The messaging is provided by a third party who is dedicated to working on their iMessage compatibility. Apple has no reason to stop this because this is a good move for them in the larger battle between mobile messaging standards.
Google owns Jibe, the company behind RCS messaging found on all Android phones and an emerging, competent product from the only game in town that can compete with Apple. Google has decided to take this to the government level and push for a unified phone messaging standard, normally a good thing, but proposed their own RCS solution. The one they own and whose servers Google scrapes for user info.
Apple is pushing iMessage as a protest against Google and their inevitable lawsuit to conform with RCS adoption. Android may win unless Apple shows it has parity and provides a non-legislative option: if enough people use iMessage then governments don’t have to make any laws or enforce changes. The company Nothing is using iMessage, which helps Apple prove there is both a significant user base, which would cause a burden on Apple and it’s customers to change, and there is no monopoly on iMessage or messaging in general. So if enough people use iMessage, Apple sees it as a good thing.
RCS is not a Google product, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSMA
Apple has been pushing iMessage for quite some time, but they want to keep it just to their platform and have made no attempt to make it open to other users. That’s Apples way and it’s not as a “protest” to Google lol
That’s like saying they made the lightning port as a protest to USB standards, nah they just want their proprietary shit.
Google’s RCS service is unique in that it is not telecom based. I would advise looking at the RCS Wikipedia article here.
Can you please point to me where it states Googles “version” of RCS can’t also interface with telecom based RCS?
Because it seems from my reading the Google just has some enhanced features on top of RCS (like e2e encryption) when both sides are through Google, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work with telecoms as well, unlike Apples walled garden of iMessage which doesn’t work with anything else lol.
Apple’s ideology behind not expanding iMessage to other platforms has been - at least in part - due to the security of the iMessage platform and how it authorizes senders and recipients (like many encrypted services on Apple devices, tokens are encrypted/decrypted in the Secure Enclave on the SoC). Apparently, Apple has low confidence in the diaspora of Android devices and just decided to forget even trying to create a client for Android it could tie down to hardware authentication due to not having a reliable hardware base. This was many years ago.
I don’t know if this is still true or even necessary today, or if they’ve even bothered to explore it recently, but that’s Apple’s main issue. Sure, it also benefits them in other ways such as driving users to their platforms, but this is their main issue.
Not according to the leaked emails… https://x.com/TechEmails/status/1589450766506692609?s=20
Also, the secure enclave wasn’t added until the iPhone 5s in 2013, whereas iMessage had already existed as of 2011.
That’s like saying they made the lightning port as a protest to USB standards, nah they just want their proprietary shit.
They wanted a new, compact, durable, reversible plug for their mobile devices. There was no industry-standard option that met their requirements, so they made their own. If USB-C had existed at the time, they would have used it (though as a physical connector, Lightning is still just plain better).
Do you really think that?
Back when that would’ve been a good argument… but why then when USB-C did become a thing, and became robust and well-supported enough that even Apple used it on every other device they sold, didn’t they adopt it onto the IPhone despite lightning being an inferior standard in basically every way?
Why did they literally have to be forced by the EU to adopt the very standard they helped to create, a standard that was de-facto almost everywhere else?
Because they wanted that sweet, sweet proprietary monopoly. Plain and simple, the rest is just excuses.
I don’t buy this argument at all, they could have contributed towards a combined connector with the usb-if, but instead they made their own proprietary connector.
Lmao, how is Lightning better than a USB-C? They’re both practically the same thing, even in durability. Apple might’ve made Lightning first, yes, but then USB-C came out like 2 years later.
Be real here: Apple only stuck with Lightning because it’s stupid easy money for them. Cables are hella cheap to make, and if you make them in-house, you basically spend like $2 at most to manufacture 1 cable. Lightning has the upside of both that and forcing people into the Apple ecosystem because their old phone cables can charge the new phones.