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.
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Ironically, despite Apple’s whining to get to this point, between this, and the EU forcing them to adopt USB-C, and, hopefully 3rd party stores and browsers, I may consider an iPhone for my next phone.
It’s a pity you almost need to point a gun to their head for them to consider unshittifing their products.
Yeah. My iphone fanatic of a friend was complaining about something on hers the other day, and was like “Why doesn’t Apple just do {whatever}?”
My reply was basically that Apple didn’t become a trillion dollar company by giving customers what they want. They became a trillion dollar company by telling customers what they want and marketing the crap out of it.
That was Jobs’ (Jobs’s …? Jobses…?) whole thing. People don’t know what they want until we’ve told them.
And I’d say it’s worked out pretty well for the entire tech industry so far.
It’s popular idea for a lot of innovation focused groups tbh. “If I have the people what they asked for I would have given them faster horses.” -Henry Ford
And to a certain degree there is truth to it.
The People: “We could really do with less antisemitic conspiracy theories.”
Henry Ford: “Hold my beer.”
… or by providing some that works really well for the majority of customers.
What was she complaining about?
I never understood this argument. Apple lost its fight to make the environment worse for the customer, so you’re gonna reward them?
I think that’s the irony they’re pointing out
I saw a rumor mill style post that Apple was going to allow sideloading of apps. If so, that’ll probably get me to switch. These changes and choice in software eliminates my gripes with iOS vs. Android.
As a point of clarity, I think both suck. But if Apple removes it’s disadvantages (even if by force) and is the more privacy respecting option out of the box, it makes sense to me.
Read a post on here the other day someone had a few articles linking to studies that apple may not be as privacy respecting as you think. Guess custom roms are the way to go lol.
I’ll go research that, thanks for the heads up!
So you look at their history of shitty behavior and want to give them money because they were forced to act right in some cases?
OK then…
They just need to stop using slaves and fighting attempts to fight against it and I might actually get to appreciate the cool things their engineers do actually make.
Love to see Apple being forced into making good decisions against their will.
Holy crap. Now my uncle can stop complaining about degraded quality when Android users are in message rooms. When it comes to tech, he really doesn’t care about the culprit. He just complains that people aren’t playing in Apple’s walled garden.
** checks if hell has frozen **
Apple RCS messaging and USB-C, Microsoft complying with beingle able to renove Edge, Google not challenging being a gatekeeper corp…
Did someone introduce a plot twist for the sake of entertainment in the Matrix overworld? Did I miss something?
This is the effect of the EU.
Even as an EU citizen it’s a bit hard to believe…
I can’t fathom that those politicians decided to finally do anything besides line some pockets from lobbyists.
hell’s zipcode is 48169… so not yet
And they will act like they invented it
Apple: (Finally supports a standard the rest of the world has been using for years) Look at us. So brave, so innovative. Also, we removed another port. Here’s a link to a $29 dongle in the Apple store.
*RCS Messaging will require the external coprocessor dongle, available at just 49.99
Rest of usby googleTM
Yeah…not really an open standard.
RCS is an open standard. Many mobile providers dragged their feet for so long that Google finally just started making it so that Google messages would relay RCS through their servers. The whole point is for the carriers to have RCS servers. Blame the carriers not Google for this. For once, Google isn’t the one that did something shitty.
When will I be able to use RCS in other messaging apps than Google Messages on Android?
It’s really bad that we sill would live in a ancient model when in order to use the protocol app need some specialized system API to the baseband modem. I thought it was all fixed with just the IP (Internet)?
The RCS standard, not Google’s implementation. There are still going to be iMessage features that won’t work.
The elephant in the room is impending legislation in the European Union that could’ve ultimately required Malus to open up iMessage.
Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce you to The Brussels Effect!
Apple is being Brusseled 🙂
Around 2010 Google, Facebook, MySpace, even OkCupid were all running on the XMPP standard protocol. The corpos were generally bad stewards not following protocol updates, implimenting features in incompatible ways, & eventually realized there was more to gain be defederating forcing folks to use their platforms & let those corporations siphon the (meta)data of messaging.
What gets me is why they saw the need to invent yet another similar protocol with XMPP still being feature rich, battle tested—as well as Matrix to a lesser extent—unless they already have their plans on how to circumvent the system & repeat this same cycle.
Regulations strike again!
They aren’t doing this by choice lol
Still better than nothing lol.
Doesn’t this mean all text message traffic will flow through the control of Google servers?
I don’t know anything about how RCS works aside from a couple of comments talking about the Google servers problem.
In theory anyone can host an RCS endpoint but in practice that means carriers (historically) or OS vendors (in modernity). So in effect yes all RCS messages will pass through Google servers, but mostly because Apple to Apple texts will remain on iMessage. But any texts starting or ending on Android will go through Google. Note that this doesn’t really change much as Google’s privacy policy for Android users already discloses the bulk ingestion, scanning and processing of communications, including text messages.
I thought that it was the carriers the ones hosting the RCS server. Is this not true?
Some do, but what Google rolled out in Android Messages is their own implementation unrelated to the carriers. Ostensibly so it works regardless of carrier, but what they rolled out is a semi-proprietary implementation that only works on their app. Ergo if you use a third party texting app, no RCS. So it’s a sort of “Android iMsssage” thing anyway. Apple plans to implement Google’s version, again sidestepping the carriers.
some carriers do but Google runs their own as well because carriers were slow to adopt.
There can be other servers and apps, for example Samsung has their own app. It’s hard for me to track down details about how they interoperate but it appears that the various services need to agree to work with one another, so I don’t think just anyone can create an RCS app and infrastructure and have it work with Google’s and Samsung’s. However, I imagine Apple is fully capable of it and would be surprised if iPhone RCS wasn’t going through Apples network.
I don’t want to be cynical, but is this part required for Apple to implement RCS?
“and bring a wide range of iMessage-style features to messaging between iPhone and Android users.”
I can totally imagine it being limited to the encryption and the bare minimum, as imessages features don’t perfectly overlap with the RCS features (e.g. emojis).
Let me know when you can use RCS on an Android phone without Google Play Services outside of Google Messages
Seems like Nothing did it?
No, Nothing will provide a bridge to iMessage by logging with your password on the Mac mini farm. Not something that you want.
Also nothing didn’t shit, they partnered with Sunbird.
I know what happened. But maybe with Nothings announcement Apple decided “fuck it” You know?