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.
I don’t want to be cynical, but is this part required for Apple to implement RCS?
“and bring a wide range of iMessage-style features to messaging between iPhone and Android users.”
I can totally imagine it being limited to the encryption and the bare minimum, as imessages features don’t perfectly overlap with the RCS features (e.g. emojis).
Love to see Apple being forced into making good decisions against their will.
I’m hoping that they also force Google to do the same. Pushing for a universal RCS E2E encryption standard is great. I’m sick of Google saying RCS is the open alternative to iMessage, when key things like their E2EE implementation are not open at all.
AFAIK Apple has said they are only going to use official RCS spec with no extensions and will work on adding encryption to the spec. Google has announced that they will work with Apple and the GSMA to implement official RCS encryption.
Yeah, all in all, this is a good news all around m. Apple is coming into the fold, and E2EE should become more accessible for more RCS clients.
What kind of openness are you hoping for? Google has built their solution with a bunch of already open pieces.
RCS + Signal protocol + MLS
https://www.androidauthority.com/google-messages-mls-3346918/
https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/20/23801536/google-messages-app-mls-support-announce
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Accessing the keys from the server isn’t really a mystery or hidden. It’s technically possible for Apple to write software to query servers run by Google as well as any servers they created for themselves.
You don’t need implementation source code when you have open standards already.
WhatsApp actually used Signal’s development team to rollout the Signal protocol for them, but that app is still untrustworthy.
Do you have a link to those standards? All I could find was a high-level overview of “this is how the Signal based crypto is used in Messages” from a year and a half ago. It mentions extending the XML scheme used in RCS, but doesn’t provide a schema or any other details.
Google Messages and WhatsApp are both based on documented, secure protocols, and neither can be particularly trusted because both are run by data-hungry ad companies. I trust both companies to make the right choice in giving customers this little bit of privacy so they don’t leave the platform entirely, but they’re both equally iffy.
Hopefully with MIMI we will see complete cross-messenger compatibility, so open source messengers can be used for all communication.
Here are the links to the documentation for these standards:
MLS - https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mls/documents/
Signal Protocol - https://www.signal.org/docs/
RCS - https://www.gsma.com/futurenetworks/rcs/universal-profile/ & https://www.gsma.com/futurenetworks/resources/rcs-up-2-4-uni/
I knew where to find these, but where are the details on Google’s implementation of them? Because that’s what’s most important here.
Fucking finally
The elephant in the room is impending legislation in the European Union that could’ve ultimately required Malus to open up iMessage.
Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce you to The Brussels Effect!
Apple is being Brusseled 🙂
Ironically, despite Apple’s whining to get to this point, between this, and the EU forcing them to adopt USB-C, and, hopefully 3rd party stores and browsers, I may consider an iPhone for my next phone.
It’s a pity you almost need to point a gun to their head for them to consider unshittifing their products.
I never understood this argument. Apple lost its fight to make the environment worse for the customer, so you’re gonna reward them?
I think that’s the irony they’re pointing out
Yeah. My iphone fanatic of a friend was complaining about something on hers the other day, and was like “Why doesn’t Apple just do {whatever}?”
My reply was basically that Apple didn’t become a trillion dollar company by giving customers what they want. They became a trillion dollar company by telling customers what they want and marketing the crap out of it.
That was Jobs’ (Jobs’s …? Jobses…?) whole thing. People don’t know what they want until we’ve told them.
And I’d say it’s worked out pretty well for the entire tech industry so far.
It’s popular idea for a lot of innovation focused groups tbh. “If I have the people what they asked for I would have given them faster horses.” -Henry Ford
And to a certain degree there is truth to it.
The People: “We could really do with less antisemitic conspiracy theories.”
Henry Ford: “Hold my beer.”
… or by providing some that works really well for the majority of customers.
What was she complaining about?
To be fair, Google has been doing the same stuff with RCS E2E encryption. It ain’t open. There is a reason why Android isn’t littered with dope messaging apps that support encrypted RCS.
So you look at their history of shitty behavior and want to give them money because they were forced to act right in some cases?
OK then…
I don’t know how much of a gun it was. Apple has definitely been working on RCS support for a year; you don’t add that in a few months. Similarly I’m pretty sure Apple has been considering USB C in iPhone since at least when they started working on the USB C on iPad, which is what 5 years old?
Of course without pressure they would have probably be slower to move forward, and with Apple secrecy it’s always hard to tell how long things have been ready to ship. But let’s not pretend they just woke up this morning with a horse head in their bed and told their direction team to start working on this.
I hear you, but isn’t the proverbial horse’s head the fact that the EU is looming over them and forcing them to make a move?
RCS and USBC have been available for a while. It seems disingenuous not to acknowledge that Apple has purposely dragged their feet so they could make more profit selling proprietary software and hardware which is probably why you’re being downvoted
Let’s be fair, things like RCS E2E encryption are firmly under control by Google. People like to claim RCS is open, but it’s not.
If RCS was a proper open standard, we would have a lot of awesome messaging apps to choose from. We don’t, and the reason is because Google has been gatekeeping.
I’m annoyed that Apple is late to the game, and I hate that they needed to be pressured to get here, BUT I’m glad to see that they’re going to support universal alternatives to the crap you still have to ask Pichai to please let you use.
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Yeah… Matrix seems so much better over all for me. It’s just not as controllable so there is less investment in pushing adoption from companies.
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Because who is going to operate the servers?
Originally with RCS it was the carrier, but basically every carrier switched to using Jibe (by Google) for the backend.
And it sounds like Apple is going to operate their own as well.
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You’re wrong. That’s been an option for a long time
Actually all three of those things have been possible for a couple of years now.
Are any of the browsers not responded safari now?
You mean rebranded safari? That would be a no, but when I say rebranded Safari, that’s just the rendering engine, not the whole app. Other browsers can add features.
I did mean rebranded. Thanks for the explanation.
Other browsers, however, have to use the non-accelerated version of the WebKit engine, however. So third-party browsers will always have worse performance than Safari proper. Only Safari has access to the high-performance version of the rendering engine. I think that’s what the question was.
Huh, I wasn’t aware of that.
Maybe in the further future they can renove the grip with sideloading so you can install not-safari firefox.
I saw a rumor mill style post that Apple was going to allow sideloading of apps. If so, that’ll probably get me to switch. These changes and choice in software eliminates my gripes with iOS vs. Android.
As a point of clarity, I think both suck. But if Apple removes it’s disadvantages (even if by force) and is the more privacy respecting option out of the box, it makes sense to me.
Read a post on here the other day someone had a few articles linking to studies that apple may not be as privacy respecting as you think. Guess custom roms are the way to go lol.
I’ll go research that, thanks for the heads up!
They just need to stop using slaves and fighting attempts to fight against it and I might actually get to appreciate the cool things their engineers do actually make.
I just want to point out that this announcement comes after Nothing phone company announced they partnered with a company that will bridge the two protocols so apple was about to lose their ability to force android images and videos to look like a potato so iPhone users wouldn’t want to leave the apple ecosystem.
This just exactly like when apple decided they were going to be champions of privacy by improving the security on their phones, which coincidentally happened right after a company called cellebrite started selling a product that would allow police to bypass passcodes and fingerprints to access a users data which previously could only be unlocked by the police department paying a fee for each time to unlock a phone.
They will always default to being shitty like any other company treating their users like the enemy until they can’t and then they spin it in their favor.
Seems more likely to be Apple getting ahead of incoming legislation than a small phone company’s announcement. Companies like Apple don’t make huge changes within a couple days of nearly unknown (to the general market) companies doing something that might slightly affect them.
Regulations work, and in this case, it doesn’t look like competition played any role. Apple only makes changes like this when forced to by regulators or, in the case of privacy, when it’s marketable. Capitalistic self regulating is almost a myth with them— they wouldn’t even stop selling those butterfly keyboards until their self imposed refresh timeline allowed for it.
I’ve no doubt it’s more than one thing that is driving this, but my point was they are only now agreeing because they have to and not because they want to. This company has literally taken away their customers ability to receive quality media from their friends with the sole intent to pressure people into getting their product so they belong. I know it’s hyperbolic to say, but it’s basically using teens to bully each other into buying something. Someone had to pitch this idea to a room full of people and all those people thought wow this is a great idea, think about how fucked up that is.
Nothing is literally nothing, Apple could care less about them.
Nothing’s solution is basically getting you to send your messages to them, and they’ll send it through a Mac logged into your Apple ID hence achieving the “blue bubble” lol. Hugely insecure, hacky solution and hardly groundbreaking.
Apple could care less about them.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ask/comments/17wx1tq/whats_so_wrong_that_it_became_right/k9jzi63/
Could of, should of, would of. I’m not gonna loose sleep on it and I hope your not gonna
It will never be right, I couldn’t care less what a bunch of Redditors think
So Apple could care less? On a scale of one to ten, how much less?
You’re opinion? Maybe 3.5 or fewer more
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There are several of these solutions in the wild now. Basically, the phone tunnels into MacOS VM that sends the message through actual iMessage.
Kind of janky, but it works.
Beeper is sick! Would highly recommend. Or if you’re feeling frisky, self hosting the bridge in a docker container is possible. The container is a kvm osx vm.
Does beeper have a docker? I tried to install it last week, only saw an ansible notebook or something like that, broke my nginx and didn’t even work
I want to reverse proxy to it, not have it take total control of my vps or dedicate a vps to it
If you have a matrix server, then yes the mautrix-imessage bridge has a docker container. Beeper itself you can’t really self host as it’s their matrix server you live on (I haven’t checked out the beeper-selfhosted git yet).
I’m pretty sure the playbook is just docker under the hood on a service user instead of your normal user. There’s a way to run the playbook with docker as well (memory is fuzzy on that).
Matrix and the bridges can all be run in docker, yes.
Nothing doesn’t have anything real - it’s a Mac in the cloud with some janky scripting puppeting Messages.app. They haven’t figured out how to plug in at a protocol level or anything.
Beeper, and the open-source Matrix bridges it uses have been around for a while now, including the iMessage bridge.
Definitely a better choice than Nothing’s “we don’t believe in open source” sketchware
hopefully this was the huge hurdle needed clear that’ll eventually allow 3rd party developers access to rcs
Let me know when you can use RCS on an Android phone without Google Play Services outside of Google Messages
I think this is because the carriers were slow / refused to host RCS on their servers so most carriers make you use Google servers.
Seems like Nothing did it?
No, Nothing will provide a bridge to iMessage by logging with your password on the Mac mini farm. Not something that you want.
Also nothing didn’t shit, they partnered with Sunbird.
I know what happened. But maybe with Nothings announcement Apple decided “fuck it” You know?
Nah Beeper/matrix have had this capability available FOSS for much longer
Nothing have been pretty good at marketing really, all those headlines saying “Nothing brings blue bubble in Android” instead of “Nothing to bundle the Sunbird app with their phones”.
The RCS standard, not Google’s implementation. There are still going to be iMessage features that won’t work.
I’d rather they use the open standard. Google should, too. If there are shortcomings with the standard then let’s improve the standard, not create a custom implementation of it.
Well the standard is to laser than iMessage and kinda bad fundamentally, so I wouldn’t count on much else.
No matter how poorly Apple’s implementation works with Google’s, this will be a net positive for consumers.
Apple finally giving in allows RCS to become a true standard that works across any mobile devices. That will motivate developers and the industry as a whole to continue to improve upon it.
The initial release may be underwhelming but in the long run this week be good for everyone.
If Google’s implementation remained the defacto “RCS” that everyone used there would be no motivation to add things like encryption to the standard as everyone is using Google’s anyway
And they will act like they invented it
Apple: (Finally supports a standard the rest of the world has been using for years) Look at us. So brave, so innovative. Also, we removed another port. Here’s a link to a $29 dongle in the Apple store.
Rest of usby googleTM
Yeah…not really an open standard.
RCS is an open standard. Many mobile providers dragged their feet for so long that Google finally just started making it so that Google messages would relay RCS through their servers. The whole point is for the carriers to have RCS servers. Blame the carriers not Google for this. For once, Google isn’t the one that did something shitty.
*RCS Messaging will require the external coprocessor dongle, available at just 49.99
So will Google shut the fuck up about it now?
No. They will now introduce costs for carriers :)
Next year sounds like it’ll be a feature for iPhone 16 pro Max.
It’s going to be a software update, so not tied to a new phone release model.
Around 2010 Google, Facebook, MySpace, even OkCupid were all running on the XMPP standard protocol. The corpos were generally bad stewards not following protocol updates, implimenting features in incompatible ways, & eventually realized there was more to gain be defederating forcing folks to use their platforms & let those corporations siphon the (meta)data of messaging.
What gets me is why they saw the need to invent yet another similar protocol with XMPP still being feature rich, battle tested—as well as Matrix to a lesser extent—unless they already have their plans on how to circumvent the system & repeat this same cycle.
When will I be able to use RCS in other messaging apps than Google Messages on Android?
It looks like Apple is addressing one of the biggest gripes with RCS - Google’s proprietary crap that isn’t opened up to small 3rd parties. Apple wants things like E2EE to be a universal standard that anyone can use, not something Google only dishes out to big phone manufacturers.
I’m not sure that’s quite the case. It sounds like it’s just a big undertaking where Google and Samsung are the only ones that have done it. There was never anything stopping Apple.
It’s totally the case with the encryption element. Pretty widely known.
Gotcha. Thanks for clearing that up.
Wait, so Apple is doing something good for 3rd party apps? I did not expect that to happen in my lifetime
Apple, Google, and Microsoft all magically become really into open alternatives when one of their competitors starts to dominate or control a significant portion of the marketplace with proprietary tech.
Apple specifically had LOTS of examples of this back when they were a smaller player. OS X and Safari really leaned into open standards when MS was the 900lb gorilla.
Meta too. Their work in the Opencompute space is really cool, but it definitely feels like a jab at all their major tech competition going into the cloud space.
I’m sure they just don’t want all data to go through google servers, and thus give google more control over the protocol
I will never trust big tech companies. My successors will never trust big tech companies.
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