In a surprising move, Apple has announced today that it will adopt the RCS (Rich Communication Services) messaging standard. The feature will launch via a software update “later next year” and bring a wide range of iMessage-style features to messaging between iPhone and Android users.
Apple’s decision comes amid pressure from regulators and competitors like Google and Samsung. It also comes as RCS has continued to develop and become a more mature platform than it once was.
Ironically, despite Apple’s whining to get to this point, between this, and the EU forcing them to adopt USB-C, and, hopefully 3rd party stores and browsers, I may consider an iPhone for my next phone.
It’s a pity you almost need to point a gun to their head for them to consider unshittifing their products.
Yeah. My iphone fanatic of a friend was complaining about something on hers the other day, and was like “Why doesn’t Apple just do {whatever}?”
My reply was basically that Apple didn’t become a trillion dollar company by giving customers what they want. They became a trillion dollar company by telling customers what they want and marketing the crap out of it.
That was Jobs’ (Jobs’s …? Jobses…?) whole thing. People don’t know what they want until we’ve told them.
And I’d say it’s worked out pretty well for the entire tech industry so far.
It’s popular idea for a lot of innovation focused groups tbh. “If I have the people what they asked for I would have given them faster horses.” -Henry Ford
And to a certain degree there is truth to it.
Let’s be fair, things like RCS E2E encryption are firmly under control by Google. People like to claim RCS is open, but it’s not.
If RCS was a proper open standard, we would have a lot of awesome messaging apps to choose from. We don’t, and the reason is because Google has been gatekeeping.
I’m annoyed that Apple is late to the game, and I hate that they needed to be pressured to get here, BUT I’m glad to see that they’re going to support universal alternatives to the crap you still have to ask Pichai to please let you use.
Also RCS is build that way. It has more features than SMS, but underneath is even worse than it. Why in the 2023 people massively want to go back tying their chat app with mobile carrier? Like, giving what Internet standards we now have RCS should really be considered deprecated, hope we won’t be stuck with it for next 30 years.
Yeah… Matrix seems so much better over all for me. It’s just not as controllable so there is less investment in pushing adoption from companies.
I never understood this argument. Apple lost its fight to make the environment worse for the customer, so you’re gonna reward them?
I saw a rumor mill style post that Apple was going to allow sideloading of apps. If so, that’ll probably get me to switch. These changes and choice in software eliminates my gripes with iOS vs. Android.
As a point of clarity, I think both suck. But if Apple removes it’s disadvantages (even if by force) and is the more privacy respecting option out of the box, it makes sense to me.
Read a post on here the other day someone had a few articles linking to studies that apple may not be as privacy respecting as you think. Guess custom roms are the way to go lol.
I don’t know how much of a gun it was. Apple has definitely been working on RCS support for a year; you don’t add that in a few months. Similarly I’m pretty sure Apple has been considering USB C in iPhone since at least when they started working on the USB C on iPad, which is what 5 years old?
Of course without pressure they would have probably be slower to move forward, and with Apple secrecy it’s always hard to tell how long things have been ready to ship. But let’s not pretend they just woke up this morning with a horse head in their bed and told their direction team to start working on this.
I hear you, but isn’t the proverbial horse’s head the fact that the EU is looming over them and forcing them to make a move?
RCS and USBC have been available for a while. It seems disingenuous not to acknowledge that Apple has purposely dragged their feet so they could make more profit selling proprietary software and hardware which is probably why you’re being downvoted
Actually all three of those things have been possible for a couple of years now.
Love to see Apple being forced into making good decisions against their will.
I’m hoping that they also force Google to do the same. Pushing for a universal RCS E2E encryption standard is great. I’m sick of Google saying RCS is the open alternative to iMessage, when key things like their E2EE implementation are not open at all.
What kind of openness are you hoping for? Google has built their solution with a bunch of already open pieces.
RCS + Signal protocol + MLS
https://www.androidauthority.com/google-messages-mls-3346918/
https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/20/23801536/google-messages-app-mls-support-announce
AFAIK Apple has said they are only going to use official RCS spec with no extensions and will work on adding encryption to the spec. Google has announced that they will work with Apple and the GSMA to implement official RCS encryption.
Really? Like honest to God? They aren’t gonna gimp the implementation, are they?
Yellow bubbles and the text notification sound is permanently a teenage girl saying “ewww”
Honestly that would make texting people on Android from an iPhone so much fun.
If they wanted it to have a dark pattern they should make the text slightly blurry or move one pixel back and forth to annoy us and the text tone is the sound of someone throwing up and is un-mutable so you’re forced to either listen to it at full volume or block them (ideal??).
It feels almost a guarantee they’re gonna do something stupid to ruin it somehow, don’t you worry about that
I just want to point out that this announcement comes after Nothing phone company announced they partnered with a company that will bridge the two protocols so apple was about to lose their ability to force android images and videos to look like a potato so iPhone users wouldn’t want to leave the apple ecosystem.
This just exactly like when apple decided they were going to be champions of privacy by improving the security on their phones, which coincidentally happened right after a company called cellebrite started selling a product that would allow police to bypass passcodes and fingerprints to access a users data which previously could only be unlocked by the police department paying a fee for each time to unlock a phone.
They will always default to being shitty like any other company treating their users like the enemy until they can’t and then they spin it in their favor.
There are several of these solutions in the wild now. Basically, the phone tunnels into MacOS VM that sends the message through actual iMessage.
Kind of janky, but it works.
Beeper is sick! Would highly recommend. Or if you’re feeling frisky, self hosting the bridge in a docker container is possible. The container is a kvm osx vm.
Does beeper have a docker? I tried to install it last week, only saw an ansible notebook or something like that, broke my nginx and didn’t even work
I want to reverse proxy to it, not have it take total control of my vps or dedicate a vps to it
Nothing is literally nothing, Apple could care less about them.
Nothing’s solution is basically getting you to send your messages to them, and they’ll send it through a Mac logged into your Apple ID hence achieving the “blue bubble” lol. Hugely insecure, hacky solution and hardly groundbreaking.
Apple could care less about them.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ask/comments/17wx1tq/whats_so_wrong_that_it_became_right/k9jzi63/
Seems more likely to be Apple getting ahead of incoming legislation than a small phone company’s announcement. Companies like Apple don’t make huge changes within a couple days of nearly unknown (to the general market) companies doing something that might slightly affect them.
Regulations work, and in this case, it doesn’t look like competition played any role. Apple only makes changes like this when forced to by regulators or, in the case of privacy, when it’s marketable. Capitalistic self regulating is almost a myth with them— they wouldn’t even stop selling those butterfly keyboards until their self imposed refresh timeline allowed for it.
I’ve no doubt it’s more than one thing that is driving this, but my point was they are only now agreeing because they have to and not because they want to. This company has literally taken away their customers ability to receive quality media from their friends with the sole intent to pressure people into getting their product so they belong. I know it’s hyperbolic to say, but it’s basically using teens to bully each other into buying something. Someone had to pitch this idea to a room full of people and all those people thought wow this is a great idea, think about how fucked up that is.
So great to see Apple finally invent RCS! /s
