![]() When asked about RCS during a media event on Thursday, Apple CEO Tim Cook reportedly said: "I don’t hear our users asking that we put a lot of energy in on that at this point."Īside from the current drawbacks of RCS, the lock-in effect of iMessage is also believed to be a major reason why Apple is keeping iMessage exclusive to its devices. The short answer is probably not any time soon.Īpple declined to comment on whether it planned to adopt RCS when contacted by ABC News. This is an old tech playbook, but we don't have to take it seriously." Will Apple ditch SMS and adopt RCS? "Now it decides to try to support this, so suddenly it's a 'standard'. "Google, as we all know, has repeatedly failed messaging," he wrote on Twitter. Independent technology analyst Benedict Evans said it was "bizarre" that RCS had not been killed off yet, after having "staggered on for 15 years without ever getting traction". The GSMA says there are almost 500 million active monthly users of RCS and more than 1.2 billion RCS-ready devices.īut there are still billions of other Apple and non-Apple devices which don't support it. "It's a PR play that doesn't solve any of the actual problems with RCS." "In a vacuum, of course I want Apple to implement RCS. But Google launching an entire campaign against Apple is so cringey and painful to watch," one Twitter user wrote after Google launched its campaign. RCS group messages also aren't covered by end-to-end encryption at this stage, unlike one-to-one conversations. ![]() Google even turned off promotional messages in India earlier this year, after a number of businesses flooded RCS users with spam. There are concerns about how it might be used by companies to send advertising material to users more easily than is possible with SMS. There's been a mixed response to Google's PR push, with some people pointing out that RCS isn't a flawless system. Loading Twitter content What's the response been to Google's campaign? Google engineer Elmar Weber described RCS as "the new SMS" in a blog post as part of Google's recent publicity campaign. The RCS protocol, which was first released in 2008, can be used when texting between Android phones and Google wants it to be adopted more widely. ![]() RCS, which stands for rich communication services, was first developed by an industry organisation called the GSM Association (GSMA), which represents operators of mobile networks. Why does Google say RCS is 'the new SMS'? "These problems exist because Apple refuses to adopt modern texting standards when people with iPhones and Android phones text each other," the company says. On its "Get the message" campaign page, Google says, "it's not about the colour of the bubbles". ![]() In the United States, where iPhones dominate the youth market, the colours of message bubbles have become so significant that some students with non-Apple phones (and therefore green message bubbles) have been bullied by their peers, according to the Wall Street Journal.Īt the time of that report, Google's senior vice-president of Android, Hiroshi Lockheimer, said in a tweet: "Using peer pressure and bullying as a way to sell products is disingenuous for a company that has humanity and equity as a core part of its marketing." Google says Apple's use of SMS instead of RCS means mobile phone users experience issues when messaging between Apple devices and those running Google's Android software, such as: This is because either SMS or MMS is being used to send the message, and it shows there's a non-Apple device in the conversation. This is where blue and green message bubbles come into play.Īpple's iMessages show up in blue bubbles when they are sent between Apple devices, but the bubbles are green when messaging non-Apple devices. There's also Apple's iMessage, which allows Apple devices to send various kinds of messages and media to each other. These technologies are still being used by billions of people, but face increasing challenges from internet-based services such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, Viber, WeChat and Line. There's also MMS (multimedia messaging service) which arrived in the early 2000s and enables longer messages and the ability to send a small amount of media such as a photo or a short video or audio file. SMS, which stands for short messaging service, has been around since the early 1990s and allows for messages of up to 160 characters between mobile devices. ( Unsplash: Hillary Black) A brief history of SMS IPhones use SMS or MMS when sending messages to non-Apple devices. ![]()
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