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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Fucking finally
When will I be able to use RCS in other messaging apps than Google Messages on Android?
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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.
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.
Gotcha. Thanks for clearing that up.
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.
They aren’t doing this by choice lol
Still better than nothing lol.
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).
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.
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”.
hopefully this was the huge hurdle needed clear that’ll eventually allow 3rd party developers access to rcs
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
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 🙂
So will Google shut the fuck up about it now?
No. They will now introduce costs for carriers :)
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.
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.
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.
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 🤔.
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
