Apple is bringing RCS to the iPhone in iOS 18
www.theverge.com
Ding dong, the SMS is dead.

The long-awaited day is here: Apple has announced that its Messages app will support RCS in iOS 18. The move comes after years of taunting, cajoling, and finally, some regulatory scrutiny from the EU.

Right now, when people on iOS and Android message each other, the service falls back to SMS — photos and videos are sent at a lower quality, messages are shortened, and importantly, conversations are not end-to-end encrypted like they are in iMessage. Messages from Android phones show up as green bubbles in iMessage chats and chaos ensues.

Apple’s announcement was likely an effort to appease EU regulators.

  • Evilcoleslaw@lemmy.worldEnglish
    231·
    5 months ago

    And yet Google still hasn’t rolled out RCS for Google Voice, and last I checked there was an issue with it and Google Fi as well. (It works but it precludes some advertised feature of Fi or something.)

    • TonyOstrich@lemmy.worldEnglish
      12·
      5 months ago

      Currently Google has bricked RCS for people with rooted phones in such a way that it fails silently for like the 4th time this year, and it’s looking like the modders may not be able to keep getting around it.

      • GamingChairModel@lemmy.worldEnglish
        51·
        5 months ago

        Fi has two different, incompatible options for how to sync your messages to a computer or other device that isn’t your primary phone with your SIM (or e-SIM): the so-called “option 1” is RCS compatible, but treats your phone as the canonical device that has the primary copy of all messages, voicemails, etc. “Option 2” is device agnostic, where all messages and voicemails live on the cloud, and your phone (and all other devices) merely syncs with that primary copy in the cloud.

        If your phone breaks or dies or is lost/stolen, Option 2 keeps chugging along with all your logged in devices, but the dead phone is the single point of failure for Option 1.

        Ideally there would be a device agnostic way to access RCS through your account, but every implementation seems to require a specific SIM.

    • CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      85·
      5 months ago

      Honestly, it’d be a good retort from Apple if they ran a commercial that said, “We’ll support RCS once all your products do” and then show a screenshot of Google Voice.

    • Caiman86@lemmy.worldEnglish
      31·
      5 months ago

      Yeah, if Voice doesn’t have RCS support by the time iOS 18 launches, I’ll be moving off it for messaging. Have a number of text groups with iPhones that will benefit from everyone on RCS, most important knowing that my group messages were actually received. MMS still randomly drops messages or they get massively delayed or received out of order.