Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year

kae@lemmy.ca to Technology@lemmy.ml – 621 points – Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year - 9to5Mac
9to5mac.com

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.

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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.

Yeah. My iphone fanatic of a friend was complaining about something on hers the other day, and was like "Why doesn't Apple just do {whatever}?"

My reply was basically that Apple didn't become a trillion dollar company by giving customers what they want. They became a trillion dollar company by telling customers what they want and marketing the crap out of it.

That was Jobs’ (Jobs’s …? Jobses..?) whole thing. People don’t know what they want until we’ve told them.

And I’d say it’s worked out pretty well for the entire tech industry so far.

It's popular idea for a lot of innovation focused groups tbh. "If I have the people what they asked for I would have given them faster horses." -Henry Ford

And to a certain degree there is truth to it.

The People: "We could really do with less antisemitic conspiracy theories."

Henry Ford: "Hold my beer."

To be fair, Google has been doing the same stuff with RCS E2E encryption. It ain’t open. There is a reason why Android isn’t littered with dope messaging apps that support encrypted RCS.

… or by providing some that works really well for the majority of customers.

What was she complaining about?

Let’s be fair, things like RCS E2E encryption are firmly under control by Google. People like to claim RCS is open, but it’s not.

If RCS was a proper open standard, we would have a lot of awesome messaging apps to choose from. We don’t, and the reason is because Google has been gatekeeping.

I’m annoyed that Apple is late to the game, and I hate that they needed to be pressured to get here, BUT I’m glad to see that they’re going to support universal alternatives to the crap you still have to ask Pichai to please let you use.

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I never understood this argument. Apple lost its fight to make the environment worse for the customer, so you're gonna reward them?

I think that's the irony they're pointing out

I saw a rumor mill style post that Apple was going to allow sideloading of apps. If so, that'll probably get me to switch. These changes and choice in software eliminates my gripes with iOS vs. Android.

As a point of clarity, I think both suck. But if Apple removes it's disadvantages (even if by force) and is the more privacy respecting option out of the box, it makes sense to me.

So you look at their history of shitty behavior and want to give them money because they were forced to act right in some cases?

OK then...

They just need to stop using slaves and fighting attempts to fight against it and I might actually get to appreciate the cool things their engineers do actually make.

I don’t know how much of a gun it was. Apple has definitely been working on RCS support for a year; you don’t add that in a few months. Similarly I’m pretty sure Apple has been considering USB C in iPhone since at least when they started working on the USB C on iPad, which is what 5 years old?

Of course without pressure they would have probably be slower to move forward, and with Apple secrecy it’s always hard to tell how long things have been ready to ship. But let’s not pretend they just woke up this morning with a horse head in their bed and told their direction team to start working on this.

I hear you, but isn't the proverbial horse's head the fact that the EU is looming over them and forcing them to make a move?

RCS and USBC have been available for a while. It seems disingenuous not to acknowledge that Apple has purposely dragged their feet so they could make more profit selling proprietary software and hardware which is probably why you're being downvoted

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Love to see Apple being forced into making good decisions against their will.

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.

What kind of openness are you hoping for? Google has built their solution with a bunch of already open pieces.

RCS + Signal protocol + MLS

https://www.androidauthority.com/google-messages-mls-3346918/

https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/20/23801536/google-messages-app-mls-support-announce

@Ghostalmedia

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Accessing the keys from the server isn't really a mystery or hidden. It's technically possible for Apple to write software to query servers run by Google as well as any servers they created for themselves.

You don't need implementation source code when you have open standards already.

WhatsApp actually used Signal's development team to rollout the Signal protocol for them, but that app is still untrustworthy.

@skullgiver

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AFAIK Apple has said they are only going to use official RCS spec with no extensions and will work on adding encryption to the spec. Google has announced that they will work with Apple and the GSMA to implement official RCS encryption.

Yeah, all in all, this is a good news all around m. Apple is coming into the fold, and E2EE should become more accessible for more RCS clients.

Really? Like honest to God? They aren't gonna gimp the implementation, are they?

Yellow bubbles for all RCS messages.

Yellow bubbles and the text notification sound is permanently a teenage girl saying "ewww"

Honestly that would make texting people on Android from an iPhone so much fun.

If they wanted it to have a dark pattern they should make the text slightly blurry or move one pixel back and forth to annoy us and the text tone is the sound of someone throwing up and is un-mutable so you’re forced to either listen to it at full volume or block them (ideal??).

You will be shamed and sentenced to isolation from the rest of the US if caught with a disgusting yellow bubble. Have some self respect, buy an iphone, use imessage

Probably will. They're only doing it for legal reasons, not out of the kindness of their heart

We all know the bubbles will still be green

Meh, doesnt bother me, its the iphone users that tend to care

I’ve really never met one that really cared, other than knowing that a green bubble meant you knew that certain things weren’t available in chat

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.

There are several of these solutions in the wild now. Basically, the phone tunnels into MacOS VM that sends the message through actual iMessage.

Kind of janky, but it works.

Beeper is sick! Would highly recommend. Or if you’re feeling frisky, self hosting the bridge in a docker container is possible. The container is a kvm osx vm.

Does beeper have a docker? I tried to install it last week, only saw an ansible notebook or something like that, broke my nginx and didn't even work

I want to reverse proxy to it, not have it take total control of my vps or dedicate a vps to it

If you have a matrix server, then yes the mautrix-imessage bridge has a docker container. Beeper itself you can’t really self host as it’s their matrix server you live on (I haven’t checked out the beeper-selfhosted git yet).

I’m pretty sure the playbook is just docker under the hood on a service user instead of your normal user. There’s a way to run the playbook with docker as well (memory is fuzzy on that).

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.

So Apple could care less? On a scale of one to ten, how much less?

Seems more likely to be Apple getting ahead of incoming legislation than a small phone company’s announcement. Companies like Apple don’t make huge changes within a couple days of nearly unknown (to the general market) companies doing something that might slightly affect them.

Regulations work, and in this case, it doesn’t look like competition played any role. Apple only makes changes like this when forced to by regulators or, in the case of privacy, when it’s marketable. Capitalistic self regulating is almost a myth with them— they wouldn’t even stop selling those butterfly keyboards until their self imposed refresh timeline allowed for it.

I've no doubt it's more than one thing that is driving this, but my point was they are only now agreeing because they have to and not because they want to. This company has literally taken away their customers ability to receive quality media from their friends with the sole intent to pressure people into getting their product so they belong. I know it's hyperbolic to say, but it's basically using teens to bully each other into buying something. Someone had to pitch this idea to a room full of people and all those people thought wow this is a great idea, think about how fucked up that is.

Nothing doesn’t have anything real - it’s a Mac in the cloud with some janky scripting puppeting Messages.app. They haven’t figured out how to plug in at a protocol level or anything.

Beeper, and the open-source Matrix bridges it uses have been around for a while now, including the iMessage bridge.

Definitely a better choice than Nothing's "we don't believe in open source" sketchware

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So great to see Apple finally invent RCS! /s

A messaging system that breaks away from SMS and MMS? Apple is so brave.

...and don't forget "innovative." Now, where is my wallet?

Off to pay them for the pleasure of being their product, I assume?

(Apple is becoming an ad-company)

Apple was kind enough to beta test it on Android for years, too!

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.

I don't message anyone with an iPhone. Other than the different colored bubbles what does it do? How is the quality degraded?

It just seems like Apple kept it separate so their obsessed fans would have something to feel superior about.

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.

The biggest issue I've heard of is that message size is very constrained, so photos and videos are reduced to postage stamps.

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.

iPhones don't support multimedia messaging over anything other than SMS. On Android when you send an image to someone you're sending the actual file (the original file with all its bytes intact). If you try to send it to someone over SMS it'll just goes "nope, you shouldn't do that you should send the actual file", and seamlessly intervenes and just does it.

But since IOS can't receive files, instead preferring to use their proprietary AirDrop system which they don't feel like making available to other developers, Android phones are forced to send it as an SMS. Problem with that is there is a max file size and the image has to be heavily compressed in order to fit.

So then iPhone users (who typically know less about technology than my grandmother) start to complain about the terrible quality of Android photos, even though it's actually an issue with transferring the file, and it's not Androids fault. So what's going to happen is that next year the quality of Android photos is massively going to jump really weirdly 🤔.

** checks if hell has frozen **

Apple RCS messaging and USB-C, Microsoft complying with beingle able to renove Edge, Google not challenging being a gatekeeper corp...

Did someone introduce a plot twist for the sake of entertainment in the Matrix overworld? Did I miss something?

This is the effect of the EU.

Even as an EU citizen it's a bit hard to believe...
I can't fathom that those politicians decided to finally do anything besides line some pockets from lobbyists.

Wait what about Edge? Can I finally remove it without scripts and registry hacks??

Take from it as you want because it's Microsoft...
https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/microsoft-will-let-windows-11-users-in-europe-uninstall-edge-bing-and-disable-ads-in-eea-dma
Maybe they will water the decision down with loopholes

Ah fuck, here's the watering down

The company describes these changes as specific to Windows 11 PCs in the EEA, so it's unclear if users outside this area will be able to utilize these functions.

Fuckin MS lmao

I wonder how this will work. So many registry tweaks which forcefully removed Edge also removed the "web view" and therefore broke a lot of parts of the OS. Maybe this is just removing the shortcuts, links and edge URIs from the OS

It's probably relatively trivial for MS since they have the entire codebase to work with.

I'm more curious on how they plan on limiting it to the EEA, I bet we'll have much simpler/safer one-click mods that will force windows into deploying these EEA only changes in any region in short order

It depends on how tightly integrated it is into the OS. Like right now File Explorer is very tightly integrated with the desktop. So much so that if you can get File Explorer to t crash, it'll most likely bring the entire desktop UI down with it.

Software is like a huge house of cards. You can't take a card from the bottom without expecting the rest of the house to stand

I don't think they've have one click methods to employ "EEA" mode or something like that. I think it's more likely to be a version of Windows compiled specifically with these limitations in mind. You'll likely have to install a specific variant of Windows for EEA

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When will I be able to use RCS in other messaging apps than Google Messages on Android?

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.

Wait, so Apple is doing something good for 3rd party apps? I did not expect that to happen in my lifetime

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.

Meta too. Their work in the Opencompute space is really cool, but it definitely feels like a jab at all their major tech competition going into the cloud space.

I'm sure they just don't want all data to go through google servers, and thus give google more control over the protocol

I will never trust big tech companies. My successors will never trust big tech companies.

I'm not sure that's quite the case. It sounds like it's just a big undertaking where Google and Samsung are the only ones that have done it. There was never anything stopping Apple.

It’s totally the case with the encryption element. Pretty widely known.

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The RCS standard, not Google’s implementation. There are still going to be iMessage features that won’t work.

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.

Well the standard is to laser than iMessage and kinda bad fundamentally, so I wouldn’t count on much else.

No matter how poorly Apple's implementation works with Google's, this will be a net positive for consumers.

Apple finally giving in allows RCS to become a true standard that works across any mobile devices. That will motivate developers and the industry as a whole to continue to improve upon it.

The initial release may be underwhelming but in the long run this week be good for everyone.

If Google's implementation remained the defacto "RCS" that everyone used there would be no motivation to add things like encryption to the standard as everyone is using Google's anyway

The elephant in the room is impending legislation in the European Union that could’ve ultimately required Malus to open up iMessage.

Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce you to The Brussels Effect!

Apple is being Brusseled 🙂

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.

And they will act like they invented it

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.

*RCS Messaging will require the external coprocessor dongle, available at just 49.99

Rest of us^by^ ^google^^TM^

Yeah...not really an open standard.

RCS is an open standard. Many mobile providers dragged their feet for so long that Google finally just started making it so that Google messages would relay RCS through their servers. The whole point is for the carriers to have RCS servers. Blame the carriers not Google for this. For once, Google isn't the one that did something shitty.

Doesn't this mean all text message traffic will flow through the control of Google servers?

I don't know anything about how RCS works aside from a couple of comments talking about the Google servers problem.

In theory anyone can host an RCS endpoint but in practice that means carriers (historically) or OS vendors (in modernity). So in effect yes all RCS messages will pass through Google servers, but mostly because Apple to Apple texts will remain on iMessage. But any texts starting or ending on Android will go through Google. Note that this doesn’t really change much as Google’s privacy policy for Android users already discloses the bulk ingestion, scanning and processing of communications, including text messages.

I thought that it was the carriers the ones hosting the RCS server. Is this not true?

some carriers do but Google runs their own as well because carriers were slow to adopt.

Some do, but what Google rolled out in Android Messages is their own implementation unrelated to the carriers. Ostensibly so it works regardless of carrier, but what they rolled out is a semi-proprietary implementation that only works on their app. Ergo if you use a third party texting app, no RCS. So it’s a sort of “Android iMsssage” thing anyway. Apple plans to implement Google’s version, again sidestepping the carriers.

There can be other servers and apps, for example Samsung has their own app. It's hard for me to track down details about how they interoperate but it appears that the various services need to agree to work with one another, so I don't think just anyone can create an RCS app and infrastructure and have it work with Google's and Samsung's. However, I imagine Apple is fully capable of it and would be surprised if iPhone RCS wasn't going through Apples network.

I don't want to be cynical, but is this part required for Apple to implement RCS?

"and bring a wide range of iMessage-style features to messaging between iPhone and Android users."

I can totally imagine it being limited to the encryption and the bare minimum, as imessages features don't perfectly overlap with the RCS features (e.g. emojis).

Let me know when you can use RCS on an Android phone without Google Play Services outside of Google Messages

I think this is because the carriers were slow / refused to host RCS on their servers so most carriers make you use Google servers.

Seems like Nothing did it?

No, Nothing will provide a bridge to iMessage by logging with your password on the Mac mini farm. Not something that you want.

Also nothing didn't shit, they partnered with Sunbird.

I know what happened. But maybe with Nothings announcement Apple decided "fuck it" You know?

Nah Beeper/matrix have had this capability available FOSS for much longer

Nothing have been pretty good at marketing really, all those headlines saying "Nothing brings blue bubble in Android" instead of "Nothing to bundle the Sunbird app with their phones".

I’m glad that they’re finally going to implement it but I can’t help but shake the feeling that there’s still going to be some interoperability issues.

If they can manage it, it's safe to assume they will implement those issues

Next year sounds like it'll be a feature for iPhone 16 pro Max.

It’s going to be a software update, so not tied to a new phone release model.

hopefully this was the huge hurdle needed clear that'll eventually allow 3rd party developers access to rcs

I'm guessing the bubbles will stay the different colors, which is all apple really cares about. They get a /lot/ of sales on bubble color. So keep the regulators who want to open up imessage to others at bay and keep the primary benefit to apple. As a bonus, it's less terrible in general for all of us.

Win-win-win.

They get a /lot/ of sales on bubble color.

This is soooo weird for me. I mean, it's the content which counts?

A lot of high schoolers and people who never grew up after that consider it a status symbol.

No they don’t.

Really? High schoolers who have been known to shame/bully/hold random things as status symbols that most grown adults wouldn't even give a second thought to?

Lmao, they definitely do and I've even seen it first hand in a past life as a substitute. There's also plenty of articles and surveys to confirm it

Plus dating apps. When I used to be on Tinder, a bunch of girls stopped talking to me once we moved off Tinder and my bubble showed up green lmao.

Thats because it’s just not true that people care about bubble color. Or at least no one I’ve ever encountered at least. The way people talk about it on here you’d think kids were killing themselves because they have an android phone and no one with iPhones will talk to them.

Not sure if you're serious, but as someone who graduated a US high school just a few years ago, yes young people actually do care about stupid things like this. Real otherwise completely normal seeming people discriminate based on bubble color.

They should be publicly ridiculed and shamed then for their stupidity.