Apple is bringing RCS to the iPhone in iOS 18 | The new standard will replace SMS as the default communication protocol between Android and iOS devices
theverge.com
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.
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What if they kept the green color just to troll...
They probably will. They're aware of and actively foster the "in-group" psychology that plays out in youth social circles. Anyone with a non-Apple phone is excluded as lower class, weird, or less-than. You don't get included in the group chats that are often the center of your peers' social lives because no one wants the annoyance of dealing with the limitations of conversing with a green bubble. You must conform, purchase the correct products, and sign over your life to the correct social media platforms if you want to participate in society.
Yea, but the real question is will the youth see through the BS or not? Before it wasn't just a color, green bubbles actively broke things in blue bubble group chats
But once that's gone with (hopefully) the rollout of RCS (which should fix most, if not all, the things that broke gcs) it really would be "just a color"
Ofc, Apple being Apple, I wouldn't put it past them to artificially "break" things or arbitrarily introduce limits between RCS and iMessage
That's where my money is
I’m guessing RCS support will be as barebones as possible while still technically functioning. All of the fancy bells and whistles will remain exclusive to iMessage.
Some iMessage features might not be possible to implement with RCS I suppose. Maybe RCS messages will get a different colour. All Apple said in the WWDC keynote was RCS would be supported, they didn’t elaborate any further.
What kind of fancy bells and whistles does RCS have?
Apple is bringing RCS because China is requiring it, not because of what google has done. So I don’t expect it to be bare bones in that case since a huge market of theirs will be phasing out sms in the foreseeable future.
One of two things can happen...
Either Apple does the bare minimum to implement RCS, continuing to make interoperability a pain in the ass. Meanwhile, keep making improvements to iMessage.
Or Apple does it right, fully implements RCS, contributes back to the standard, and abandons iMessage as maintaining two separate platforms for the same function is a waste of resources.
I'll take a guess as to which it'll be.
Alternatively Americans just accept using 3rd party messengers. But that field is huge with big and small names competing, and ultimately anything that displaces FB messenger or WhatsApp will just get bought by Meta (or some other FAANG) and we're back at square-one.
Everybody just remember that Apple is the stubborn ones here, reluctantly adopting the standard that every other OEM has been using for a decade, and the reason they've been doing this was as a means to keep people in Apple's walled garden by "othering" people who don't have iMessage.
They knew exactly what they were doing. I got rid of my iPhone to go back to Android literally a week after the original announcement. Exchanging multimedia with my wife was literally the only thing holding me to iOS. The alternative, using third party messengers, is just plain cumbersome for one user (and likely means selling your soul to Meta nowadays, anyway).
I doubt I'm alone.
And RCS is a neutral standard, belonging to GSMA. Even though Google is a key player, they aren't the only ones. Any phone OS or OEM could always have implemented RCS. Apple has historically chosen not to, while also not reciprocating the openness with iMessage.
I guess there is one other possibility...Apple embraces RCS and, being keenly aware of its limitations and with Apple and Android cooperating, they collaborate to develop a new open standard that fully replaces both. That's probably the best outcome but also least likely to happen.
Next up, ios20 will let you change the color of your fried chat bubble in groups. And it’ll be the most innovative inclusion “evarrrhh”.
It’s super useful to know instantly if the messages are encrypted or not.
Exactly. Encryption is coming later.
Also, there are iMessage specific features that are not part of RCS, so knowing what platform someone is on is still useful for cross platform communication.
They are we got confirmation months ago
There’s a few things that are iOS device specific (like FaceTime) so I can see legit reasons to keep the different colors, if that’s what everyone is used to. Not that video calling should be a random proprietary tech, but that’s another battle…
Apple wanted to open source FaceTime and destroy Skype. They got sued and were not allowed to open source their protocols. It’s real dumb that Apple didn’t get to drive the standards there.
That doesn't make sense.
Steve Jobs loudly announced FaceTime would be made open source. Then they lost a patent lawsuit against https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-20236114
Apple paid up and could keep using the patent, but could not just let anyone else use the tech they developed as it now needed a non-open license.
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.
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 that 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.
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.
If you’re relying on iMessage for privacy, ensure you and everyone you’re messaging have gone to iCloud settings and enabled “Advanced Data Protection”
Absolutely, and excellent advice. Most of my folks I talk about
pirated
Uhh
movies
…we’ll just say THC cuz it’s legal here
with, whether it enabled or not, we go through Signal iPhone or Android
edit: I read this again and it’s a terribly worded post but I think ya get it
On the iOS 18 preview page, they show RCS with green bubbles
https://www.apple.com/ios/ios-18-preview/
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).
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?
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.
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.
Well that sucks
That’s what I’m curious abt, as well. Will RCS to iMessage be e2ee?? 🧐
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.
They won't be including encryption so it's not quite feature parity but yeah
I'm guessing orange.
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.
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.