remains of Gtalk, it is just a skeleton of the service.
And I'm still bitter.
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At this point - unless/until someone develops a trivial-to-install OTR-style encryption utility which can transparently sit on top of this service, I don't see any reason for me to use this instead of SMS.
Re:Why does it need to be carrier based? (Score:4, Informative)
The problem with XMPP is fragmentation. The core protocol is an IETF standard, but it's very minimal (messages, presence notifications, basically nothing else, including how clients authenticate with servers). Everything else is handled via XEPs and for every feature there are 3-4 XEPs describing incompatible ways of providing it. Google did a pretty good job with Jingle, which provided file transfer and a way of setting up streams to use for video / voice, but clients all implement different file transfer mechanisms. I don't think I found a single pair of Android XMPP clients that could exchange files, for example. There are multiple mechanisms for publishing avatars. The last time I looked, the most widely supported one was vcard-temp, which involves setting an base64-encoded image in an XML encoding of a vcard that you publish inside your presence stanzas. This XEP was deprecated as soon as it was published because it had a bunch of well-known problems and was intended as a temporary stop-gap. The replacement was built on top of PEP (personal eventing via PubSub) which was, in turn, built on top of PubSub. The PubSub XEP is fiendishly complicated to implement and PEP adds even more complexity, so it was years between the standard being published and any clients or servers properly supporting it.
This last point really highlights the problem with the XMPP standards process. The IETF requires two interoperable implementations for an RFC to advance. The XMPP Foundation happily publishes standards-track XEPs with zero implementations. They never produced a reference implementation of a client library. Some newer open IM standards have learned from this mistake. For example, Tox provides a client library that is used by multiple clients and serves as a reference implementation. Unfortunately, it's not GPLv3, so anyone wanting to implement a non-GPL Tox client must reimplement the protocol (it's still better than no reference implementation though, and providing an incentive to implement a second client library may be good for the protocol in the long term).
Re:Why does it need to be carrier based? (Score:4, Insightful)
Good (no-brainer!) idea.
Whoa, stop. You suddenly jerked to 180 degrees away from the previous sentence. Those are the enemies of standards. Those companies are why you're not already using a standard. The only reason to invite them to the table, would be if you'd like them to sabotage progress.
Use a standard (XMPP). All the power is in users' hands. And then those companies can join the game, or they can be left out. But they need to be led; under no circumstances should you be asking any of them to lead, because they have reasons to prevent you from using a standard. They want you to use their app and look at the ads they were paid to show, and have your plaintext go through their marketing analytics. We've been through this before and it's part of the reason why people switched away from standards to proprietary IM where users are locked into using specific apps instead of having competing implementations using interoperable protocols.
You have to choose between getting what your want xor using those companies' products.
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Even if Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft are the enemies of standards as you say, it doesn't matter since that's what people are using. Either we can demand and force them to use XMPP or something similar and open, or you can try forcing everyone to stop using Facebook, macOS, iOS and Windows. Hint: this will never happen.
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The problem is that none of those companies want a federated standard, *and* at least Google, Facebook, and Apple all have the resources to out-compete any standard.
Otherwirse, XMPP (which already exists) would be more viable. None of the services want to endorse a system that allows communicating with users of their platform without first becoming a user of their platform yourself. Sadly, an alternative approach is unlikely to be a sound business plan, and the marketing dollars and such that come with a b
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Presumably this isn't designed for TCP/IP style internet transmission but rather the S7 network, or whatever it is they use in the 4G/LTE era.
Regardless, a standard isn't much of a standard if it isn't supported. XMPP is an awesome protocol, my last company was premised around it, and Ideally it IS what should be used, but we can moan and complain all we want about "standards"., but it Android and IOS use something else, then whatever that something else is, its the real standard.
(For reference I'm fairly s
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Building services into the fabric of cell carriers makes everything less transparent and portable, and opens opportunities for them to play hanky-panky with pricing and restrictions. In my view, carriers should accept a role as a dumb-pipe wireless Internet service, and services should be platform agnostic.
Could we just come up with a messaging standard that everyone can agree to? Get Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft all to agree on a set of protocols and standards. The same way that a Gmail user can email and Office 365 user, a user of Apple Messages should be able to message a Facebook user. Why is that so hard?
As far as I can tell, it's not. It's just that all these companies all want their own little walled gardens so that they can abuse their customers, or else are suffering from Not-Invented-Here syndrome.
I agree completely with this. I think the problem has been the addressing not the actual messaging protocols. Meaning we have email addresses @gmail.com @icloud.com @microsoft.com which are interoperable and addressable across Internet providers and then we have phone numbers which are interoperable and addressable across phone networks.
Universal addressability is the challenge, otherwise how do you send a message to someone?
I would much prefer to see communication standards based on existing email addr
The problem is timing... (Score:4, Interesting)
Certain modern norms tha tbenefit the enduser are a result of happening at just the right time.
The network companies of the time could not keep up with the internet, and as such there were no players to prevent email from settling into the unassailable role it had gotten. It's possible that if AOL had played things a tad bit differently, we'd all be using AOL mail instead and email would be like XMPP, this idealistic concept that no one uses because it can't reach most people. None of the business folk at the time that had the resources was able to foresee a strategy to 'own' that. In this century however, federated standards have generally failed to succeed, as the stakeholders now have a handle on how to prevent that from happening again.
Same with drm-free music. When wired internet became feasible to transfer music, but maybe not quite stream it as well as music players that couldn't realistically connect to the internet, attempts at DRM failed so badly they had to give up on the concept. By the time video became feasible, so to had network connectivity evolved to the point where any video playback device could pretty much have some network access at all times, or maybe it was the move away from hardware device provided interface towards 'apps' to consume a video content providers product.
If you strike and get some fundamental truth about technology established, it's hard to get rid of, but the companies are *all* over messaging and won't stand for it.
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Addressing isn't really the problem. The format of "username@domain" is already used for a lot of things, not just email, and including instant messaging.
I wouldn't suggest doing instant messaging email standards, though. Email protocols aren't great. It'd be better to develop a new set of standards for messaging, both email and instant messaging. The problem is, you'd need major vendors to buy into the same standards. You'd need Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Google, and others to all agree to support t
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Their stated reason for dropping XMPP support was spam. XMPP makes it possible to validate the server that a message is coming from, but it's still possible for a new XMPP server to pop up, send spam until it's blacklisted, and then shut down and restart with a new domain name and IP address. Within a walled-garden network, you can require some external identification for new users and rate limit them until other people have added them to their rosters and validated that they're probably useful. Within a
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Good quesiton. Why not just use email, which is available on any modern phone? It's easily accessed from multiple devices, even a web browser in many cases. No real limit to size. You can attach documents. All the kids seem to like the limitations of SMS for some reason.
Re: Why does it need to be carrier based? (Score:2)
Yeah.... Wasn't this problem totally solved ten years ago? The reason we now have 20 different, incompatible, yet feature-identical messaging apps is not technical. It's financial. Apparently there is no money to be made providing seamless, convenient, compatible messaging.
The venture capitalist oligarchy is betting big on the "walled garden" prison state model. Amusingly, Uncle Sam's demand for positive ID on all communications means most of these incompatible messenger apps are using the carrier phone
Rich Communibation Services (Score:2, Funny)
So its just for the 1% then
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Hey, allowing the cell carriers to book more profit and do the heavy lifting of advertising and persuasion for Google, so they don't have to do it. Smart for Google. Glad I don't have to opt in.
Color me surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
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Two, at making sure that their product naming is as confusing as possible.
I still give Microsoft credit for winning at that. When they first released "Pixelsense" they called it the Microsoft Surface. And then a few years later rebranded only four months before reusing the name for their laptops.
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Because using standards is so 2000 & late (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Because using standards is so 2000 & late (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been 100% google free for a little over 2 years now. It's surprisingly easy to do.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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How good at blocking spam is KolabNow? Google's spam filtering was the reason I switched to them in the first place.
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If Google thought that XMPP was good enough, they would have used it. It was the basis for Google Talk and based their protocol for Google Wave on it. Phones don't have always-on connections despite our best wishes, so they would need something a little bit different.
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XMPP works perfectly fine on intermittent connections: there are push notifications, interruptable connections, offline delivery, history retrieval, etc. Google abandoned it because they wanted everyone to use Google. The only reason they can't do the same thing (and they are clearly trying!) with Gmail is still too many people have non-Gmail addresses and they would genuinely lose users if they killed SMTP.
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You ever tried to coach someone weaned on modern tablet interfaces through the process of setting up an XMPP client and entering the arcane data you need to connect to a server? And then it doesnâ(TM)t work right and they didnâ(TM)t enter what you said exactly and you have to help them letter by letter?
And how do you get from your friendâ(TM)s tel number to find them on XMPP anyway? Or do a real name search? You canâ(TM)t.
XMPP is way too complex to catch on with the public and doesnâ(TM)t offer features like real name search that people want to find their friends and stuff.
Believe it or not the world is not solely the basement dwelling nerd set. People have lives and they donâ(TM)t want to spend all their time messing with arcane things.
Have you ever tried to tell an Apple user to use regular fucking apostrophes instead of the various curly abominations?
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Strange to say email addresses should be considered antiquated and turn around and say that phone numbers shouldn't be.
email addresses continue to be a universally known thing and are popularly used.
The problem is that in practice, email is very permissive and as such you can email from your provider to a provider they've never heard of (with unfortunate security implications that have not been overcome). In XMPP, your chat server administrator has to explicitly do something to establish a relationship wit
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Ok, guess my experience was limited, I was setting up an xmpp to talk to google hangouts users, but I couldn't seem to make it work without having a google account.
Of course I could be recalling something incorrectly, it was a long time ago and ultimately abandoned the effort.
Re:Oh Greaaaaaat! (Score:4, Funny)
I'd argue the most annoying feature of Apple's iMessage is convincing iPhone users that "texting" has all these features, so they'll freely use them when communicating with you... Thus forcing you to experience the pain of crappy MMS when talking with them.
Mind your own damn business (Score:2)
If I want to pretend I didn't get someone's message, that should be my own damn business. Ditto for "typing indicators" which I assume is what insecure people look at to see if someone is typing them a reply (pathetic fools).
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How do you keep an idiot in suspense?
(Anonymous Coward is typing)
SMS is a useful "last resort" (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: SMS is a useful "last resort" (Score:1)
From the summary, add this other reason: SMS will work when the voice capability of cellular networks is unavailable because too many people are trying to make calls at the same time. Think mass panic.
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My main reason for using it is that it is free and just works. I don't want to pay extra on my pay as you go plan for data, which is even more expensive here in Canada then the States, and I don't need anything more then text.
Re:SMS is a useful "last resort" (Score:4, Insightful)
For me, the "always works" aspect is important. If you send a message and the receiver is a cell phone, they will get the message at some point.
That's much more important than getting it immediately or not at all (as is sometimes the case with Apple's iMessage). And Apple understands that. Which is why when iMessage fails, they give the opportunity to resend as SMS.
Google Sure is good at (Score:2)
Giving people what they do not want, no matter how many times they're told what people want. Google you see, knows better than you, what you want.
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You jest, but on this front, Google has gone through so many trials and changed their minds to try a new approach, either because it failed to catch on or they didn't do it in a way that enables enough profit.
People use Android, Maps, Google search, and email. They use youtube, but google paid for that, unable to organically come up with something. Google Plus, Wave, Allo, and tons of other things have not achieved success, areas that Google desperately wants to be a part of.
RCS also means Revision Control System (Score:2)
Did anyone else reading this summary think of the old source control system, RCS? RCS underlies CVS source control, and creates local ",v" files to record source control changes? I still use it occasionally, locally, when I merely want to record changes in a specific configuration file and not be burdened by git or subversion trying to report on all changes in the directory.
I acknowledge that those would be confusing to send via a telephone based messaging system.
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Context matters. And you should stop worrying about obsolete software unless you're a computer historian [sourceforge.net].
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In my case, I am old enough, and and active enough, to be part of computer history. RCS, the source control software, is still useful in very old or extremely tiny environments which have individual files requiring source control. It's also sometimes useful put local files in local source control, in parallel with what Subversion or or CVS or Perforce do, and save local working changes without committing them upstream during local development. Ideally one configures the parallel source control to ignore any
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I still have SCCS setup on two systems. I used to keep all my DNS configs in RCS, but I've switch them over to Git a few years ago. And I hacked a MUD's back-end text database to co/ci with RCS, which made it easier to track down what people have built or altered. But I'm not geezer enough to go on about the virtues of RCS.
Having a scratch area by combining RCS and Subversion is equivalent to staging a change in Git. So it might be worthwhile to just switch to Git, Hg or Fossil. And with P4 you can create c
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I agree that a local git repo can be quite useful: I also use that. _But_ being able to source control individual files, without having to exclude anything else, has occasionally proven quite useful.
The RCS tracked scratch files, on top of a Subversion workspace, may look like using git locally at a casual glance. But once again, the ability to source control one file only without having to exclude or handle the other files at all can help avoid confusion. I won't insist that it's the best approach: it can
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Still using hangouts.... (Score:2)
Allo, Chat, whatever comes next...
I'm still using hangouts since it's built into the gmail web interface and the iPhone app isn't that bad either.
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Still built into the gmail web interface ... for now.
Why there's no SMS 2.0? (Score:2)
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Have we not solved the chat problem yet? (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure we had widely available instant messaging clients back in the mid-1990's. 20+ years later and we still can't settle on a standard and live with a fractured set of incompatible networks.
The whole point of the Information Age is for everyone to be connected and able to communicate with each other. Several proprietary chat protocols that are deprecated by their vendor every 5 years goes against progress.
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I suspect it's typical Google culture where perfect is the enemy of good enough. They resisted encrypting Chrome passwords for so long because they felt that storing passwords locally was insecure. But somehow forgot that storing clear text passwords is even worse.
I can run OMEMO over XMPP. I wonder if, with the right phone software, OMEMO could tunnel over SMS as well. Might be worthwhile to research.
I'm still morning Wave (Score:2)
Wave really was awesome. It was everything anyone needed or wanted it to be. AND it was opensource and cross platform. If it had been baked into the heart of Gmail from the start it would have taken over the world.
But sadly it was killed by pride and personal fiefdoms.
no end-to-end encryption (Score:1)
Why in the world would anyone develop a messaging app nowadays without end-to-end encryption? C'MON, Google!
JFC. One step forward; two steps back.
Google just released another service named Chat (Score:2)
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Did you use iMessage to type that? Turn off your shitty fucking curly quotes.