The long-awaited day is here: Apple has announced that its Messages app will support RCS in iOS 18. The move comes after years of taunting, cajoling, and finally, some regulatory scrutiny from the EU.
Right now, when people on iOS and Android message each other, the service falls back to SMS — photos and videos are sent at a lower quality, messages are shortened, and importantly, conversations are not end-to-end encrypted like they are in iMessage. Messages from Android phones show up as green bubbles in iMessage chats and chaos ensues.
Apple’s announcement was likely an effort to appease EU regulators.
They probably will. They’re aware of and actively foster the “in-group” psychology that plays out in youth social circles. Anyone with a non-Apple phone is excluded as lower class, weird, or less-than. You don’t get included in the group chats that are often the center of your peers’ social lives because no one wants the annoyance of dealing with the limitations of conversing with a green bubble. You must conform, purchase the correct products, and sign over your life to the correct social media platforms if you want to participate in society.
Yea, but the real question is will the youth see through the BS or not? Before it wasn’t just a color, green bubbles actively broke things in blue bubble group chats
But once that’s gone with (hopefully) the rollout of RCS (which should fix most, if not all, the things that broke gcs) it really would be “just a color”
Ofc, Apple being Apple, I wouldn’t put it past them to artificially “break” things or arbitrarily introduce limits between RCS and iMessage
That’s where my money is
I’m guessing RCS support will be as barebones as possible while still technically functioning. All of the fancy bells and whistles will remain exclusive to iMessage.
Some iMessage features might not be possible to implement with RCS I suppose. Maybe RCS messages will get a different colour. All Apple said in the WWDC keynote was RCS would be supported, they didn’t elaborate any further.
Apple is bringing RCS because China is requiring it, not because of what google has done. So I don’t expect it to be bare bones in that case since a huge market of theirs will be phasing out sms in the foreseeable future.
Next up, ios20 will let you change the color of your fried chat bubble in groups. And it’ll be the most innovative inclusion “evarrrhh”.
It’s super useful to know instantly if the messages are encrypted or not.
Exactly. Encryption is coming later.
Also, there are iMessage specific features that are not part of RCS, so knowing what platform someone is on is still useful for cross platform communication.
There’s a few things that are iOS device specific (like FaceTime) so I can see legit reasons to keep the different colors, if that’s what everyone is used to. Not that video calling should be a random proprietary tech, but that’s another battle…
Apple wanted to open source FaceTime and destroy Skype. They got sued and were not allowed to open source their protocols. It’s real dumb that Apple didn’t get to drive the standards there.