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.
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.