The Android developer just published an updated landing page for Google Messages, showing off key features ranging from customization, privacy and security, and, of course, AI.
On this landing page, there are different sections for each feature set, including one for RCS. As spotted by 9to5Google, if you expand this list of RCS features and scroll to the bottom, you see a section on “Coming soon on iOS: Better messaging for all.” That’s no surprise: We’ve known Apple was adopting RCS since November. However, it’s the next line that brings the news: “Apple has announced it will be adopting RCS in the fall of 2024.”
Of course, this does not say a lot as it is “in the fall” which is anywhere over a couple of months, and Google has tried to embarrass Apple into making moves before. I suppose, though, there is the looming court case against Apple which is anyway keeping pressure on Apple. If it were not for the US court case, I would have guessed Apple may have pulled out after the EU had ruled Apple was not a dominant player in the market (although the EU case was looking more at interoperability with WhatsApp and others in Apple Messages).
Of course, with Apple actually including RCS now, they can probably argue that there is interoperability via RCS between their platform and Android too. It must be remembered that in many countries, like mine, SMS’s are paid for so are very expensive to use for any form of chatting, and the costs go up exponentially when you text an international number.
I personally have quite a few issues with interoperability with Apple:
- I still have AirTags from when I had an iPhone and I daily get the audio beeps warning me the AirTags are not connected (I use an Android phone and alternate between an iPad and an Android tablet)
- I can’t wait to sell my AirTags and get the new one’s Google was working on that will interoperate with Apple, but supposedly Apple has been delaying building in that support into their devices (which Google already built into Android for AirTags in 2023)
- Because I was on Apple Messages and my iPad still sometimes connects, I find a message on my iPad that arrived a week ago which I had not seen (I had Beeper which was solving this problem)
Apple is not at all dominant outside the USA, but it makes interacting with Apple users quite a pain, as Apple has gone out of their way to try to keep their users inside the walled garden.
See https://lifehacker.com/tech/google-just-revealed-when-apple-will-officially-adopt-rcs
#technology #RCS #Apple #interoperability
Watch them be pee-yellow bubbles or something, but still not blue, lol.
Honestly they shouldn’t be blue. I don’t say this out of some kind of elitism, I just mean that the different colored chat bubbles are what currently tell you whether you’re using Apple’s E2EE chat function or plain text SMS. RCS would also support encryption, but currently Apple allows you to opt into tighter security controls that hide your iMessage encryption keys even from Apple when your messages are backed up. Your RCS chat partner opens half of the encrypted end to Google’s security policies which you won’t have any control over. So knowing that I’m using RCS when messaging somebody is something I’d want to be aware of.
I’d assume they’d just be green
Apple hasn’t agreed to implement RCS encryption, but maybe they will anyway
Right, consider the case of iMessages being green. If you have an iMessage chat with blue bubbles, but try to text from an area with poor reception, it can fail over to SMS. With this scenario, it’s pretty clear why you still want green bubbles to tell you the chat is degraded
Maybe teal or cyan (green + blue) 😉
I like that idea.
Or maybe they could just allow users to change the colors of their bubbles as a UI preference option.
Probably too complicated. Just not allowing certain settings for that reason is a very Apple thing to do.
But what if someone accidentally changes the bubble and text colors to an unreadable combination? No. We must protect our users from this obscene nonsense.
Back when the Messages app in macOS supported other services you were able to change the bubble color. But this feature was removed over time…
RCS will replace SMS/MMS, not iMessage. Whether it’s encrypted or not, Apple will still regard it as being a tier beneath their own solution. So green is the new green.
I don’t mind the different color. Since SMS or RCS can cost money depending on where you are and which contract you have it’s an important information for me if I’m not using iMessage.
Light gray bubbles, white text
I hate that so much but you’re probably right 😅
modern features like E2EE
This is false. E2EE is not part of the spec. It’s just a feature of Google’s implementation, which Apple will absolutely not be using.
Incorrect. They’re working with the GSMA on a universal E2EE protocol. They mentioned that we should not expect E2EE in the first release of RCS on iOS.
It’s coming, but since they don’t want the proprietary thing Google has, and they want a standard, it’s coming later.
This is so important.
Yeah, I am not using it until it comes to google free android. How is it “better messaging for all” when you are forced to use google’s proprietary implementation on android?!
Just keep using signal.
The “better” though is over plain text SMS message which we have to pay per message. I use Signal but less than a handful of friends use it so it does not help me much on that front.
im curious where you are if you still pay each text
South Africa
It’s not plain text sms in either case. Apple just defaults to iMessage if the “text” is sent ios to ios. At least with signal there’s no chance of it failing back to sms.
From what I understand with Apple’s fallback (or like Google’s Message app does), if RCS is sensed by the other non-iMessage user, then RCS will be used, if not right now it would still default back to text SMS but then lose some features like hi-res photos etc. Just don’t know how it will work for me where I am on iMessage on my iPad, but when out with my Android phone will the iMessage’s wait a week until I turn on my iPad again. Would be nice if there was a proper presence sensing, and it routes to there. That may be possible with RCS, but we won’t know how Apple plans to use it, and they are not going to want it to be as shiny and nice as sending an iMessage…
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Apple is not at all dominant outside the USA
Depends on the country. iOS has over 50% of the mobile market in more nations than you might realize. This is especially true for English speaking countries.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/iphone-market-share-by-country
True, but the big number really is the USA followed maybe by Australia. Entire Middle East, Africa, South America, and Asia are Android. India is also massive (behind China), and India is 95% Android.
iOS has markets that it dominates more than the US. For example, Japan, Denmark and Canada. Japan is particularly unique. It’s just under 70% on iOS, while the US is sub 60%
Yes, but a percentage has to be seen in the context of the total to gauge its impact. India for example is 95% of 1.428 billion people vs Japan is 70% of only 124 million. There are just under 200 countries.
Apple is not at all dominant outside the USA
This is all I was replying too. Just saying there are non US markets that Apple dominates.
You’re talking about one country, worldwide Android has about 70% market share.
one country
?
I’m confused. The point of that link was to show that there are other countries, other than the US, that have most of the nation using iOS.
But yes, Android dominates worldwide installs. I’m not debating that, and that link also very clearly shows that.
So basically what everyone predicted when Apple said it would occur in 2024.
Major new features are always in the n.0.0 fall releases. No way this was going to be bundled with a late in life iOS 17 bug and security update.
But will they fix my Pixel 8 just missing and failing to send RCS messages?
A problem I’ve noticed is I’ve had one person using RCS, then a month or two later I noticed they’d reverted to text. They seemed to know nothing about RCS and claims they never disabled it. So not sure if that was maybe a phone upgrade. Others I’ve not had issues with.
“Fall of 20xx” is when Apple usually releases new versions of iOS, so it wouldn’t be a stretch to assume that iOS18 will be the release.
Love the bottom line in the posting title. Thank you.
So is this going to be standard RCS, which has no encryption and the telcos need to support, or the Googlified version that does E2E encryption but requires storing keys on Google’s servers?
RCS has interoperability issues itself and Google hasn’t been making the situation better.
I suspected this is what was going on because of the way some of the documents were worded, but I can’t find any direct reference to it. Do you have any? Re: storing encryption keys on google’s servers.
On my phone, so links may come later. It’s hard to find solid documentation on it, since their encryption extension is proprietary, but it’s been referenced as being based on the Signal Protocol. The Signal Protocol, or every implementation of it that I’ve seen, uses a central “trusted” repository of public keys to tell message originators query to encrypt the message to. For Signal, and I assume Google RCS, that central repository is Google. The protocol doesn’t allow for federation, so any system that is interoperable with Google RCS will rely on Google as the trusted authority.
The private key part I’m much less sure of, since both the Signal and Google RCS clients are closed source. Signal makes you jump through hoops to add a new client, involving one of your currently installed clients. This suggests that Signal isn’t in possession of your private keys. On the other hand, all you need to set up a new Google client is your account password. This suggests that either your keys are held by Google (perhaps encrypted by your account password) or that new keys can be added without needing explicit involvement from current keys.
Of course this is all speculation because the implementations aren’t available for inspection.
ITT: Americans talking about bubble colours and the rest of the world going “just use Telegram, Signal or Whatsapp like the rest of us”?
Not as simple as that as many did ditch WahtsApp for Meta’s documented privacy violations, and their ongoing T&C which passes the WhatsApp metadata upstream to Meta and others. A lot of people also only use one messenger, and right now nothing connects them together yet. So I have masses of family and friends that only use WhatsApp, and I now only have SMS contact with them. About 8% to 10% do have multiple messengers so I see some on Signal and Telegram.
The last thing the world needs, is for WhatsApp to become the default dominant standard. That is a company that can be least trusted out of everyone worldwide, based on their history. With the app installed, the metadata includes constant location, usage, contacts, messages to who, etc.
