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.

  • @[email protected]
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    275 months ago

    RCS is crap, inconsistent, unreliable, lacking, buggy. It doesn’t even handle Dual SIM …

    Android needed a native “iMessage” style solution at least 10 years ago.

    I can buy a $99 flip phone, basic phone, up to a $1,500 premium device, SMS/MMS will function the same across all 3 devices. RCS however will not. So how is this the answer to advanced messaging on Android? It isn’t…

    If Google bought BBM & made it their own when it was still relevant in the consumer space, made it native on all Android 10 devices & later with SMS/MMS fall back, this would be something! Damn I miss BlackBerry…

    RCS is not seamless, not native, and it simply is not it. It’s the 1 thing I hate about Android, as creative and customizable as the software is, we need more…I hate what Apple represents in the consumer space and how people often think who use an iPhone which makes me never want one…

    The moment Google saw the exclusivity Apple was doing, Android should have followed suite.

    RCS sucks

    • @[email protected]
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      105 months ago

      Crazy thing is Google Hangouts did this back in 2012! They had it! You could text and message digitally to someone’s hangouts acct. then they killed it because of some legacy code or something.