A few weeks ago, in a post primarily complaining about Google’s disingenuous claims about their Messages app’s support for encryption (they suggest, heavily, that it encrypts every message or most messages, but in fact only supports encryption for RCS messages sent between users of Google Messages on Android devices), I also complained about the fact that Google’s own Google Voice doesn’t support RCS at all.

Turns out Google Fi doesn’t support RCS fully either. Google Fi is Google’s cellular phone service. I actually use it to provide service to my Android burner phone. The prices are excellent and the service is fine for my minimal needs for a phone I barely use. But Google Fi offers something called “call and voicemail sync” that lets Fi users make and answer voice calls through the web. If you enable this, you lose RCS. See Reddit threads here and here with Fi fans complaining about it.

It’s just wild to me that Google would spend years waging a campaign urging Apple to support RCS, yet Google itself doesn’t support RCS in its own products.

Excellent five-minute short video from the ever-insightful Kirby Ferguson for The New York Times, exploring why everything looks the same, sounds the same, and seemingly is the same in today’s pop culture. The short answer: that sameness is only pervasive when you only look at what’s promoted by our three-headed social media hegemony (Meta, YouTube, and TikTok).

Take Control (via Kirk McElhearn): Back in 2019, Apple replaced iTunes for Mac, iOS, and iPadOS with three apps—Music, TV, and Podcasts—with audiobooks handled by the Books app. Take Control of Apple Media Apps is your guide to this post-iTunes world. Covers macOS 15 Sequoia, iOS 18, and iPadOS 18 or later, plus Apple Watch, […]

Drew McCormack (Mastodon): I’m launching a new Swift framework called Forked for working with shared data, both on a single device, and across many.[…]The merging that @ForkedModel provides is pretty powerful. It does property-wise merging of structs, and if you attach the @Merged attribute, you can add your own custom merging logic, or use the […]

David Pierce (Slashdot): Google is releasing Gemini 2.0 on Wednesday, about 10 months after the company first launched 1.5. It’s still in what Google calls an “experimental preview,” and only one version of the model — the smaller, lower-end 2.0 Flash — is being released. But Hassabis says it’s still a big day. “Effectively,” Hassabis […]