Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year

https://feddit.ch/post/2351709

Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year - feddit.ch

I think the phrasing is important here.

Later next year, we will be adding support for RCS Universal Profile, the standard as currently published by the GSM Association.

If Google’s & Samsungs implementations aren’t compliant with the GSM associations’ standard then I don’t think this is going to work how people are expecting it to. The stuff Google has added to RCS messaging has all been their own implementation of it and not part of the standard, and as far as I’m aware android RCS gets routed through Google’s servers.

I wonder if RCS support is Apple trying to appease the EU with the DMA stuff forcing messaging apps to be interoperable with each other.

This is what I was hoping for. Something that an Android using friend of mine doesn’t grasp is that Apple adopting RCS with E2EE encryption as it’s implemented at the moment makes them beholden to Google. Google’s putting on a song and dance pretending to be the good guy in this situation but if that were true they would have developed E2EE in a way that was a part of the RCS standard instead of proprietary. In a weird turn of events; Apple committing to improving encryption for the RCS standard has turned this into a really good thing for everyone.

I never would have put this situation on my bingo card after years of Apple’s “Blue bubble vs green bubble” crap.