Technology

This is weirdly only a thing in America. In Europe, where I live, iMessage isn’t that popular and iPhone users never seem to care about the bubble colour (likely because WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Element, and Threema are so popular, everyone is used to using multiple chat apps anyway).

Edit: Also I’m not sure why everyone is championing RCS - it’s yet another proprietary communication standard like iMessage and isn’t open thus can’t be easily implemented in other chat apps.

Rather then pressure Apple to support and further popularise another closed protocol, we should be pushing for something open like Matrix or Signal.

Also yesterday, Reuters reported that the European Commission has begun trying to establish whether iMessage should be brought under the remit of the EU’s new antitrust law, the Digital Markets Act, which imposes interoperability requirements (among other things) on so-called gatekeeper services that are part of many people’s daily lives.

Apple’s iOS operating system, App Store, and Safari browser already fall under the DMA, which is likely to force Apple to allow third-party app stores on iPhones and iPads, but Apple so far managed to lobby the Commission into leaving iMessage out of it. If the Commission decides after its investigation that iMessage is worth regulating in this way, Apple would have until August next year to introduce some form of interoperability—presumably with RCS.

I have seen people literally say they like that iMessage is exclusive, and they like to keep Android users away/separate

It was reeking of classism in addition to being generally a terrible thing to read

💀

The EU has dragged Apple through the mud in order to make them change for the better, they will be able to do the same.

The idea of making Apple use it is also part of Google giving the operations to carriers, just like SMS, and then gradually replacing SMS altogether. Google isn't even supposed to be running the RCS servers. But they did it in order to get the standard up and running everywhere. It's an open standard, and multiple carriers in several countries are on their way to carrying the burden of the servers, the way the standard is supposed to operate. Once it's operating, all servers can talk to each other, just like you can SMS a person on another carrier line. RCS will allow universal rich texting.

Surely XMPP and other standards are different and I would prefer any other than something championed by Google. But the truth is, that the other standards aren't invited to sit at the right tables and don't offer the same “replace SMS once and for all” potential the way RCS does. XMPP for example is super expensive to escalate and like almost all of the traffic is just presence messaging, which is super wasteful and energy intensive on servers. RCS is not the best, but it's one that all carriers and telecommunications agencies are on board for replacing the archaic SMS. And it doesn't preclude using other protocols. Like, WhatsApp, Signal, Matrix and Telegram will still continue to exist.

"Hell yes" - the EU, definitely

It was FaceTime, not iMessage. The reason the developers were surprised was that they didn’t own the tech, and Apple lost a patent lawsuit about it and almost had to remove FaceTime entirely. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-20236114 https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/apple-s-facetime-open-standard-never-happened

It's incompatible with Android on purpose. They want their users shaming non apple users in to getting an iPhone.

I think this is an American problem

Not nobody, it's number three after WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger (both owned by Meta).

So yeah, the EU is definitely focusing on Meta, but iMessage, Signal and RCS (Google) are large enough to all be in scope of the regulation.

I don't know if things like Snapchat are also in scope.

Edit: got corrected below. WhatsApp and Messenger are in scope, iMessage is being reviewed.

RCS is just a standard, much like how SMS is just a standard. Google's Messaging app is just one implementation of it, though it probably is the most popular in the US it is not the only one, nor is Google able to decide who cannot use it. Carriers typically have their own, though you may have recently heard that T-Mobile decided to switch over to Google's.

As someone else said RCS is just the new global standard replacing SMS that apple does not want to support because it weakens their walled garden.

RCS is an open standard created by GSMA, not a Google product. Google and Samsung just have the most popular "flavours" of RCS

It works on Textra just fine

I'll just carry on using whatapps and people on iPhones can either download it or put up with my different coloured bubbles if they don't want too. Luckily people in the UK are all mostly on WhatsApp anyway, this who text message colours is a very yank centric problem.