TechPhonesiPhonesYour iPhone’s going to play nicer with Android texts from next yearApple announces that it’ll support the RCS standard from 2024 – but don’t expect the green bubbles to go awayWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
TechPhonesiPhonesYour iPhone’s going to play nicer with Android texts from next yearApple announces that it’ll support the RCS standard from 2024 – but don’t expect the green bubbles to go awayWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Apple announces that it’ll support the RCS standard from 2024 – but don’t expect the green bubbles to go away
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Apple)
(Image credit: Apple)
The move is just days after Nothing offered a workaround to makeApple’s iMessage platform work better on Nothing Phones– a workaround I suspect Apple will move to block fairly quickly.
Although they’ve been approaching it in different ways, both Google and Nothing have been trying to get Apple to embrace text messaging interoperability. And the new announcement goes some way to delivering that.
It’s important to point out here that Apple’s Messages app and its iMessage platform are not the same thing: Messages uses iMessage for Apple-to-Apple communications, but it also uses SMS and MMS for text and picture messages respectively. RCS is coming to the app too, but it won’t replace iMessage: that will remain Apple’s preferred messaging platform foriOSand Mac users.
What is RCS and why should you care?
RCS (Rich Communication Services) is the next generation of phone network texting. It’s like a next-generation SMS, with the useful benefit that it works over Wi-Fi as well as over mobile network connections.
Apple has announced that in 2024 its Messages app will support RCS Universal Profile, which is the set of features agreed industry-wide. Those features include multi-device messaging and group chats, file sharing, read receipts, being able to see when the other person is typing, media sharing and more. Apple’s Messages app already offers that kind of thing, but only to other iOS users. With RCS, the features will work withAndroidand other platforms too.
That’s good, but it won’t address one of the Apple things that seems to irritate a lot of people: green bubbles in Messages. When you use Apple’s messaging app, messages sent to and from other Apple users are in blue bubbles; messages from Android users are green. That won’t change.
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The other crucial omission here is end to end encryption, E2EE for short. Apple currently offers that over its iMessage platform, but it won’t be offering that over RCS; while Google’s flavour of RCS has E2EE, it’s not in the Universal Profile that Apple has pledged to support.
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