Google Posts Yet Another Plea for Apple to Support RCS Messaging in iMessage
Google is making yet another attempt to persuade Apple to support the RCS phone-messaging standard in its own iMessage service, but this time it’s aiming the sales pitch at iPhone users.
At a "Get the Message(Opens in a new window)" site posted Tuesday, Google calls out the least-common-denominator aspect of texts between iPhone and Android users: Everybody loses such features as encryption, typing indicators, and read receipts supported separately by Apple’s iMessage and the Google-backed Rich Communications Services (RCS), also called “chat features” in Android.
“Apple creates these problems when we text each other from iPhones and Android phones, but does nothing to fix it,” the page declares. “Apple turns texts between iPhone and Android into SMS and MMS, out-of-date technologies from the 90s and 00s.”
Subsequent paragraphs emphasize how iPhone users don’t only suffer the indignity of seeing Android-using friends’ messages in green bubbles but also miss features they enjoy in conversations with other iPhone users. For example: “Without read receipts and typing indicators, you can’t know if your Android friends got your text and are responding.”
Privacy also loses out in cross-platform conversations, the page notes: “SMS and MMS don’t support end-to-end encryption, which means those messages are not secure.”
(But while RCS supports end-to-end encryption(Opens in a new window) in one-to-one Android chats, group Android chats today only get encryption in transit, with “e2e” security advertised as coming later this year. Bringing this same security to chats between different apps and different platforms would be much harder.)
Apple has never shipped an iMessage client for Android, and court documents unearthed during
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