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.
I guess, if I’m on Android, this will make no difference to me?
If you’re texting an iPhone user it’ll make a difference
You mean SMS? I rarely use SMS these days. And I don’t know many people with an iPhone. That’s a US, UK thing it seems.
I know people want this. I do to. But SMS going away will suck. Even in 2024, there’s still that moment you have every now and then that you can’t get a call out but a sms will make it out just fine. SMS rides along with the carriers ping signal. It’s not part of the data signal.
Right now my phone gives me the option if RCS fails for some reason, to send the message again with SMS. I assume that will be the case here as well.
Man it’s a shame that Google RCS doesn’t run on android phones by default if you have a custom rom or rooted your device or have an unlocked bootloader. Guess this won’t really affect me then and it doesn’t really matter.
Yeah really wish there was a single FOSS alternative that supported RCS. Hard to call it an open protocol when pretty much just Google Messages supports it.
Apple could easily do the bare minimum to keep regulators at bay while still keeping the experience as shitty as possible so that Android will continue to look bad. For example they could refuse to implement reactions or typing indicators, or they could even deliberately compress videos. I’m expecting the worst until we see otherwise.
For example they could refuse to implement reactions or typing indicators
Reactions already work in MMS groups, use them every day.
or they could even deliberately compress videos
Except they’re already advertising improved quality of photos and video in non-iMessage chats. Doubt they would advertise a specific feature only to make it worse.
Disliked a message.
Doubt they would advertise a specific feature only to make it worse.
Not like companies have never done that…
Not to criticise apple too badly here, but that’s what will happen, as the version of RCS they use won’t have E2EE.
And… It’ll still be tied to your phone number. Why would I want another shitty messaging system that’s tied to my phone number?
Apple will probably use white bubbles with yellow font.
This is exactly what I’m expecting. The company of “buy your mom and iPhone” isn’t going to be aiming for maximum interoperability.
Yeah but the company of “wants to remain in the EU market” might
No, they’ll aim for minimum interoperability that the EU will let them get away with, and they’ll push that line every chance they get
I’m still of the opinion that the basic message app should only be SMS.
Then anything else should be its own thing. Mixing the two is a recipe for disaster, where it’s a consumer product.Has hell frozen over?
What if they kept the green color just to troll…
The bubbles will remain green. At the very least, it’s handy a hand way to tell if chat is unencrypted.
But rcs can be e2ee right?
That’s what I’m curious abt, as well. Will RCS to iMessage be e2ee?? 🧐
Encryption was never part of the RCS standard, and Google has been gatekeeping the encryption solution that they’ve been using… which is why there aren’t a lot of E2EE RCS clients floating around.
Google finally conceded several months ago, and now encryption will be part of RCS and managed by an independent working group that Google, Apple, and others can contribute to.
Phase 1 of RCS is about implementing the unencrypted foundation of the protocol. Encryption is supposed to come when the working group has aligned.
Encryption is supposed to come when the working group has aligned.
I wouldn’t hold my breath.
The whole RCS thing is a Bad Idea™ . It’s a standard by the GSM Association, which consists of over 1150 members (750 operators and 400 other companies). Getting all these companies to align will take forever.
To illustrate: the RCS initiative was started in 2007 and the steering committee was formed in early 2008. The first version of the Universal Profile, that would enable interoperability between different operators and networks was released in 2016. It took 8 f-ing years to come up with an interoperable messaging standard to replace SMS. It was intended to be implemented by operators, but since hardly any operator did Google had to run their own service, bypassing the network operators, just to get it off the ground. Operators are now slowly beginning to support it.
If Apple decides to add a feature to iMessage, they implement the feature, roll out an update to their servers and release it to a billion users in the next iOS update. If they want to add a feature to RCS, they first have to discuss it in the committee until they agree on a solution, this alone takes forever. Then every player needs to update their software to add support. This means potentially 750 operators who need to update their shit, and that is after their software suppliers add support for it. In the mean time, the new feature will work for some users when they communicate with some other users, depending on which phone and operator each party has. Rinse and repeat for every new feature you want to add.
This means RCS will at best only ever be a very basic messaging service. It’ll be an improvement over SMS and MMS, but that’s not saying much. It will be in no way a threat to Apple’s dominance in messaging.
Thank you for detailing what’s wrong with RCS.
It’s too little, too late, with major issues.
I was running XMPP on my phone in 2009…
Not across vendors it can’t. Or at least isn’t.
They almost certainly will. That blue is a prestige feature for a lot of people.
I don’t really care, so long as I can easily send texts and pictures back and forth, I’ll be happy.
On the iOS 18 preview page, they show RCS with green bubbles
Image for the lazy (and yes, of course, Apple’s breaking their own accessibility guideline of having text at least 3:1 contrast ratio for text to be readable and instead making it 2:1 by picking the lightest shade of green possible).
Honestly that will be the least of your concerns. I will be very surprised if it’s anything more than basic interoperability. Photos and videos and such. Probably not even group text. Apple will comply maliciously just like they are with app stores. You’ll have to drag them kicking and screaming.
It’s not just to troll. There are actual differences between the RCS and iMessage protocols and their capabilities.
Sure, but we all know what the real reason is…
It would be inappropriate to not make it clear what messaging protocol is being used.
Most RCS chats will be going through googles servers. A user might want to know that.
ABSOLUTELY. I have way more trust in iMessage’s privacy than RCS. I am ELATED for this change, but I want the colors different. I wouldn’t be upset if it changed from green to something else like peach or something, though, to reflect at least there might be SOME encryption or something going on.
I absolutely agree on that. It should be clear to the user what protocol is being used, but that isn’t Apple’s goal. If that was the case, the bubble for RCS messages would be something other than green since green currently indicates SMS. The way they’re doing it, making RCS bubbles green too won’t do anything to tell you what protocol you’re using, but it will specifically reveal you aren’t using iMessage, and continuing the in-group mentality is the goal.
No, apple is not using Google’s proprietary RCS they are using Open Source GSM RCS which doesn’t go through Google’s servers and it doesn’t include end-to-end encryption.
What if you speak to someone on android, then it’ll most likely go through googles servers. Most carriers are using googles servers to service rcs. When you texting iPhone users you’ll be using iMessage so most of the time your going through googles servers.
Sounds like it just replaces sms as the default method to communicate with androids. So it’s very likely the bubbles will remain differently colored.
100% they will do this.
But I wonder if the effect will be different to now. I know Apple wants to retain the idea that their users are in an exclusive blue bubble group. But currently, green bubbles are associated with shitty looking images, video, etc, due to MMS. Especially for people that don’t know why files come through that way, green bubbles are always presented as inferior by virtue of actually being inferior.
But now, if they do keep the green bubs, they’ll just be green. Green at feature parity is different from green with clear differences.
RCS is crap, inconsistent, unreliable, lacking, buggy. It doesn’t even handle Dual SIM …
Android needed a native “iMessage” style solution at least 10 years ago.
I can buy a $99 flip phone, basic phone, up to a $1,500 premium device, SMS/MMS will function the same across all 3 devices. RCS however will not. So how is this the answer to advanced messaging on Android? It isn’t…
If Google bought BBM & made it their own when it was still relevant in the consumer space, made it native on all Android 10 devices & later with SMS/MMS fall back, this would be something! Damn I miss BlackBerry…
RCS is not seamless, not native, and it simply is not it. It’s the 1 thing I hate about Android, as creative and customizable as the software is, we need more…I hate what Apple represents in the consumer space and how people often think who use an iPhone which makes me never want one…
The moment Google saw the exclusivity Apple was doing, Android should have followed suite.
RCS sucks…
Crazy thing is Google Hangouts did this back in 2012! They had it! You could text and message digitally to someone’s hangouts acct. then they killed it because of some legacy code or something.
And now I’m irritated by this all over again.
And yet Google still hasn’t rolled out RCS for Google Voice, and last I checked there was an issue with it and Google Fi as well. (It works but it precludes some advertised feature of Fi or something.)
Honestly, it’d be a good retort from Apple if they ran a commercial that said, “We’ll support RCS once all your products do” and then show a screenshot of Google Voice.
I’ve had no issues with Fi and RCS. Then again, maybe Fi on pixel is different.
Fi has two different, incompatible options for how to sync your messages to a computer or other device that isn’t your primary phone with your SIM (or e-SIM): the so-called “option 1” is RCS compatible, but treats your phone as the canonical device that has the primary copy of all messages, voicemails, etc. “Option 2” is device agnostic, where all messages and voicemails live on the cloud, and your phone (and all other devices) merely syncs with that primary copy in the cloud.
If your phone breaks or dies or is lost/stolen, Option 2 keeps chugging along with all your logged in devices, but the dead phone is the single point of failure for Option 1.
Ideally there would be a device agnostic way to access RCS through your account, but every implementation seems to require a specific SIM.
I think it was something to do with the Fi-specific syncing of messages to the web version.
Yeah, if Voice doesn’t have RCS support by the time iOS 18 launches, I’ll be moving off it for messaging. Have a number of text groups with iPhones that will benefit from everyone on RCS, most important knowing that my group messages were actually received. MMS still randomly drops messages or they get massively delayed or received out of order.
RCS is proprietary, right?
I’m gonna wait to see how this is implemented but it sounds bad on the face of it.
RCS is a terrible standard. But China wants it, so Apple is forced to add it.
I just want my gf to have the same SMS app as me so she can see the silly emoji animations I see 😢
I don’t know if it’s a good thing… To use RCS you have to use a compatible OS + device and use the google messages app (maybe also the Samsung one now) and why does the brand implemented this is because google “offered” the servers to run this protocol. I think even today the best way is to get onto secure messaging apps (like Signal, Session, SimpleX…)
RCS is the wrong standard to use though, as there isn’t a single FOSS Android RCS client. They should support something like Matrix.
If you do anything as merely speak the name of anything FOSS in Apple headquarters, they throw you in a deep dark well in the middle of the campus and remove your name from the world of the living.
Apple have a surprising amount of open-source software. The OS that MacOS and iOS are built on top of (Darwin) is open-source, as is its kernel (XNU). The engine used by Safari (Webkit, forked from KDE’s KHTML) is open-source too.
It’s not really traditional open-source, though. It does use an OSS license, but they don’t really accept public contributions, nor do they track bugs publicly or have a public roadmap.
That is interesting actually, but compared to other companies I’d not say that’s significant. Specially because I suspect they switched to WebKit because they had no other choice 🤷♂️
Matrix
😂 As an SMS/MMS/RCS replacement?? You’re joking. Surely.
Yea, like that would ever in literally any possible incarnation of any possible existence where Apple is a thing happen. Totally.
That wasn’t what I was saying though. I was talking about what should happen, not what is likely to happen, and criticising the EU for pushing for the wrong thing.
I mean, in the Steve Jobs Apple it might have.
Steve originally pushed for web apps to dominate on the emerging open web standards.
Apple used to care about the customer more than they do now (IMO).
