In a surprising move, Apple has announced today that it will adopt the RCS (Rich Communication Services) messaging standard. The...
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.
You will be shamed and sentenced to isolation from the rest of the US if caught with a disgusting yellow bubble. Have some self respect, buy an iphone, use imessage
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??).
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.
You mean rebranded safari? That would be a no, but when I say rebranded Safari, that’s just the rendering engine, not the whole app. Other browsers can add features.
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
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. 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.
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
To be fair, Google has been doing the same stuff with RCS E2E encryption. It ain’t open. There is a reason why Android isn’t littered with dope messaging apps that support encrypted RCS.
They just need to stop using slaves and fighting attempts to fight against it and I might actually get to appreciate the cool things their engineers do actually make.
Apple: (Finally supports a standard the rest of the world has been using for years) Look at us. So brave, so innovative. Also, we removed another port. Here’s a link to a $29 dongle in the Apple store.
RCS is an open standard. Many mobile providers dragged their feet for so long that Google finally just started making it so that Google messages would relay RCS through their servers. The whole point is for the carriers to have RCS servers. Blame the carriers not Google for this. For once, Google isn’t the one that did something shitty.
Around 2010 Google, Facebook, MySpace, even OkCupid were all running on the XMPP standard protocol. The corpos were generally bad stewards not following protocol updates, implimenting features in incompatible ways, & eventually realized there was more to gain be defederating forcing folks to use their platforms & let those corporations siphon the (meta)data of messaging.
What gets me is why they saw the need to invent yet another similar protocol with XMPP still being feature rich, battle tested—as well as Matrix to a lesser extent—unless they already have their plans on how to circumvent the system & repeat this same cycle.
Even as an EU citizen it’s a bit hard to believe…
I can’t fathom that those politicians decided to finally do anything besides line some pockets from lobbyists.
The company describes these changes as specific to Windows 11 PCs in the EEA, so it’s unclear if users outside this area will be able to utilize these functions.
I wonder how this will work. So many registry tweaks which forcefully removed Edge also removed the “web view” and therefore broke a lot of parts of the OS. Maybe this is just removing the shortcuts, links and edge URIs from the OS
It’s probably relatively trivial for MS since they have the entire codebase to work with.
I’m more curious on how they plan on limiting it to the EEA, I bet we’ll have much simpler/safer one-click mods that will force windows into deploying these EEA only changes in any region in short order
It depends on how tightly integrated it is into the OS. Like right now File Explorer is very tightly integrated with the desktop. So much so that if you can get File Explorer to t crash, it’ll most likely bring the entire desktop UI down with it.
Software is like a huge house of cards. You can’t take a card from the bottom without expecting the rest of the house to stand
I don’t think they’ve have one click methods to employ “EEA” mode or something like that. I think it’s more likely to be a version of Windows compiled specifically with these limitations in mind. You’ll likely have to install a specific variant of Windows for EEA
Nothing have been pretty good at marketing really, all those headlines saying “Nothing brings blue bubble in Android” instead of “Nothing to bundle the Sunbird app with their phones”.
I’m glad that they’re finally going to implement it but I can’t help but shake the feeling that there’s still going to be some interoperability issues.
There can be other servers and apps, for example Samsung has their own app. It’s hard for me to track down details about how they interoperate but it appears that the various services need to agree to work with one another, so I don’t think just anyone can create an RCS app and infrastructure and have it work with Google’s and Samsung’s. However, I imagine Apple is fully capable of it and would be surprised if iPhone RCS wasn’t going through Apples network.
In theory anyone can host an RCS endpoint but in practice that means carriers (historically) or OS vendors (in modernity). So in effect yes all RCS messages will pass through Google servers, but mostly because Apple to Apple texts will remain on iMessage. But any texts starting or ending on Android will go through Google. Note that this doesn’t really change much as Google’s privacy policy for Android users already discloses the bulk ingestion, scanning and processing of communications, including text messages.
Some do, but what Google rolled out in Android Messages is their own implementation unrelated to the carriers. Ostensibly so it works regardless of carrier, but what they rolled out is a semi-proprietary implementation that only works on their app. Ergo if you use a third party texting app, no RCS. So it’s a sort of “Android iMsssage” thing anyway. Apple plans to implement Google’s version, again sidestepping the carriers.
I’d rather they use the open standard. Google should, too. If there are shortcomings with the standard then let’s improve the standard, not create a custom implementation of it.
No matter how poorly Apple’s implementation works with Google’s, this will be a net positive for consumers.
Apple finally giving in allows RCS to become a true standard that works across any mobile devices. That will motivate developers and the industry as a whole to continue to improve upon it.
The initial release may be underwhelming but in the long run this week be good for everyone.
If Google’s implementation remained the defacto “RCS” that everyone used there would be no motivation to add things like encryption to the standard as everyone is using Google’s anyway
RCS falls back to SMS/MMS, so it’s not another app, it’s a replacement for texting (and iMessage).
iMessage is, basically, just a proprietary way of doing what RCS is designed to do, so Apple can use peer pressure to get teens (and adults) to exclusivity buy iPhones so their messages are the “right” colour.
How is this propietary aspect of iMessage non existing on Android with RCS?
Years goes by and still the only Android app that can support this protocol seems to be Google Messages.
Third-party RCS clients like Beeper use Android virtual machine with Google Messages running…
Seriously, even Facebook Messenger seems to be less locked down.
Google Messages is a proprietary chat app that connects to proprietary Google Jire servers on phone carrier’s site. It does not use barebone RCS protocol, this is why only Google is now able to make such app even if the app does not use any permission that other apps don’t have.
Native support for Android was planned for Android 11, soon we’ll get Android 14 and still no support in sight.
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hopefully this was the huge hurdle needed clear that’ll eventually allow 3rd party developers access to rcs
Really? Like honest to God? They aren’t gonna gimp the implementation, are they?
Yellow bubbles for all RCS messages.
You will be shamed and sentenced to isolation from the rest of the US if caught with a disgusting yellow bubble. Have some self respect, buy an iphone, use imessage
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??).
Brown bubbles
Shit bubbles
What if we call it “rose gold”?
Probably will. They’re only doing it for legal reasons, not out of the kindness of their heart
We all know the bubbles will still be green
Meh, doesnt bother me, its the iphone users that tend to care
I’ve really never met one that really cared, other than knowing that a green bubble meant you knew that certain things weren’t available in chat
It feels almost a guarantee they’re gonna do something stupid to ruin it somehow, don’t you worry about that
Apple never fails to disappoint.
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.
I never understood this argument. Apple lost its fight to make the environment worse for the customer, so you’re gonna reward them?
I think that’s the irony they’re pointing out
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Maybe in the further future they can renove the grip with sideloading so you can install not-safari firefox.
You’re wrong. That’s been an option for a long time
Actually all three of those things have been possible for a couple of years now.
Are any of the browsers not responded safari now?
You mean rebranded safari? That would be a no, but when I say rebranded Safari, that’s just the rendering engine, not the whole app. Other browsers can add features.
I did mean rebranded. Thanks for the explanation.
deleted by creator
Huh, I wasn’t aware of that.
So you look at their history of shitty behavior and want to give them money because they were forced to act right in some cases?
OK then…
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.
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/android-ios-data-collection
I’ll go research that, thanks for the heads up!
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
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.
There is also XMPP which is much more developed than RCS and surpasses it on every front.
Because who is going to operate the servers?
Originally with RCS it was the carrier, but basically every carrier switched to using Jibe (by Google) for the backend.
And it sounds like Apple is going to operate their own as well.
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.
… or by providing some that works really well for the majority of customers.
What was she complaining about?
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.
The People: “We could really do with less antisemitic conspiracy theories.”
Henry Ford: “Hold my beer.”
To be fair, Google has been doing the same stuff with RCS E2E encryption. It ain’t open. There is a reason why Android isn’t littered with dope messaging apps that support encrypted RCS.
They just need to stop using slaves and fighting attempts to fight against it and I might actually get to appreciate the cool things their engineers do actually make.
And they will act like they invented it
Apple: (Finally supports a standard the rest of the world has been using for years) Look at us. So brave, so innovative. Also, we removed another port. Here’s a link to a $29 dongle in the Apple store.
Rest of usby googleTM
Yeah…not really an open standard.
RCS is an open standard. Many mobile providers dragged their feet for so long that Google finally just started making it so that Google messages would relay RCS through their servers. The whole point is for the carriers to have RCS servers. Blame the carriers not Google for this. For once, Google isn’t the one that did something shitty.
*RCS Messaging will require the external coprocessor dongle, available at just 49.99
Fucking finally
They aren’t doing this by choice lol
Still better than nothing lol.
Around 2010 Google, Facebook, MySpace, even OkCupid were all running on the XMPP standard protocol. The corpos were generally bad stewards not following protocol updates, implimenting features in incompatible ways, & eventually realized there was more to gain be defederating forcing folks to use their platforms & let those corporations siphon the (meta)data of messaging.
What gets me is why they saw the need to invent yet another similar protocol with XMPP still being feature rich, battle tested—as well as Matrix to a lesser extent—unless they already have their plans on how to circumvent the system & repeat this same cycle.
** checks if hell has frozen **
hell’s zipcode is 48169… so not yet
Apple RCS messaging and USB-C, Microsoft complying with beingle able to renove Edge, Google not challenging being a gatekeeper corp…
Did someone introduce a plot twist for the sake of entertainment in the Matrix overworld? Did I miss something?
This is the effect of the EU.
Even as an EU citizen it’s a bit hard to believe…
I can’t fathom that those politicians decided to finally do anything besides line some pockets from lobbyists.
Wait what about Edge? Can I finally remove it without scripts and registry hacks??
Take from it as you want because it’s Microsoft…
https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/microsoft-will-let-windows-11-users-in-europe-uninstall-edge-bing-and-disable-ads-in-eea-dma
Maybe they will water the decision down with loopholes
Ah fuck, here’s the watering down
Fuckin MS lmao
I wonder how this will work. So many registry tweaks which forcefully removed Edge also removed the “web view” and therefore broke a lot of parts of the OS. Maybe this is just removing the shortcuts, links and edge URIs from the OS
It’s probably relatively trivial for MS since they have the entire codebase to work with.
I’m more curious on how they plan on limiting it to the EEA, I bet we’ll have much simpler/safer one-click mods that will force windows into deploying these EEA only changes in any region in short order
It depends on how tightly integrated it is into the OS. Like right now File Explorer is very tightly integrated with the desktop. So much so that if you can get File Explorer to t crash, it’ll most likely bring the entire desktop UI down with it.
Software is like a huge house of cards. You can’t take a card from the bottom without expecting the rest of the house to stand
I don’t think they’ve have one click methods to employ “EEA” mode or something like that. I think it’s more likely to be a version of Windows compiled specifically with these limitations in mind. You’ll likely have to install a specific variant of Windows for EEA
deleted by creator
Seems like Nothing did it?
No, Nothing will provide a bridge to iMessage by logging with your password on the Mac mini farm. Not something that you want.
Also nothing didn’t shit, they partnered with Sunbird.
I know what happened. But maybe with Nothings announcement Apple decided “fuck it” You know?
Nah Beeper/matrix have had this capability available FOSS for much longer
Nothing have been pretty good at marketing really, all those headlines saying “Nothing brings blue bubble in Android” instead of “Nothing to bundle the Sunbird app with their phones”.
Fake
You’re fake!
I’m glad that they’re finally going to implement it but I can’t help but shake the feeling that there’s still going to be some interoperability issues.
If they can manage it, it’s safe to assume they will implement those issues
Doesn’t this mean all text message traffic will flow through the control of Google servers?
I don’t know anything about how RCS works aside from a couple of comments talking about the Google servers problem.
There can be other servers and apps, for example Samsung has their own app. It’s hard for me to track down details about how they interoperate but it appears that the various services need to agree to work with one another, so I don’t think just anyone can create an RCS app and infrastructure and have it work with Google’s and Samsung’s. However, I imagine Apple is fully capable of it and would be surprised if iPhone RCS wasn’t going through Apples network.
Samsung’s app is just rebranded Google app.
In theory anyone can host an RCS endpoint but in practice that means carriers (historically) or OS vendors (in modernity). So in effect yes all RCS messages will pass through Google servers, but mostly because Apple to Apple texts will remain on iMessage. But any texts starting or ending on Android will go through Google. Note that this doesn’t really change much as Google’s privacy policy for Android users already discloses the bulk ingestion, scanning and processing of communications, including text messages.
I thought that it was the carriers the ones hosting the RCS server. Is this not true?
Many carries use Google Jibe service for their RCS implementation.
some carriers do but Google runs their own as well because carriers were slow to adopt.
Some do, but what Google rolled out in Android Messages is their own implementation unrelated to the carriers. Ostensibly so it works regardless of carrier, but what they rolled out is a semi-proprietary implementation that only works on their app. Ergo if you use a third party texting app, no RCS. So it’s a sort of “Android iMsssage” thing anyway. Apple plans to implement Google’s version, again sidestepping the carriers.
The RCS standard, not Google’s implementation. There are still going to be iMessage features that won’t work.
I’d rather they use the open standard. Google should, too. If there are shortcomings with the standard then let’s improve the standard, not create a custom implementation of it.
Well the standard is to laser than iMessage and kinda bad fundamentally, so I wouldn’t count on much else.
No matter how poorly Apple’s implementation works with Google’s, this will be a net positive for consumers.
Apple finally giving in allows RCS to become a true standard that works across any mobile devices. That will motivate developers and the industry as a whole to continue to improve upon it.
The initial release may be underwhelming but in the long run this week be good for everyone.
If Google’s implementation remained the defacto “RCS” that everyone used there would be no motivation to add things like encryption to the standard as everyone is using Google’s anyway
Ugh, yet another chat network to use…
I guess now we wait for Android to add support too.
RCS falls back to SMS/MMS, so it’s not another app, it’s a replacement for texting (and iMessage).
iMessage is, basically, just a proprietary way of doing what RCS is designed to do, so Apple can use peer pressure to get teens (and adults) to exclusivity buy iPhones so their messages are the “right” colour.
Some time ago Signal was falling back to SMS too.
How is this propietary aspect of iMessage non existing on Android with RCS? Years goes by and still the only Android app that can support this protocol seems to be Google Messages.
Third-party RCS clients like Beeper use Android virtual machine with Google Messages running… Seriously, even Facebook Messenger seems to be less locked down.
It already has support on Android. I send rcs messages to other friends with Android. Read receipts. No longer mms and sms. It’s great.
Google Messages is a proprietary chat app that connects to proprietary Google Jire servers on phone carrier’s site. It does not use barebone RCS protocol, this is why only Google is now able to make such app even if the app does not use any permission that other apps don’t have.
Native support for Android was planned for Android 11, soon we’ll get Android 14 and still no support in sight.
Next year sounds like it’ll be a feature for iPhone 16 pro Max.
It’s going to be a software update, so not tied to a new phone release model.