(Credit: Apple/PCMag)
In his WWDC keynote presentation yesterday, Apple software boss Craig Federighi briefly mentioned something that the average iPhone user likely doesn't think too much about: Rich Communication Services (RCS).
At the end of a discussion about iOS 18, Federighi mentioned that the new mobile OS will include "so much more, including an option for larger icons on the home screen, RCS messaging support, and Reminders integration in Calendar."
He certainly buried the lead. Another way to say it might have been, “Our phones will now support the messaging system compatible with the 3 billion users of the most popular operating system in the world, Android."
I've had much to say about the lack of RCS support on Apple Messages; the phrase "lock-in abomination" may have been used. As someone who switched to a Samsung Galaxy phone after a decade of using iPhones, I've seen how iMessages wreak on Android. So I was pleased to hear that RCS for iPhone is finally upon us after Apple teased its adoption last year.
Why does this matter? If you're texting someone who isn't on an iPhone, iOS will fall back to SMS and MMS, an ancient method for texting. Those two methods don't support many modern features, leading to compressed photos and videos that can look like garbage, not to mention sub-par group chats. There are security concerns as well since SMS doesn't support encryption.
In the US, people also freak out that messages from Androids to iPhones show up as green balloons rather than blue ones. (In most other countries it's not an issue since they mostly use WhatsApp.) That doesn't seem to be going away with Apple's RCS adoption, though.
Apple hasn't been in a hurry to adopt RCS; court documents from 2021 revealed that execs admitted "iMessage amounts to serious lock-in."
But it's also had to contend with the Digital Markets Act (DMA) in the EU, which requires it to be less of a walled garden. Though iMessage escaped DMA "gatekeeper" status, Apple itself did not, creating a scenario similar to what happened when the company was forced to adopt USB-C on the iPhone thanks to EU regulations. In 2021, it also allowed FaceTime on Android, but that browser-based solution was terrible. Let's hope that's not the case with RCS on iPhone.
Apple will reportedly implement the RCS standard developed by the GSMA, so we still won’t get the end-to-end encryption used by Google Messages.
Still, Google welcomed the news in a canned media response. "We’re happy to see Apple take their first step today by coming on board to embrace RCS. We welcome Apple’s participation in our ongoing work with GSMA to evolve RCS and make messaging more equitable and secure."