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.
RCS falls back to SMS/MMS, so it’s not another app, it’s a replacement for texting (and iMessage).
iMessage is, basically, just a proprietary way of doing what RCS is designed to do, so Apple can use peer pressure to get teens (and adults) to exclusivity buy iPhones so their messages are the “right” colour.
Some time ago Signal was falling back to SMS too.
How is this propietary aspect of iMessage non existing on Android with RCS? Years goes by and still the only Android app that can support this protocol seems to be Google Messages.
Third-party RCS clients like Beeper use Android virtual machine with Google Messages running… Seriously, even Facebook Messenger seems to be less locked down.