With how convoluted RCS was in the beginning. Where literally US carriers had their own versions, then some manufactures had their own RCS profiles. You and your Friend could have the same phone, but different carrier and it wouldn’t work. Or two carriers would agree to support each others RCS profile, but the same phone model on either carrier had different OS versions so it wouldn’t work.
Everyone stopped running their own RCS servers and it all goes through Google now. Apple will probably run their own and by indications it will implement the standard strictly–but guess who doesn’t? Google. So it might end up being worse than just having SMS. When things don’t work right, Apple can just shrug and point at the standard and say ‘thats what we do. take it up with google.’
Google’s version runs the universal profile. If Apple uses the universal profile, all the RCS things people talk about will work. E2EE is a separate thing that Google Messages added but that won’t break RCS on the universal profile. Discussing E2EE is a separate issue than RCS support by Apple.
With how convoluted RCS was in the beginning. Where literally US carriers had their own versions, then some manufactures had their own RCS profiles. You and your Friend could have the same phone, but different carrier and it wouldn’t work. Or two carriers would agree to support each others RCS profile, but the same phone model on either carrier had different OS versions so it wouldn’t work.
It was a mess.
Everyone stopped running their own RCS servers and it all goes through Google now. Apple will probably run their own and by indications it will implement the standard strictly–but guess who doesn’t? Google. So it might end up being worse than just having SMS. When things don’t work right, Apple can just shrug and point at the standard and say ‘thats what we do. take it up with google.’
Google’s version runs the universal profile. If Apple uses the universal profile, all the RCS things people talk about will work. E2EE is a separate thing that Google Messages added but that won’t break RCS on the universal profile. Discussing E2EE is a separate issue than RCS support by Apple.
And that’s exactly what they should do.
A mess indeed, which seems to be why the rest of the world abandoned carrier/manufacturer controlled messaging and switched to WhatsApp
Let’s not pretend the rest of the world isn’t on competing messaging platforms (Line, Wechat, FBM, Viber, etc)
Which is a mistake. Never a good idea to abandon open standards and pool everything into one private business.