In a surprising move, Apple has announced today that it will adopt the RCS (Rich Communication Services) messaging standard. The feature will launch via a software update “later next year” and bring a wide range of iMessage-style features to messaging between iPhone and Android users.
Apple’s decision comes amid pressure from regulators and competitors like Google and Samsung. It also comes as RCS has continued to develop and become a more mature platform than it once was.
Ironically, despite Apple's whining to get to this point, between this, and the EU forcing them to adopt USB-C, and, hopefully 3rd party stores and browsers, I may consider an iPhone for my next phone.
It's a pity you almost need to point a gun to their head for them to consider unshittifing their products.
I’m hoping that they also force Google to do the same. Pushing for a universal RCS E2E encryption standard is great. I’m sick of Google saying RCS is the open alternative to iMessage, when key things like their E2EE implementation are not open at all.
I just want to point out that this announcement comes after Nothing phone company announced they partnered with a company that will bridge the two protocols so apple was about to lose their ability to force android images and videos to look like a potato so iPhone users wouldn't want to leave the apple ecosystem.
This just exactly like when apple decided they were going to be champions of privacy by improving the security on their phones, which coincidentally happened right after a company called cellebrite started selling a product that would allow police to bypass passcodes and fingerprints to access a users data which previously could only be unlocked by the police department paying a fee for each time to unlock a phone.
They will always default to being shitty like any other company treating their users like the enemy until they can't and then they spin it in their favor.
Nothing is literally nothing, Apple could care less about them.
Nothing's solution is basically getting you to send your messages to them, and they'll send it through a Mac logged into your Apple ID hence achieving the "blue bubble" lol. Hugely insecure, hacky solution and hardly groundbreaking.
Holy crap. Now my uncle can stop complaining about degraded quality when Android users are in message rooms. When it comes to tech, he really doesn't care about the culprit. He just complains that people aren't playing in Apple's walled garden.
The biggest thing is attachments like photos/videos.
While MMS pretty universally sucks, Apple is very aggressive with the compression they apply to attachments over MMS so the resulting user experience is garbage akin to what we used to have when MMS was new.
Modern phones from other manufacturers will make use of the full MMS attachment size available, typically 100MB or more (depending on your carrier) iPhones will compress that video down to a couple MB regardless of the higher capacity available.
iMessage is a rich communication layer backed by HTTPS and web sockets so think something like WhatsApp or Telegram; you can send 2 gig files, embed maps and other rich content, etc etc. SMS is well… SMS. So the blue versus green bubble is a dumb reductionist view but the practical impact is visible in say video messaging, where an iMessage can attach a 50mb 4K H.265 clip same as a real messaging app, whereas an MMS will be a 256k 3gpp potato.
It looks like Apple is addressing one of the biggest gripes with RCS - Google’s proprietary crap that isn’t opened up to small 3rd parties. Apple wants things like E2EE to be a universal standard that anyone can use, not something Google only dishes out to big phone manufacturers.
Apple, Google, and Microsoft all magically become really into open alternatives when one of their competitors starts to dominate or control a significant portion of the marketplace with proprietary tech.
Apple specifically had LOTS of examples of this back when they were a smaller player. OS X and Safari really leaned into open standards when MS was the 900lb gorilla.
I'd rather they use the open standard. Google should, too. If there are shortcomings with the standard then let's improve the standard, not create a custom implementation of it.
Around 2010 Google, Facebook, MySpace, even OkCupid were all running on the XMPP standard protocol. The corpos were generally bad stewards not following protocol updates, implimenting features in incompatible ways, & eventually realized there was more to gain be defederating forcing folks to use their platforms & let those corporations siphon the (meta)data of messaging.
What gets me is why they saw the need to invent yet another similar protocol with XMPP still being feature rich, battle tested—as well as Matrix to a lesser extent—unless they already have their plans on how to circumvent the system & repeat this same cycle.
Apple: (Finally supports a standard the rest of the world has been using for years) Look at us. So brave, so innovative. Also, we removed another port. Here's a link to a $29 dongle in the Apple store.
top 50 comments