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.
Man it’s a shame that Google RCS doesn’t run on android phones by default if you have a custom rom or rooted your device or have an unlocked bootloader. Guess this won’t really affect me then and it doesn’t really matter.
Yeah really wish there was a single FOSS alternative that supported RCS. Hard to call it an open protocol when pretty much just Google Messages supports it.
Yeah same here! But I think google is trying to monopolize RCS at the moment and there are really no good alternatives especially here in the United States that people are willing to use because its just attached to a phone number and you don’t have to think about it.
I know people want this. I do to. But SMS going away will suck. Even in 2024, there’s still that moment you have every now and then that you can’t get a call out but a sms will make it out just fine. SMS rides along with the carriers ping signal. It’s not part of the data signal.
Google Messages app already falls back to SMS automatically if RCS fails. SMS is not going anywhere.
I don’t think sms will go away, that ping is fundamental to GSM & LTE so far as I can tell.
You may need an app that explicitly taps into the sms feature though
Right now my phone gives me the option if RCS fails for some reason, to send the message again with SMS. I assume that will be the case here as well.
RCS is crap, inconsistent, unreliable, lacking, buggy. It doesn’t even handle Dual SIM …
Android needed a native “iMessage” style solution at least 10 years ago.
I can buy a $99 flip phone, basic phone, up to a $1,500 premium device, SMS/MMS will function the same across all 3 devices. RCS however will not. So how is this the answer to advanced messaging on Android? It isn’t…
If Google bought BBM & made it their own when it was still relevant in the consumer space, made it native on all Android 10 devices & later with SMS/MMS fall back, this would be something! Damn I miss BlackBerry…
RCS is not seamless, not native, and it simply is not it. It’s the 1 thing I hate about Android, as creative and customizable as the software is, we need more…I hate what Apple represents in the consumer space and how people often think who use an iPhone which makes me never want one…
The moment Google saw the exclusivity Apple was doing, Android should have followed suite.
RCS sucks…
I just want my gf to have the same SMS app as me so she can see the silly emoji animations I see 😢
I want to be able to turn off those silly animations.
😡
🫄 emoji racist
Apple could easily do the bare minimum to keep regulators at bay while still keeping the experience as shitty as possible so that Android will continue to look bad. For example they could refuse to implement reactions or typing indicators, or they could even deliberately compress videos. I’m expecting the worst until we see otherwise.
This is exactly what I’m expecting. The company of “buy your mom an iPhone” isn’t going to be aiming for maximum interoperability.
I’m still of the opinion that the basic message app should only be SMS.
Then anything else should be its own thing. Mixing the two is a recipe for disaster, where it’s a consumer product.Counterpoint: SMS shouldn’t exist, and RCS is our best shot at replacing it right now
SMS has one feature nothing else does. It’s not data per se. if you can ping a tower you can get a message out. You can’t do that with anything else.
Makes a difference when you’re out in BFE.
RCS is the wrong standard to use though, as there isn’t a single FOSS Android RCS client. They should support something like Matrix.
Yea, like that would ever in literally any possible incarnation of any possible existence where Apple is a thing happen. Totally.
I mean, in the Steve Jobs Apple it might have.
Steve originally pushed for web apps to dominate on the emerging open web standards.
Apple used to care about the customer more than they do now (IMO).
What if they kept the green color just to troll…
It’s not just to troll. There are actual differences between the RCS and iMessage protocols and their capabilities.
Sure, but we all know what the real reason is…
It would be inappropriate to not make it clear what messaging protocol is being used.
Most RCS chats will be going through googles servers. A user might want to know that.
No, apple is not using Google’s proprietary RCS they are using Open Source GSM RCS which doesn’t go through Google’s servers and it doesn’t include end-to-end encryption.
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.
The bubbles will remain green. At the very least, it’s handy a hand way to tell if chat is unencrypted.
But rcs can be e2ee right?
Encryption was never part of the RCS standard, and Google has been gatekeeping the encryption solution that they’ve been using… which is why there aren’t a lot of E2EE RCS clients floating around.
Google finally conceded several months ago, and now encryption will be part of RCS and managed by an independent working group that Google, Apple, and others can contribute to.
Phase 1 of RCS is about implementing the unencrypted foundation of the protocol. Encryption is supposed to come when the working group has aligned.
On the iOS 18 preview page, they show RCS with green bubbles
Image for the lazy (and yes, of course, Apple’s breaking their own accessibility guideline of having text at least 3:1 contrast ratio for text to be readable and instead making it 2:1 by picking the lightest shade of green possible).
And yet Google still hasn’t rolled out RCS for Google Voice, and last I checked there was an issue with it and Google Fi as well. (It works but it precludes some advertised feature of Fi or something.)
Currently Google has bricked RCS for people with rooted phones in such a way that it fails silently for like the 4th time this year, and it’s looking like the modders may not be able to keep getting around it.
RCS is proprietary, right?
No but also yes.
The spec itself is open, but implementations that are in the wild aren’t. Google’s implementation is proprietary, for example.
On Android, Google has went out of their way to make other RCS implementations virtually impossible to implement. Samsung, for example, had to enter an agreement with Google to use their implementation, otherwise they’d have no RCS.
As of now, the easiest way to implement RCS outside of using Google’s proprietary implementation is to create your own OS and RCS implementation for it.
I loved how blasé he mentioned it and moved right along. It is a pretty big announcement and I’m glad they are finally doing it. It will benefit many even if only indirectly.
It’s a terrible move, especially to make it default.
It’s just as bad a protocol as SMS in its own way:
It’s still tied to a phone number/sim, so you can’t just login to the service via a browser or an app.
It has lots of failures, worst of all, SILENT FAILURES, where you don’t even know your messages aren’t being sent - just look at the communities around here discussing it.
There’s no common protocol here really, lots of parts work only by decree of each host (e.g. iOS won’t have E2EE with anyone not on iOS, because that requires every cell provider to agree to the config they’re going to use.
This is the 21st century, and this is the best they can do - a protocol that fails with no notice? Without standardized encryption? That’s tied to hardware?
I had a better experience in 2009 running Pidgin on my phone and my laptop using XMPP. That didn’t require a phone number - I could login and see my messages in both places simultaneously… 15 years ago.
No, RCS is a way to make the plebes think they’ve got a new and better system while still delivering garbage.
Love you downvoters that don’t know enough to argue, just drive by and downvote.
ONE person had the guts to say why he disagreed with me.
Nevermind that BorgDrone explained what’s wrong with RCS better than I care to. You drive-by downvoters can’t even be bothered to learn about RCS.
RCS is garbage. Plain and simple. I will never allow it on my devices, just like with Whatsapp, Facecrap, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
Who even uses sms/mms these days? The only cases I see myself using sms is the poorly implemented 2fa over sms, which is bad since sim hijack is a real threat.
Other than that whatsapp is the norm around here, whether we like it or not. Some also use facebook messanger, but no1 uses mms, it never picked up with the astronomical prices that carriers kept around for no good reason. I wish more people used telegram or signal, but 99% of my contacts don’t, so whatsapp it is.
I use it to communicate with my family
It’s more convenient than chat apps.
What is more conveniant about sms compared to other apps? You still have to open the app, choose the contact from the list and start typing. It’s the exact same options. If I do it on the sms app, signal app, telegram or messanger app it’s still the same 2 taps then start typing. The only difference is what’s on the other side. If they only use sms then it’s obvious you have no other choice of communicating with them, but you can’t say it’s more conveniant.
It’s convenient because I don’t have to tell my family to use a different app. It’s hard enough to get them to install whatsapp, let alone actually use it. And I don’t even like using whatsapp.
I guess, if I’m on Android, this will make no difference to me?
If you’re texting an iPhone user it’ll make a difference
You mean SMS? I rarely use SMS these days. And I don’t know many people with an iPhone. That’s a US, UK thing it seems.
RCS is a terrible standard. But China wants it, so Apple is forced to add it.
EU is forcing them, not China. It’s a whole lot better than SMS at least.
I’m gonna wait to see how this is implemented but it sounds bad on the face of it.
