The long-awaited day is here: Apple has announced that its Messages app will support RCS in iOS 18. The move comes after years of taunting, cajoling, and finally, some regulatory scrutiny from the EU.
Right now, when people on iOS and Android message each other, the service falls back to SMS — photos and videos are sent at a lower quality, messages are shortened, and importantly, conversations are not end-to-end encrypted like they are in iMessage. Messages from Android phones show up as green bubbles in iMessage chats and chaos ensues.
Apple’s announcement was likely an effort to appease EU regulators.
They probably will. They’re aware of and actively foster the “in-group” psychology that plays out in youth social circles. Anyone with a non-Apple phone is excluded as lower class, weird, or less-than. You don’t get included in the group chats that are often the center of your peers’ social lives because no one wants the annoyance of dealing with the limitations of conversing with a green bubble. You must conform, purchase the correct products, and sign over your life to the correct social media platforms if you want to participate in society.
Yea, but the real question is will the youth see through the BS or not? Before it wasn’t just a color, green bubbles actively broke things in blue bubble group chats
But once that’s gone with (hopefully) the rollout of RCS (which should fix most, if not all, the things that broke gcs) it really would be “just a color”
Ofc, Apple being Apple, I wouldn’t put it past them to artificially “break” things or arbitrarily introduce limits between RCS and iMessage
That’s where my money is
I’m guessing RCS support will be as barebones as possible while still technically functioning. All of the fancy bells and whistles will remain exclusive to iMessage.
Some iMessage features might not be possible to implement with RCS I suppose. Maybe RCS messages will get a different colour. All Apple said in the WWDC keynote was RCS would be supported, they didn’t elaborate any further.
Apple is bringing RCS because China is requiring it, not because of what google has done. So I don’t expect it to be bare bones in that case since a huge market of theirs will be phasing out sms in the foreseeable future.
What kind of fancy bells and whistles does RCS have?
One of two things can happen…
Either Apple does the bare minimum to implement RCS, continuing to make interoperability a pain in the ass. Meanwhile, keep making improvements to iMessage.
Or Apple does it right, fully implements RCS, contributes back to the standard, and abandons iMessage as maintaining two separate platforms for the same function is a waste of resources.
I’ll take a guess as to which it’ll be.
Alternatively Americans just accept using 3rd party messengers. But that field is huge with big and small names competing, and ultimately anything that displaces FB messenger or WhatsApp will just get bought by Meta (or some other FAANG) and we’re back at square-one.
Everybody just remember that Apple is the stubborn ones here, reluctantly adopting the standard that every other OEM has been using for a decade, and the reason they’ve been doing this was as a means to keep people in Apple’s walled garden by “othering” people who don’t have iMessage.
They knew exactly what they were doing. I got rid of my iPhone to go back to Android literally a week after the original announcement. Exchanging multimedia with my wife was literally the only thing holding me to iOS. The alternative, using third party messengers, is just plain cumbersome for one user (and likely means selling your soul to Meta nowadays, anyway).
I doubt I’m alone.
And RCS is a neutral standard, belonging to GSMA. Even though Google is a key player, they aren’t the only ones. Any phone OS or OEM could always have implemented RCS. Apple has historically chosen not to, while also not reciprocating the openness with iMessage.
I guess there is one other possibility…Apple embraces RCS and, being keenly aware of its limitations and with Apple and Android cooperating, they collaborate to develop a new open standard that fully replaces both. That’s probably the best outcome but also least likely to happen.
Next up, ios20 will let you change the color of your fried chat bubble in groups. And it’ll be the most innovative inclusion “evarrrhh”.
It’s super useful to know instantly if the messages are encrypted or not.
Exactly. Encryption is coming later.
Also, there are iMessage specific features that are not part of RCS, so knowing what platform someone is on is still useful for cross platform communication.
They are we got confirmation months ago
There’s a few things that are iOS device specific (like FaceTime) so I can see legit reasons to keep the different colors, if that’s what everyone is used to. Not that video calling should be a random proprietary tech, but that’s another battle…
Apple wanted to open source FaceTime and destroy Skype. They got sued and were not allowed to open source their protocols. It’s real dumb that Apple didn’t get to drive the standards there.
That doesn’t make sense.
Steve Jobs loudly announced FaceTime would be made open source. Then they lost a patent lawsuit against https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-20236114
Apple paid up and could keep using the patent, but could not just let anyone else use the tech they developed as it now needed a non-open license.