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.
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 🤷♂️