Looks like they've fixed this? Looking now, I see:
> End-to-end encryption is on by default between Google Messages users who have RCS enabled and secures your eligible communications, so no one (including Google and third parties) can read or view your messages and attachments except the person you’re messaging.
Gruber doesn't mention that section, so it's unclear whether that line was always there or not. But the two things he *does* mention (the second screenshot, and the item in the "Data Safety" card) are still there as of my comment.
Ah I see. Sure, yeah, they should clarify the screenshot.
At the same time... I'm pretty unimpressed by the author:
>> Google Messages does put a tiny lock in the timeline to indicate when an RCS chat is secure, and they also put a lock badge on the Send button’s paper airplane icon, so there are visual indications whether an RCS chat is encrypted, but because the messages bubble colors are the same for all RCS chats, it’s subtle, not instantly obvious like it is with Apple Messages, where green means “SMS or RCS, never encrypted” and blue means “iMessage, always encrypted”.
So the author who is complaining about Google's "shamefully misleading" UI is making a serious claim that choosing the color blue over green would somehow convey better security more "instantly obviously" than a lock icon does, to the average user?
It's Gruber. His content is valueless. It's always either Apple good, everything else bad or Apple missing something here but understandable, everything else bad. Several times, Apple has later copied a competitor on something Gruber panned, but he doesn't have the self awareness to realize that his previous assessment was incorrect if everybody goes against it.
Google's consistently good about this in its UIs by leaning on iconography, while Apple tends to lean on colored elements, such as text labels and containers, that only sometimes work for colorblind folks. Neither company is perfect, however.
I don't even believe that. If you show your grandma both of them and asked which one she would guess is more secure, what do you think her guess would be?
> Google's consistently good about this in its UIs by leaning on iconography, while Apple tends to lean on colored elements, such as text labels and containers, that only sometimes work for colorblind folks. Neither company is perfect, however.
Certainly neither is perfect, but unless I'm missing something obvious, there is literally nothing about blue that conveys security more than green. It's just an arbitrary choice Apple made, and how the heck is an Android user supposed to know about it? Whereas a lock is kind of self-explanatory...
>you show your grandma both of them and asked which one she would guess is more secure, what do you think her guess would be?
I'm a technical person, spend most of my life with computers, and this is the first time I hear that blue messages means secure. I assume this is something Apple specific? Because I have never seen this anywhere. It... doesn't seem obvious. While lock is pretty universally understood.
Blue bubbles mean the conversation is happening over iMessage. Some technical people might've taken that to mean secure due to the use of encryption, but that's an implied thing.
> End-to-end encryption is on by default between Google Messages users who have RCS enabled and secures your eligible communications, so no one (including Google and third parties) can read or view your messages and attachments except the person you’re messaging.