It was Apple that said it will support RCS in iPhones from 2024. They also said that they would work on encryption being added to the RCS standard. I didn't read anywhere that they said they wouldn't support RCS without encryption.
RCS messaging is 'the new SMS'
- Thread starter Son of a Beach
- Start date
Apple will support RCS but only at a basic level. All the things Google has added to RCS will be ignored by Apple and only implemented if they become part of a future version of the Universal Profile.
Apple are committing to adopt the RCS standard Universal Profile not Google's Messages implementation. Most people don't make any distinction between the two because right now almost every RCS user is using Google's version, when Apple rolls out RCS in iMessage people will see the difference.
For encryption the hypothesised replacement to Google's Signal based extension is MIMI/MLS, which in their own words is 6-18 months away from being standardised, and that's only the first step. Once standardised it will need to be added to the RCS standard, and adopted and rolled out to end users. So it could be a couple of more years before RCS is end-to-end encrypted between iMessage and Google Messages. In the meantime I'd expect Apple to make it very clear that RCS is unecrypted.
The end-to-end encryption extension is just one of many extensions to the Universal Profile that Google uses. Apple supporting RCS does not mean that Google Messages and iMessage will be fully compatible. Will Apple's support of RCS be much better than falling back to SMS/MMS? For sure. Will it mean that iMessage conversations transparently interoperate with RCS? Almost certainly not.
Google's Messages app (distinct from whatever your carrier or phone OEM provides) already does a crap-load of hacky translation on the backside to account for the content that iMessage provides via SMS. I see no reason why that would not continue.
e.g. instead of seeing the SMS message that says "soandso liked your message", Google intercepts that and just puts a thumbs up on your message. You no longer see the hack Apple had to put into place because they were downgrading everything to SMS. It's a battle of the hacky solutions.
e.g. instead of seeing the SMS message that says "soandso liked your message", Google intercepts that and just puts a thumbs up on your message. You no longer see the hack Apple had to put into place because they were downgrading everything to SMS. It's a battle of the hacky solutions.
I've no doubt that Google will continue to fix Apple caused problems. I doubt that Apple will reciprocate. I expect Apple to implement RCS and allow it to remain functionally worse than iMessage or Google's version of RCS.
It looks like the EU has decided that the iMessage market specifically is not one where gatekeeper status comes into play.
arstechnica.com
So it was the threat of legislation rather than actual action that may have moved the needle on RCS ever so slightly. It's a tricky thing to measure as a) Apple isn't going to fall over themselves to give up how their users actually use iMessage and b) even though the protocol/app are used when a fallback SMS message does arrive at an iOS device, the EU feels that the iMessage-only use falls under their threshold at the present time. I get the complexity here. Every iOS user (within rounding error) in the US is an iMessage user, but it's not fair to count every iOS user in Europe as an iMessage user and those few who do use it, you want to count users not devices as you can have an iPhone, iPad and Mac or whatever.
To be fair, iMessage in Europe is like WhatsApp in reverse. You'd use it to talk to Americans or similar who don't use WhatsApp, and that's pretty much it. The number of users is probably at or close to the threshold, but if it's not EU-citizen to EU-citizen communication, they are likely to err on the side of not regulating.
Other Apple products like the App Store are still very much affected (as is Google Play etc.)
iMessage will reportedly dodge EU regulations, won’t have to open up
iMessage isn't popular enough with businesses to force interoperability.
arstechnica.com
So it was the threat of legislation rather than actual action that may have moved the needle on RCS ever so slightly. It's a tricky thing to measure as a) Apple isn't going to fall over themselves to give up how their users actually use iMessage and b) even though the protocol/app are used when a fallback SMS message does arrive at an iOS device, the EU feels that the iMessage-only use falls under their threshold at the present time. I get the complexity here. Every iOS user (within rounding error) in the US is an iMessage user, but it's not fair to count every iOS user in Europe as an iMessage user and those few who do use it, you want to count users not devices as you can have an iPhone, iPad and Mac or whatever.
To be fair, iMessage in Europe is like WhatsApp in reverse. You'd use it to talk to Americans or similar who don't use WhatsApp, and that's pretty much it. The number of users is probably at or close to the threshold, but if it's not EU-citizen to EU-citizen communication, they are likely to err on the side of not regulating.
Other Apple products like the App Store are still very much affected (as is Google Play etc.)
I agree with this. iPhones have much smaller market share here- I don't deal with many iPhone users, but I don't even hear the term iMessage in Europe, if we're not talking about the US. I suspect even many iPhone users think that iMessage is a plain SMS client.
(I know your entire post supports this sentence, I just wanted to validate.)
It would be really nice to have a global open IM system, but I'll be happy just to have that in my neck of the woods
I'm not sure that is true. Given how Apple puts "i" infront of so much...it gets added to things they don't. I hear "iwatch" "imessage" and other things pretty often.
iPhone, iPad and iMessage seem prevalent here, not so much anything else.
"iWatch" is what speculators called the Apple Watch for years before it was announced. People still calling it the iWatch simply don't care about what the product's actual name is.
The i branding hasn't been used in a new product since iMessage itself was introduced 12 years ago. It is a remnant of the Jobs era of Apple. If the iPhone was invented today, it would be called the Apple Phone. iCloud is the only other prevalent i branded product left.
The i branding hasn't been used in a new product since iMessage itself was introduced 12 years ago. It is a remnant of the Jobs era of Apple. If the iPhone was invented today, it would be called the Apple Phone. iCloud is the only other prevalent i branded product left.
Nobody - literally nobody - uses the brand name here. Anything that isn’t WhatsApp is explicitly Signal, Threema, or Telegram— but the default iOS client is just “a message”.
iCloud
iMac
iPhone
iPad
iTunes Store is still around, somewhere…
iPod was discontinued in 2022…
Apple watches would have been called iWatch but they ran into trademark issues that prevented them from using that branding.
Pretty sure there was some talk of AppleTV (the device) being iTV before it debuted, but they couldn't have called it that in the UK due to the second-largest over-the-air broadcaster in the country already being called that…
Prior trademark ownership didn't stop them from releasing an "iPhone".
They probably could have named it "iWatch". They were just over the "i" naming scheme at that point, except for existing product lines. Their next new product line isn't the "iVision", either.
I always figured they couldn't name Apple TV "iTV" due to the existence of the eyeTV USB receivers/software, which was already well-established in the space at the time. It was introduced at some Apple Event in beta form as "iTV" though.
This is iWatch, btw: https://iwatch.sourceforge.net/index.html
Hell, Apple pays Cisco so it can use iOS. So hard to say trademarks stop them when they want it bad enough.
They'd also had a spat with HP who had the "ipaq" line of PocketPCs, though maybe that was more in the ipod days.
Well, this is even nicer (if true):
Beeper Mini fix may have caused user Macs to be banned from iMessage
Beeper mini users who used their hardware to register their app with Apple's iMessage network may find their Mac blocked from the service instead, in what could be retaliation against the use of the controversial messaging app.
appleinsider.com
So how does this work? I'm kinda guessing that the ban would not be permanent (otherwise... you could buy a second-hand Mac that cannot do iMessage? AWESOME!).
Well, this is even nicer (if true):
Beeper Mini fix may have caused user Macs to be banned from iMessage
Beeper mini users who used their hardware to register their app with Apple's iMessage network may find their Mac blocked from the service instead, in what could be retaliation against the use of the controversial messaging app.
So how does this work? I'm kinda guessing that the ban would not be permanent (otherwise... you could buy a second-hand Mac that cannot do iMessage? AWESOME!).
How DARE those Apple customers not have a pure Apple stack of hardware?!?! </sarcasm>
Apple denying a feature to paying customers trying to use their product that are otherwise outside of the Beeper infrastructure beyond using their own hardware to relay to their own other hardware is something that's lawsuit bait.