It looks like it’s a season for astonishing twists from Apple. Yesterday, the corporate introduced an extension of its free Emergency SOS through Satellite tv for pc providers for all iPhone 14 customers, and now it’s achieved a exceptional turnaround with an official announcement that it’s about to open up its proprietary messaging providers to a a lot bigger world.
Particularly, after years of stubbornly holding out, Apple has determined to embrace Android customers by supporting Wealthy Communication Companies (RCS) within the iPhone Messages app, permitting iPhone customers to speak extra successfully with these on different platforms with out resorting to archaic SMS expertise.
Whereas RCS has turn out to be a core a part of Google’s Android messaging platform, it’s truly an open normal put ahead by the GSM Affiliation as a alternative for SMS/MMS. Whereas the expertise arguably took a while to mature earlier than it was prepared for prime time attributable to sluggish adoption by carriers, it’s taken off since Google took issues into its personal arms.
Nonetheless, Apple continued to dismiss RCS as irrelevant, with Apple CEO Tim Prepare dinner going as far as to be downright dismissive of the expertise. When requested about RCS throughout final fall’s Vox Media Code 2022 occasion, Prepare dinner insisted it wasn’t a precedence for Apple clients.
I don’t hear our customers asking that we put loads of power in on that at this level. I might like to convert you to an iPhone.
Apple CEO Tim Prepare dinner.
Now, a yr later, evidently Apple is rethinking that place.
The information of Apple’s change of coronary heart got here in a press release despatched out by the corporate to a number of media publications. It was first reported by 9to5Mac and likewise shared on X (the social media community previously often known as Twitter) by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.
Later subsequent yr, we shall be including assist for RCS Common Profile, the usual as presently printed by the GSM Affiliation. We imagine RCS Common Profile will supply a greater interoperability expertise when in comparison with SMS or MMS. This may work alongside iMessage, which can proceed to be the perfect and most safe messaging expertise for Apple customers.
Whereas it’s not clear if it will clear up the Inexperienced Bubble phobia, adopting RCS ought to at the least permit iPhone and Android customers to get iMessage-like options when speaking by their respective native messaging apps. This would come with issues like typing indicators and browse receipts, in addition to assist for full-resolution pictures and movies.
Nonetheless, Apple is evident that RCS will function “alongside iMessage,” which implies some options will stay unique to Apple’s proprietary messaging platform. Doubtless, RCS shall be handled as an enhanced model of SMS, with the coveted blue bubbles nonetheless reserved for conversations on Apple’s iMessage community. RCS bubbles will in all probability nonetheless be inexperienced. Perhaps only a completely different shade of inexperienced.
Though Google has added options like end-to-end encryption to its personal implementation of RCS, that’s certainly not common, and it stays to be seen if Apple will play together with these customizations or just assist the baseline RCS normal.
Frankly, we anticipate Apple to do the naked minimal right here and observe the RCS normal. That’s honest, because it’s unreasonable to anticipate the corporate to assist different distributors’ distinctive methods of dealing with RCS, which can not even be sensible or potential in all instances.
Which means that Apple nonetheless doesn’t want to fret about RCS consuming its lunch. It in all probability by no means did. iMessage has supported end-to-end encryption since its inception, and with current iOS updates, we’ve gotten the power to edit and unsend messages, alternate stickers, ship cash utilizing Apple Pay Money, and extra, none of that are supported by RCS.
Nonetheless, the hole between what iMessage may do and what SMS/MMS was like was so absurd as to create a horrible person expertise for anyone who had family and friends who weren’t utilizing iPhones — which was seemingly Apple’s plan for by no means bringing it to Android. Nonetheless, it’s comprehensible why Google hyperbolically accused Apple of “bullying” Android customers with inexperienced bubbles, even when that wasn’t a completely honest assertion — the inexperienced bubbles existed lengthy earlier than iMessage was even a gleam in Apple’s eye.
It is going to be a welcome change that iPhone and Android customers can at the least talk utilizing one thing that feels extra prefer it belongs within the twenty first century. There’s little doubt that iMessage will proceed to enhance and keep forward of RCS, however at the least it is going to really feel like a value-added service fairly than the one viable choice.