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.
This is great but surprising news. Hopefully the implementation is actually good
I imagine they’ll probably keep the blue bubbles and some features exclusive to iMessage users, but this is still great news.
I wonder if this will encourage Google to allow Fi users to have RCS while texting from PC…
Yep, they’ll definitely stick to the blue green system that already exists, threads with greens will just be improved from what they were/currently are
What do you guys think is going to happen with like an open RCS standard? RCS is only available on Google messages.
RCS has always been an open standard.
Only Google has done the work to implement it for billions of devices, so far.
That has never prevented Apple from also implementing the standard on their devices.
https://www.gsma.com/futurenetworks/rcs/universal-profile/
@13617 @Corgana
Wonder how it is that smaller community-based chat protocols with many more features can have so many client options: https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/
While basic text messaging was for years only implemented by Google app.