Here in the Netherlands, WhatsApp has the defacto communication tool. Everyone is expected to have it installed, not just by friends but also municipals and companies. Same level as having an e-mail address.
It's a missed opportunity for the digital soverignty the EU says it so badly needs. The code for a government backed WhatsApp competitor is there, in multiple instances even. Launch a WhatsApp clone and put all governement communication through it so everyone has to have it installed, and you have an instant EU-wide userbase. From there, people will naturally start to use it between themselves.
Eurocrats could never in a million years make it happen. For starters, every country would insist on having its own ChatsApp, with roll out taking years. Then, to satisfy strict security and compliance regulations it would be restricted to devices passing Google & Apple hardware attestation checks. And once everyone is finally forced to be on board, any confidentiality guarantees can go out the window to catch pedos and terrorists.
Mastodon instances would be a drop-in replacement, no? Federated instances and as a bonus, it solves the biggest problem of new users not knowing which server to join. Just join your local government's if you don't know of another.
The EU should rather embrace open standards rather than building a closed competitor here. We already have XMPP and Matrix, all that's required is for public institutions to use them.
For what purpose? All this discussion about open alternatives to closed systems always leaves out what the purpose is. For broadcasting public information that is not time critical, I think they should use HTTP and HTML.
It's not all about profit as European SMS is now free. It is however about decentralisation stifling feature development - a trap we run into again and again, from email to IRC to SMS to Fediverse/ATProto.
WhatsApp is one company so if they want to enable sending images they can just do it, and they don't have to coordinate with anyone else. MMS was a failure because you couldn't be sure if your recipient would actually get it, or if your carrier would actually let you send it.
please tell me ONE app for Android other than Google Messages I can use to send and receive RCS, it surely won't be problem since it's international standard same as SMS, so there must be plenty apps available...
Pretty much all banking apps for Android won't work without Google Play Services, so once again if you are using Lineage or Graphene, you are still stuck with US company to use your European banking services on the phone.
> please tell me ONE app for Android other than Google Messages I can use to send and receive RCS, it surely won't be problem since it's international standard same as SMS, so there must be plenty apps available...
Nice red herring. The number of implementations is irrelevant here, although Wikipedia says Samsung had one too.
Cell broadcast, depending on the emergency level set by the sender, also makes your phone vibrate until you read the message, and may also cause it to play a loud siren noise. Which is the sort of thing you want in a real emergency.
Nah, Cell Broadcast has a lot less overhead since it does not have to do any routing or delivery confirmation and such. The load does not scale based on recipients which makes it far more reliable during an emergency.
Sorry, maybe I did "carrier replication" wrong - I used the word in a sense of "it is duplicated at the local cell by the towers", instead of getting "fed with 1mio receivers in region X by the telco servercentral HQ"
Because it doesn't do the job well. It's difficult to send any media, group chats are a pain, international messages often incur fees, it doesn't work on wifi-only, and so on.
RTS is the SMS replacement and is quite old. And as evidence it works, I direct your attention to the ubiquitous iMessage, which only "couldn't" interop with Android because Apple was trying the vendor lock-in approach and actively enshittifying its own users' experience and blaming it on Android users.
Assuming you mean RCS, to which Google built a proprietary E2EE extension, remains the only client with no API to build off of and if I recall requires play attestation.
Hardly a complete solution, it devolved into a Google power grab, in my opinion.
For once I half agree with apple when they say its less secure, as apple-to-google comms are not E2EE like they are for google-to-google. While that is fixable with a hack its still a hack, not part of the protocol.
SMS are virtually free for every carrier. The prices for the customers exist to partially offset the fixed costs of the infrastructure (which already exists).
I agree that I don't trust governments today to provide the necessary confidentiality guarantees but remember that both physical mail and the phone network are government backed - in the sense that they set the rules even if they are operated by private entities in some countries.
I hear this sentiment a lot from people in the USA. They deeply distrust their government and can't imagine it being different anyway else in the world.
> It's a missed opportunity for the digital soverignty the EU says it so badly needs. The code for a government backed WhatsApp competitor is there, in multiple instances even. Launch a WhatsApp clone and put all governement communication through it so everyone has to have it installed, and you have an instant EU-wide userbase. From there, people will naturally start to use it between themselves.
I think you have completely misjudged how much the majority of people would not want to use an EU-controlled chat app.
Which is one of the many many reasons Zuckerberg needs to be investigated the hell out of for every single thing he does
I grant you 2014 is 12 years ago now and you could plausibly argue it was their doing to grow network effects but I'm pretty sure WA had that infrastructure already in place - Acton, Koum et al already did the ground work to get carriers to... whatever it is
That's the fate of all government-backed systems as well as all decentralised systems. The former can't evolve because of extreme bureaucracy and the latter can't evolve because of incompatibility trauma and fragmentation.
But in either case we do have the ability to make a new system every 10 years.
Touché. Getting stuck with an obsolete service/protocol for decades is a nightmare, even if it is just ye olde user inertia. If it is mandated by law or pushed by the government, it becomes nearly impossible to update.
In this, I trust the government way less than either the open source movement or the actual Silicon Valley. Both of the latter are much better at iterating of their designs when a new idea comes along.
It's a missed opportunity for the digital soverignty the EU says it so badly needs. The code for a government backed WhatsApp competitor is there, in multiple instances even. Launch a WhatsApp clone and put all governement communication through it so everyone has to have it installed, and you have an instant EU-wide userbase. From there, people will naturally start to use it between themselves.