• 2 Posts
  • 31 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 9th, 2023

help-circle

  • RCS is already live in the US for iOS 18 Beta users, and will come to all iPhones in 2 months. It’s also an awful spec, you don’t have to dig far to find that. Operators have basically just farmed out implementation of it to Google.

    I don’t know why you’re trying to pick a fight. It’s a simple fact. MMS was the standard for years, and iMessage compressed photos & videos less than that. RCS is now coming, flawed as it is.

    End of story. It’s just one in a list of many features that made iMessage popular, all implemented years before RCS was a thing. You can move on to complaining about something else on a platform you don’t use and don’t care about.


  • It absolutely does have higher quality video & photos than MMS. MMS does not have a clear public spec, and carriers/phones/OSes apply size limits for videos and pictures, and these limits are inconsistent at best. They are all quite low though, here is an Android Police article discussing it: https://www.androidpolice.com/why-text-message-videos-look-blurry-how-to-fix/

    It’s not entirely dissimilar to email. It’s a bad idea to send an attachment over 15-20MB not because email can’t handle it, but because at some point in the chain something might have a limit that says that’s too much.

    You are correct though that Apple does just crank it down to shit 3GPP level (I assume the baseline of the spec) and call it a day because they don’t care about SMS/MMS. Why would they, even Android users all use WhatsApp so it barely matters.

    Obviously there is no “picture beautifier”, whatever the hell that means. I never said or implied that. iMessage movies & pictures are just less compressed than MMS ones, even between non-Apple MMS devices. Is it less compression than other over-the-top messaging apps? Depends on the app, but nowadays probably not.


  • Yes but it doesn’t brand the other person, the colour is to inform the sender that the message they sent is either an iMessage (blue) or an SMS (green).

    It wasn’t intended to be some class system. When the iPhone launched, it only supported SMS and all texts were green. They wanted to differentiate iMessage conversations when they launched that a few years later, but still use the same client so people were more likely to use it. That way you know you can use more features but you also know you need a data connection. This was an important distinction when most people still had plans that had minutes, quantities of texts, and limited or no data. Also if a iMessage fails, it automatically uses SMS fallback. It’s important to know when that happens too. Colour was just a very obvious way to indicate that.

    The reason iPhone users don’t like green bubble conversations now is mostly because SMS just doesn’t support all the iMessage features like higher quality pictures, video, tapback, inline reply, stickers, etc. It also is lowest common denominator for a group thread, so one person without iMessage causes the whole thread to revert to SMS.


  • They tried that and made one good but derivative game and two awful games. Capcom has no idea where to take the franchise, that’s why they farmed it out after DR1 to a company that got so sick of only making Dead Rising games that they basically built something completely different behind Capcom’s back and then shut down because Capcom didn’t want it.

    I’m way more excited for this. It’s better to start at the only original game in the franchise, excise the “early 360 era” horrible controls, and remind a generation why they liked it in the first place when most only have vague memories of it.

    Then, another develop might actually want to take a crack at it or will bring Capcom a good pitch.





  • For anyone on iOS, you can do most of this there too. On older iPhones you need a lightning to USB-A adapter you can get on AliExpress for like $3, but on USB-C iPhones it works directly.

    The Files app has become like a full file manager, with local storage, unzipping, archiving, SMB connections, as well as most cloud storage services connect to it. Download Keka from the App Store and you can even unpack 7z, ISOs, everything you can do on a desktop.








  • That’s true I suppose, but there pretty much isn’t anything I’m like “damn I wish that was on iOS but Apple’s rules won’t allow it” anymore.

    I can think of a few examples that I have on my Android phone. TouchHLE, Mario 64 decompiled and Yuzu come to mind. But those are just fun to play with and not exactly things I care deeply about.

    Just to be clear, this didn’t used to be the case. I used to jailbreak & sideload for years. But I just… don’t need to anymore. It’s all there. I figured it was worth asking if there was something I didn’t know I was missing.

    Not only that, there is an upside too. The fact that IPAs can’t be easily installed on iOS drastically reduces piracy, and companies are more apt to release non-ad-supported, premium titles on the platform.

    I have RE Village, RE4 and Death Stranding on my phone right now. I don’t see those coming to Android any time soon. So I would say it’s a double-edged sword.




  • What IPAs do you want to install? This is a real question, I know there are a handful of apps that you need to install from outside the App Store but over the years as restrictions have loosened that has dropped to almost nothing for me.

    I used to install nzbUnity which has been fully replaced by LunaSea at this point, and with the rule change allowing emulators they really took a ton of wind out of the sails of the 3rd party App Store push.


  • Apple Intelligence. The image generation and bullshit text generator aspects I’m over (although Genmoji looks cute), but the ability to process complex natural language requests using an on-device LLM so I can perform tasks via voice without laborious specificity?

    I’m in. If they nail this it will be the biggest leap forward in human-computer interaction since the GUI.

    The other features I already like in DB1 aren’t on this feature slide either:

    • The new Calendar app with a proper multi-day view is great and has already replaced the “list” view I’ve used since 2009. I like “list” but it makes every day look busy visually, and makes it difficult to see gaps in your day.
    • New Calculator app finally has most features people would like. Multi line, easy editing of mistakes, a history, etc. They only talked about the handwritten stuff for iPad in the keynote but the whole thing is vastly improved across all iOS platforms.
    • This one is on the slide but the new Photos app is great, although some don’t like it I found most features in Photos were buried and people never used the tabs in the app, just scrolling down to see everything actually works quite well. Most users seem to think that the first tab is the only one you need to use and everything else is just settings and whatnot so it’s best to just adapt to that at this point.