After a decade of iMessage dominance, our green bubble nightmare is over: Apple is adopting a universal texting standard with Android next year
For the last decade, nothing has kept people loyal to—or trapped in—the Apple ecosystem more than iMessage. Apple's messaging app creates a harsh divide between other iPhone users (beautiful blue bubbles, messages sent over data, integrated file sharing and encryption and more) and Android users (green bubbles, ancient unencrypted SMS) whose presence in a group chat would ruin everyone else's access to those advanced features. If Apple was ever going to bring down the walls around iMessage, I figured it would be a dramatic moment in one of its annual keynotes—not on a random Thursday, which happens to be today.
«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,» 9to5Mac reported this morning.
Despite years of needling from Google, Apple has stuck to its guns with keeping iMessage exclusive to iPhone users and ignoring RCS, a standard that Android has been pushing for several years now as a replacement for the outdated SMS protocol. RCS incorporates many of the same features as iMessage—it uses data instead of older cellular network infrastructure, supports read receipts, reactions, seamless group chats, and all that good stuff.
The most practical benefit of RCS is being able to send messages and media over wi-fi, and with a common standard it's much easier to communicate between different types of devices, like, say, a PC and a phone, without a dedicated app. People have become so desperate to use iMessage on non-Apple devices that in just the last couple years we've seen startups like
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