In a stunning flip, Apple has confirmed in an announcement that it’s going to carry RCS to iPhone, drastically bettering the expertise of sending messages between iPhones and most Android telephones. The announcement comes at a time when Apple is underneath unprecedented regulatory and authorized strain to interoperate higher with non-Apple services and products and elevated public outcry from customers to do the identical.
The assertion, despatched to a number of media shops, reads:
Later subsequent 12 months, we shall be including assist for RCS Common Profile, the usual as at present printed by the GSM Affiliation. We imagine RCS Common Profile will supply a greater interoperability expertise when in comparison with SMS or MMS. This can work alongside iMessage, which is able to proceed to be the most effective and most safe messaging expertise for Apple customers.
RCS is the brand new messaging customary that has been closely pushed by Google and adopted by the GSM Affiliation, a governing requirements physique for the wi-fi business. It’s meant to interchange SMS and MMS because the default carrier-based messaging answer, taking it as much as trendy requirements in an interoperable, device-and-platform agnostic approach. Whereas RCS just isn’t unique to Android, it’s supported within the messaging shoppers for many Android telephones and Apple’s reluctance to assist the usual has made it a de-facto “Android solely” expertise.
Apple informed TechRadar that it gained’t be supporting “proprietary extensions” that search so as to add encryption on prime of RCS and hopes, as a substitute, to work with the GSM Affiliation so as to add encryption to the usual. On Android telephones some apps (corresponding to Google Messages) assist encryption whereas others don’t.
We don’t know precisely how RCS will work on the iPhone, however the most probably situation is that RCS shoppers will nonetheless appear to be messaging with SMS shoppers, aka inexperienced bubbles, whereas iMessage customers will nonetheless be despatched with blue bubbles. Apple will nonetheless need to differentiate between messages despatched with Apple units and people despatched with Android telephones since many options gained’t be supported by means of RCS. However they’ll have the ability to co-exist and a single inexperienced bubble gained’t blow up the entire group chat.
We don’t know when “later subsequent 12 months” is, however that phrase makes it sound like that is an iOS 18 characteristic due for launch within the fall. We’ll possible be taught extra at WWDC in June, however in a nutshell, RCS assist implies that once you use Messages to speak with somebody who has an Android cellphone (or there’s an Android consumer within the group textual content), you’ll get options like:
- Sending messages over Wi-Fi or mobile.
- Group chats as much as 100 folks.
- Full-size recordsdata, photographs, and movies (as much as 100MB, most likely).
- Supply and Learn reciepts.
- Typing indicators.
- Improved safety, together with encryption.
The RCS Common Profile has gone by means of a variety of updates in the previous few years so as to add options and capabilities, and we don’t but know which model Apple intends to assist, or which optionally available options it’s going to embrace. You may most likely count on all the pieces on the record above, however maybe not a few of RCS’s extra superior or latest options.
The transfer is one thing of an about-face for Apple, which hasn’t proven any inclination to undertake RCS. At a convention final September, in truth, Tim Cook dinner informed an attendee that the most effective answer for blurry photographs despatched from iPhones to Android telephones is to “Purchase your Mother an iPhone.”
As for iMessage, it’s going to nonetheless supply extra options, together with the power to edit and unsend messages and superior privateness and safety. In different phrases, there’ll nonetheless be an iMessage benefit, however the expertise for iPhone customers who ship messages to these utilizing Android telephones will enhance drastically—even of they’ll nonetheless want to have a look at inexperienced bubbles.
