IMO RCS was a diversion put up by Google against Apple but I’m not sure what was the exact reason behind it.
Not even using RCS right now with anyone, worst thing I can do with my friends is chat on WhatsApp if they don’t have iPhones and I doubt RCS‘s popularity in the 🇪🇺
RCS is just a more modern messaging standard. Google wanted Apple to implement it so bad because it makes messaging Android users nicer. And yes, it doesn’t matter in Europe so much, but the US uses the preinstalled messaging apps. So iPhone users get iMessage talking to iPhone users and fell back to SMS whenever talking to Android users.
Ah, great! So Apple will provide the platform and it will be interoperable with Google. I’m glad they fixed the protocol instead of everyone using Google’s servers.
You’re still using Google’s servers even if you’re on iPhone, though now Google shouldn’t be able to read your messages.
It’s just that Apple didn’t want to support Google’s proprietary encryption protocol. So they worked to make end to end encryption part of the RCS standard, and now that it is, Apple is willing to support it.
Edit: Small correction. It seem’s like RCS on iPhone does not always use Google servers. It’s just that US carriers have partnered with Google to provide their RCS support.
It’s just that US carriers have partnered with Google to provide their RCS support.
Not sure if I’d call this “partnered”. AFAIK every carrier can provide their own RCS infrastructure via some data on the SIM. However, as Google wanted to push RCS, they’ve added a fallback to their own servers into the Android Messaging app. And I guess this then became somewhat of a “standard”.
And carriers are busy enough counting all that money we pay them, so they were happy to not having to do anything.
The US carriers announced in 2019 their CCMI (Cross Carrier Messaging Initiative) to bring RCS. But that went nowhere and they killed it. That’s when they started using Google’s Jibe instead.
See: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/04/verizon-att-and-t-mobile-kill-their-cross-carrier-rcs-messaging-plans/. Interesting read in 2025. Since then a lot changed. Carriers switched to Jibe rather than rolling their own RCS, Apple started supporting RCS (China mandated they add support, but I’m surprised that they brought it to other countries too), and now RCS has an official end to end encryption protocol.
Can’t believe it’s been 6 years since that announcement.
China’s mandate pushed GSMA to adopt the RCS Universal Profile as part of the 5G standard. Thus, Apple and every other phone maker needs to support RCS everywhere to be 5G compliant.
I’ve been there in the early days, when it was still called “Joyn” in Europe. That was around 2008/2009.
As far as I know, carriers do explicitly have to point to some RCS endpoint to make it work on iOS though, because that doesn’t assume the Google fallback. Maybe that’s what they meant.
So is RCS with E2E encryption illegal in the UK and Australia now?
The UK didn’t make end to end encryption illegal. They just asked Apple to make them a backdoor, so it would technically not be end to end encryption anymore.
Well, it still is end-to-end encrypted. Just from your end to Apple’s end. 😂
Funny enough I had activated the Advanced Protection (which deletes the iCloud encryption key from Apple’s servers) like a week before that UK thing went into effect. And since Apple isn’t allowed to talk about this, there’s no pressure to deactivate it again so far.
So no more blue vs green box bullshit? Stupidest thing I’ve seen is hate because you got a green text box.
Blue means the iMessage protocol is being used by all parties. So that means things like end-to-end encryption, data-driven messaging and photos, videos, rich replies, effects, voice replies, etc…
Green means the SMS protocol is being used by at least one person so everything is dumbed down to what SMS can do.
It’s going to stay green, just that green now includes end-to-end encryption as long as all parties are using RMS.
iMessage still has other features that RCS lacks.
Even if they were at feature parity, I don’t think RCS would ever be blue. Blue is the “premium” messaging experience.
Maybe one day Apple will give RCS its own color to separate it from SMS. I hope they do to signify its security.
Nah I’m sure that’s not gonna change, it’s effortless marketing lock-in for apple
