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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hopefully this was the huge hurdle needed clear that’ll eventually allow 3rd party developers access to rcs
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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?
You’re opinion? Maybe 3.5 or fewer more
Apple could care less about them.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ask/comments/17wx1tq/whats_so_wrong_that_it_became_right/k9jzi63/
It will never be right, I couldn’t care less what a bunch of Redditors think
Could of, should of, would of. I’m not gonna loose sleep on it and I hope your not gonna
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
Matrix and the bridges can all be run in docker, yes.
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).
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They aren’t doing this by choice lol
Still better than nothing lol.
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.
Rest of usby googleTM
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.
*RCS Messaging will require the external coprocessor dongle, available at just 49.99
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
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
The Signal protocol and MLS are useless without access to the key servers.
WhatsApp is also basically Signal’s protocol, but writing your own WhatsApp client is still very difficult. Without a documented implementation, you’ll still be reverse engineering Google’s solution if you want to inter-operate. Apple will easily be able to get the necessary documentation from Google, but right now that openness is vague and noncommittal.
Google said they were moving MLS into Android’s code, but every article says Google “announces” or “claims” or “promises”. When it comes to the actual source code, there’s nothing public out there right now.
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.
Do you have a link to those standards? All I could find was a high-level overview of “this is how the Signal based crypto is used in Messages” from a year and a half ago. It mentions extending the XML scheme used in RCS, but doesn’t provide a schema or any other details.
Google Messages and WhatsApp are both based on documented, secure protocols, and neither can be particularly trusted because both are run by data-hungry ad companies. I trust both companies to make the right choice in giving customers this little bit of privacy so they don’t leave the platform entirely, but they’re both equally iffy.
Hopefully with MIMI we will see complete cross-messenger compatibility, so open source messengers can be used for all communication.
Here are the links to the documentation for these standards:
MLS - https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mls/documents/
Signal Protocol - https://www.signal.org/docs/
RCS - https://www.gsma.com/futurenetworks/rcs/universal-profile/ & https://www.gsma.com/futurenetworks/resources/rcs-up-2-4-uni/
I knew where to find these, but where are the details on Google’s implementation of them? Because that’s what’s most important here.
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.
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).
Fucking finally
So will Google shut the fuck up about it now?
No. They will now introduce costs for carriers :)
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.
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RCS falls back to SMS/MMS, so it’s not another app, it’s a replacement for texting (and iMessage).
iMessage is, basically, just a proprietary way of doing what RCS is designed to do, so Apple can use peer pressure to get teens (and adults) to exclusivity buy iPhones so their messages are the “right” colour.
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It already has support on Android. I send rcs messages to other friends with Android. Read receipts. No longer mms and sms. It’s great.
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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?
Many carries use Google Jibe service for their RCS implementation.
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.
Samsung’s app is just rebranded Google app.
