Apple is shocking the world today to adopt RCS messaging standard for iMessage. When iMessage users talk to people outside the service, iMessage will soon be able to revert to the RCS carrier messaging standard instead of SMS, which comes with the benefits of read receipts, high-quality media sending, and text indicators. Your conversations with your green foam friends will be a little less scary.
Apple sent a statement to several media outlets:
Later next year, we will add support for RCS Universal Profile, a standard currently published by the GSM Association. We believe that RCS Universal Profile will offer a better interoperability experience than SMS or MMS. It will work alongside iMessage, which will continue to be the best and most secure messaging experience for Apple users.
iMessage is currently under siege from all sides by various parties. Google has been running a “get the message” campaign against Apple for the past year or two, asking the company to adopt RCS. Last year, Apple CEO was Tim Cook he asked on stage if the company improved messaging with Android, and he replied, “I don’t hear our users asking us to put a lot of energy into it at this point,” and told the audience to “buy your mom an iPhone.” “If he wanted to communicate more easily with his mother. Regulators in the European Union have yet to decide the fate of iMessage, but if it meets the requirements to become a major technological “Gatekeeper”, the iMessage protocol will be forced to open in the EU. The The Wall Street Journal Last year, an article subtitled “Teens Fear Green Text Bubble” detailed the abuse Android users suffered due to SMS bounces that took down the capabilities of iMessage group chats.87 percent Most US teenagers have an iPhone).
On the Android side of things, with companies desperate to work better with iMessage, Google cobbled together an emoji reply solution for Google Messages and the Android maker. information Center.
So give credit what you will, but Apple has bowed to the cacophony of voices clamoring for RCS. For all the noise, I don’t know if RCS support will change that much. Adding status indicators and better media to SMS would certainly be welcome, but like SMS before it, RCS will still be the worst way to send a message compared to all the feature chat apps out there. RCS is still a service tied to your carrier number, so it will now be available to everyone, at least like SMS.
RCS is an SMS update that was first developed by the GSM Association in 2008 during the heyday of pay-per-message SMS messaging. After unlimited messaging became available and messaging became a cash cow, carrier enthusiasm for upgrading to RCS fell by the wayside and chat apps took over. There wasn’t really any enthusiasm around RCS until Google removed the standard in 2015 by purchasing back-end RCS provider Jibe, and then made a harder transition to RCS in 2018 after the death of Google Allo. Google has signed up multiple carriers for its Jibe backend, so even if you’re an iPhone user, there’s a good chance your RCS messages will now flow through Google’s servers.
Google has several extensions on top of RCS that add important features like encryption, but it’s not part of the GSMA standard. Apple’s statement carefully announcing support for the “currently published standard by the GSM Association” seems tailor-made to exclude all the fancy Google additions. Android messages on iMessage will also probably still be green, so I don’t know if this will change the concern about teenage violence much.