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.
It looks like Apple is addressing one of the biggest gripes with RCS - Google’s proprietary crap that isn’t opened up to small 3rd parties. Apple wants things like E2EE to be a universal standard that anyone can use, not something Google only dishes out to big phone manufacturers.
Wait, so Apple is doing something good for 3rd party apps? I did not expect that to happen in my lifetime
Apple, Google, and Microsoft all magically become really into open alternatives when one of their competitors starts to dominate or control a significant portion of the marketplace with proprietary tech.
Apple specifically had LOTS of examples of this back when they were a smaller player. OS X and Safari really leaned into open standards when MS was the 900lb gorilla.
Meta too. Their work in the Opencompute space is really cool, but it definitely feels like a jab at all their major tech competition going into the cloud space.
I’m sure they just don’t want all data to go through google servers, and thus give google more control over the protocol
I will never trust big tech companies. My successors will never trust big tech companies.
I’m not sure that’s quite the case. It sounds like it’s just a big undertaking where Google and Samsung are the only ones that have done it. There was never anything stopping Apple.
It’s totally the case with the encryption element. Pretty widely known.
Gotcha. Thanks for clearing that up.