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.
Let me know when you can use RCS on an Android phone without Google Play Services outside of Google Messages
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.
Ugh, yet another chat network to use…
I guess now we wait for Android to add support too.
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.
Some time ago Signal was falling back to SMS too.
How is this propietary aspect of iMessage non existing on Android with RCS? Years goes by and still the only Android app that can support this protocol seems to be Google Messages.
Third-party RCS clients like Beeper use Android virtual machine with Google Messages running… Seriously, even Facebook Messenger seems to be less locked down.
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.
Google Messages is a proprietary chat app that connects to proprietary Google Jire servers on phone carrier’s site. It does not use barebone RCS protocol, this is why only Google is now able to make such app even if the app does not use any permission that other apps don’t have.
Native support for Android was planned for Android 11, soon we’ll get Android 14 and still no support in sight.
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 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.
Next year sounds like it’ll be a feature for iPhone 16 pro Max.