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.
They’re going to implement the open standard … which isn’t what most Android users are actually using. Does Google’s Messages app gracefully transition to the RCS standard if that’s what the other person is using?
No idea but, I suspect that Apple will have some negotiating power here, hopefully weakening Google’s control and making it mostly open
RCS is already an open standard, that’s why Apple is, and always has been, able to implement it themselves without relying on Google for anything.
@NENathaniel @kirklennon
My understanding is that it can be fully open but Google’s current implementation is not. That’s why the Google/Samsung messaging apps are the only texting apps that support it
Google and Samsung were the only apps to implement RCS (and the infrastructure to support the app) so far.
Nothing Google has done prevents any other organizations that want to invest the time and money from also implementing the standard.
https://www.gsma.com/futurenetworks/rcs/universal-profile/
Apple, on the other hand, doesn’t allow iMessage apps or servers that they didn’t create themselves. Or even an SMS/RCS app on their devices.
@NENathaniel
Hopefully someone more educated on the topic than me can jump in here haha, maybe I’ve been misinformed idk
Obnoxious "@"ing behavior
They’re on Mastodon, interaction between Lemmy and Mastodon can be weird sometimes it automatically put those there they probably didn’t manually try to @ people.
I haven’t used that feature but I think it’s neat as fuck
Yuck, it’s like replying in all caps