In a stunning flip, Apple has confirmed in a press release that it’ll deliver RCS to iPhone, enormously enhancing 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 elevated public outcry from customers to do the identical.
The assertion, despatched to a number of media retailers, reads:
Later subsequent 12 months, we will probably be including assist for RCS Common Profile, the usual as at the moment printed by the GSM Affiliation. We consider RCS Common Profile will provide a greater interoperability expertise when in comparison with SMS or MMS. This may work alongside iMessage, which can proceed to be the very best 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 trendy requirements in an interoperable, device-and-platform agnostic means. Whereas RCS shouldn’t be unique to Android, it’s supported within the messaging purchasers for many Android telephones and Apple’s reluctance to assist the usual has made it a de-facto “Android solely” expertise.
Apple instructed TechRadar that it gained’t be supporting “proprietary extensions” that search so as to add encryption on prime of RCS and hopes, as an alternative, 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 almost certainly state of affairs is that RCS purchasers will nonetheless seem like messaging with SMS purchasers, 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 gained’t be supported via RCS. However they’ll have the ability to co-exist and a single inexperienced bubble gained’t blow up the entire group chat.
We do not 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 study extra at WWDC in June, however in a nutshell, RCS assist signifies that while you use Messages to speak with somebody who has an Android cellphone (or there’s 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 folks.
- Full-size recordsdata, 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 via numerous 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 non-obligatory options it would embrace. You may in all probability anticipate the whole lot on the checklist 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 actual fact, Tim Cook dinner instructed an attendee that the very best answer for blurry photographs despatched from iPhones to Android telephones is to “Purchase your Mother an iPhone.”
As for iMessage, it would 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 enormously—even of they’ll nonetheless want to have a look at inexperienced bubbles.