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.
No but also yes.
The spec itself is open, but implementations that are in the wild aren’t. Google’s implementation is proprietary, for example.
On Android, Google has went out of their way to make other RCS implementations virtually impossible to implement. Samsung, for example, had to enter an agreement with Google to use their implementation, otherwise they’d have no RCS.
As of now, the easiest way to implement RCS outside of using Google’s proprietary implementation is to create your own OS and RCS implementation for it.
This is kind of true but misses the fact that RCS was intended to be a carrier standard, and carriers weren’t going to fucking do it.
So after almost a decade of carriers docking around, Google fires a shot across the bow and just implements their own version, using their jive backend as a “bypass” of sorts. But like any closed platform, it only works with the same clients.
They can’t open up their server without some basic agreements so they try to get Samsung inboard. That is a mess of red tape. So they roll out RCS to all messenger clients on newer Android builds and stupidly call it chats or something. When they separately run a product called Google chat.
Anyways, that’s how we got here. Each company needs to have a RCS relay server now because carriers couldn’t be assed to do their fucking jobs, and now the Apple RCS server will pass your messages to the Google RCS server using a standard… So dumb.
Its still superior to SMS and is now at least baked into every new android device and on by default, but since it is not using actual radio waves SMS is still going to be possible in areas where data isn’t. So SMS will continue to limp along and exist, because fuck carriers.