Google is holding the 2023 edition of its annual I/O conference today, and the company announced many new things for Android and Pixel products. During the keynote, the company again teased Apple for not providing support for the RCS messaging protocol on the iPhone.
What’s RCS
RCS is a new open messaging standard created by Google to replace SMS, which is quite old, limited, and not secure. However, while Google has been pushing RCS for every Android user, Apple has never seemed open to the idea of adopting RCS on iOS. This is because the company already has iMessage, its own solution to replace SMS.
But while RCS is an open standard, iMessage is only available on Apple devices. And this ends up affecting conversations between iPhone and Android users using the default Messages app of their respective devices. During today’s I/O, Google said that there are already more than 800 million people using RCS in the world.
The company then teased Apple by suggesting that this number could be even higher if every operating system “gets the message and adopts RCS.” Android VP Sameer Samat also added that he hopes everyone can “hang out in the group chat together, no matter what device we’re using.”
Apple refuses to adopt RCS
Last year, when asked about RCS by a customer who couldn’t send his mother certain videos because she uses an Android phone, Apple CEO Tim Cook told him to “buy your mom an iPhone.” Cook also said he doesn’t see Apple users asking the company “to put a lot of energy into that.” In the US, where iMessage is really popular, allowing iPhone users to send RCS may end up hurting iPhone sales.
Craig Federighi once said that “iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones.” Multiple reports show that people in the US, especially teenagers, buy iPhones just because of iMessage. But in countries where neither iMessage nor SMS/RCS are popular, this is not exactly a problem.
Still, bringing RCS to the iPhone would result in a number of benefits for users – not only because of the interoperability between iOS and Android but also because RCS has end-to-end encrypted messages, while SMS doesn’t. Unfortunately, a Bloomberg report from December 2022 revealed that Apple still has no plans to adopt RCS in its devices.
- iMessage and RCS: An unlikely pair we all want to see [Video]
- Google I/O 2023 Keynote Live Blog + News Hub: Android 14, Pixel, and AI
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