back to article Google gives mobile operators a reason to love it, and opens rich chat up for business

Google has opened up a major new communications channel for businesses – sending multimedia messages to mobiles using interoperable standards. Any business can now join Google's Jibe programme following a closed beta last year. As well as blast out simple text confirmations, organisations will be able to use Rich Communication …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    No, please no.

    As bad as facebook mesenger and whatsapp ar for privacy, anything that both google and the mobile operators love would be much much worse.

    Anon, as I also have to eat and work for these companies.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: No, please no.

      Plus, at least Facebook and WhatsApp are voluntarily installed, versus Google now making this a standard part of its OS.

      Here's to hoping there is a way to disable it, short of chucking the phone at a wall.

      1. 2Nick3

        Re: No, please no.

        "Here's to hoping there is a way to disable it, short of chucking the phone at a wall."

        Even that might not work - see the end of the embedded video in this week's On-Call:

        http://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/02/23/on-call/

  2. ratfox
    Meh

    Cool

    Let's all use a messaging system which charges you by the message!

    Jokes aside, I wonder how many people still use SMS by default and don't use or even know about WhatsApp/Messenger. I suspect it's not much. Facebook claimed in 2016 that Messenger and Whatsapp together had three times as much traffic as SMS worldwide. And I'm pretty sure SMS has lost ground since then...

    And how many of these are sent from an iPhone to an Android, since that's what iMessage does in this situation?

    1. I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

      Re: Cool

      I thought most people now had all-you-can eat SMS on their deals. Or often they limit you to something ludicrous like 3,000 per month - to stop you running marketing on consumer tariffs.

      But you do have to pay for MMS still. And that's a standard that's pretty much died. Half the handsets never seemed to implement the standard properly anyway, £1 a go is insane and so it was another reason to use Whatsapp. Plus lots of people are chatting to more than one person at once.

      I had to get Whatsapp as there's a family group. Which is really useful to organise events and is also full of cat, dog and baby pictures. Which is actually the lesser of two evils, as it means I don't have to go on Facebook for all that.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Cool

        @I ain't Spartacus

        "I had to get Whatsapp as there's a family group. Which is really useful to organise events and is also full of cat, dog and baby pictures."

        my whats app started out as useful for family things bit has now descended to a never ending tirade of p0rn, funnies or vids of people making a fool of themselves. In fact its like what people used to email to each other in the 90's and early 00's before it was frowned upon to do so to your work account and before people had email at home with a decent amount of storage.

      2. K

        Re: Cool

        @I ain't Spartacus - "But you do have to pay for MMS still. A.... £1 a go is insane"

        Its simple really - the networks greed got the better of them.. competition is pretty none existent and they operate as a cartel (in everything, but name). Their motto to change (or threat to their income) is "waaaa waaaaa waaaaa...."

        Whilst people kick the EU... what they've done for consumers (and getting costs down etc) has been nothing short of spectacular... will be interesting to see what happens in the UK in the coming years on this front.

    2. Barry Rueger

      Re: Cool

      We run a commercial dog walking business, one of about fifty companies in our locale. For nearly a decade operators relied on group text messaging in emergencies.

      Open text message app, select "dog walkers" group from Contacts, send message.

      Somewhere around Honeycomb Google introduced a hard coded limit to the number of recipients of a text message.

      One text to sixty people became multiple texts to ten or fifteen member groups.

      Bug reports ensued, answered only with "because spam."

      Which is why everyone now uses WhatsApp.

      Well, except for the lone BlackBerry user....

      Trust me, this will NOT end well.

    3. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      Re: Cool

      SMS still has its advantages, such as not needing a data a connection, but one of the main ones was lost when the networks stopped worrying about delivering. I know I can't send my brother SMS any more.

      But interoperability remains a problem. I have Allo, Signal, BBM, Telegram, Hangouts and Wire installed and still can't talk to everyone. Anyone who relies on a single network is a fool.

    4. JohnFen

      Re: Cool

      " I wonder how many people still use SMS by default"

      I do, as well as the majority of people I know (even those that also use chat apps). I intentionally avoid those chat apps for a whole bunch of reasons.

  3. SloppyJesse

    "Let's all use a messaging system which charges you by the message!"

    Don't think I've paid 'per message' in a decade. SMS just come bundled, I've had unlimited on my last few contracts and ludicrously high limits before that.

    Multimedia messaging on the other hand costs and if nice cuddly google starts trying to push messages over the data channel they could send me over my data cap.

  4. Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

    Invented by the Marketing Department?

    "RCS upgrades SMS with branding..." and then I stopped reading Google's description due to a sudden lack of interest.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Invented by the Marketing Department?

      well, if you are going to upgrade things then I suppose some sort of Revision Control System will help...

  5. JohnFen

    Don't fix what isn't broken

    "no interoperable global standard exists for rich chat. This has been "silo'd" into proprietary apps like iMessage, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger."

    Which is exactly where it belongs. I just hope there will be some facility to block "rich chat" messages.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Which perfectly explains why RCS is only available on Android Messages on Rogers and Fido (biggest Canada carriers, and only RCS carriers here.) (apps like Samsung Messages support RCS without feeding Google with even more of your private info). Am I the only one thinking we should deny any future "innovations" of Google?

  7. Tim99 Silver badge
    Devil

    I told you so...

    I began to suspect that Google were going to be evil when "Don't be evil" came out in ~2,000. I knew that the probability was much higher with their IPO in 2004 - But this, really? >>=========>

  8. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Coat

    So Google gradually becomes more like Microsoft with every passing day.

    Who knows how this could possibly end?

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