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.
Yay, now one proprietary chat app forcibly preinstalled on Android phones by Google is going to work with proprietary app forcibly preinstalled on Apple iPhone phones.
Now US teenagers are going to have less reason to switch to an protocol that actually everybody can use. “Ugh, you are not using an iPhone?” is going to change to “Ugh, you are not using an Apple or Google approved phone?”
What are you talking about? Google doesn’t have a proprietary chat app that they force on everyone. The Messages app is for SMS, MMS, and RCS, just like every phone that’s ever gone out has had a messaging app for SMS.
And Apple purposely hamstringing their messaging features in favor of iMessage for so long has been anti-cooperative and anti-consumer.
Allowing for better interoperability between Android and iPhone is a good thing and it’s asinine to think otherwise.
Google Messages use nothing that regular app could not use. They can be installed on older OS versions without a problem. Yet, we cannot implement our own RCS app on Android until Google create an API for third-party developers.
So, Google can develop RCS app for Android, but other companies can’t. Even if their app is on the same level as any other app. It is really fishy.
RCS may have open spec, but at the end of the day we would connect via the Internet to servers that mostly Google hosts for carriers. At this point why even bother with Google and carriers and not just use purely Internet based, more feature-rich standards we have for decades?
Beeper app for example has RCS support. It works by using Android emulator with Google Messages installed… Yeah.