I’ve been seeing a lot of controversy on the internet regarding the fact that iOS 18 is bringing RCS (which is going to make the texting experience better for literally everyone). People are saying that when compare the RCS and iMessage standards, iMessage is inherently better. They’re half correct - yes, iMessage has a lot of features that RCS will most likely never have. However, what they’re missing is the fact that iMessage isn’t a standard. It’s a proprietary, internet-based chat software owned exclusively by Apple. Yeah, texting between iPhones and Androids is never going to be as good as texting between two iPhones, but it’s not because there’s a superior “standard”. It’s because Apple knows that their ecosystem is how they lock customers in, and so they won’t ever allow iMessage to be a standard, nor will they try very hard to keep up to date with RCS standards.
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Even if we look at this from Apple’s logic of “we only care about iMessage users, buy your mum an iPhone” - they should still support RCS or something like it because no matter how much Apple wants everyone to use an iPhone, that will never happen. There will always be Android users, especially outside the US, where Android and iOS are split pretty much 50/50 in market share. Some places are dominated by Android. That means currently anyone who messages a friend or family member via iMessage is using SMS, which is unencrypted, which goes against Apple’s whole marketing campaign about protecting user information. At the very least, supporting RCS on the iPhone means users are not using an unencrypted, unsecure platform like SMS/MMS, and if Apple truly cared about its users’ privacy, they would’ve supported RCS much faster and without pressures from the EU.
Very, very true.