In a stunning flip, Apple has confirmed in a press release that it’s going to deliver RCS to iPhone, drastically enhancing the expertise of sending messages between iPhones and most Android telephones. The announcement comes at a time when Apple is below unprecedented regulatory and authorized stress 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 retailers, reads:
Later subsequent 12 months, we shall be including help for RCS Common Profile, the usual as at present revealed by the GSM Affiliation. We imagine RCS Common Profile will provide a greater interoperability expertise when in comparison with SMS or MMS. This can work alongside iMessage, which can proceed to be the most effective and most safe messaging expertise for Apple customers.
RCS is the brand new messaging commonplace 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 switch SMS and MMS because the default carrier-based messaging answer, taking it as much as fashionable requirements in an interoperable, device-and-platform agnostic manner. Whereas RCS isn’t unique to Android, it’s supported within the messaging shoppers for many Android telephones and Apple’s reluctance to help the usual has made it a de-facto “Android solely” know-how.
Apple advised TechRadar that it received’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 (akin to Google Messages) help encryption whereas others don’t.
We don’t know precisely how RCS will work on the iPhone, however the probably situation is that RCS shoppers will nonetheless seem like 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 gadgets and people despatched with Android telephones since many options received’t be supported by RCS. However they’ll have the ability to co-exist and a single inexperienced bubble received’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 function due for launch within the fall. We’ll possible study extra at WWDC in June, however in a nutshell, RCS help implies that if you use Messages to speak with somebody who has an Android telephone (or there may be an Android person within the group textual content), you’ll get options like:
- Sending messages over Wi-Fi or mobile.
- Group chats as much as 100 individuals.
- Full-size information, photographs, and movies (as much as 100MB, in all probability).
- Supply and Learn reciepts.
- Typing indicators.
- Improved safety, together with encryption.
The RCS Common Profile has gone by a lot 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 help, or which non-compulsory options it’s going to embrace. You possibly can in all probability count on all the things on the listing above, however maybe not a few of RCS’s extra superior or current 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 reality, Tim Prepare dinner advised 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 provide 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.