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 message anyone with an iPhone. Other than the different colored bubbles what does it do? How is the quality degraded?
It just seems like Apple kept it separate so their obsessed fans would have something to feel superior about.
iMessage is a rich communication layer backed by HTTPS and web sockets so think something like WhatsApp or Telegram; you can send 2 gig files, embed maps and other rich content, etc etc. SMS is well… SMS. So the blue versus green bubble is a dumb reductionist view but the practical impact is visible in say video messaging, where an iMessage can attach a 50mb 4K H.265 clip same as a real messaging app, whereas an MMS will be a 256k 3gpp potato.
The biggest thing is attachments like photos/videos.
While MMS pretty universally sucks, Apple is very aggressive with the compression they apply to attachments over MMS so the resulting user experience is garbage akin to what we used to have when MMS was new.
Modern phones from other manufacturers will make use of the full MMS attachment size available, typically 100MB or more (depending on your carrier) iPhones will compress that video down to a couple MB regardless of the higher capacity available.
The biggest issue I’ve heard of is that message size is very constrained, so photos and videos are reduced to postage stamps.
iPhones don’t support multimedia messaging over anything other than SMS. On Android when you send an image to someone you’re sending the actual file (the original file with all its bytes intact). If you try to send it to someone over SMS it’ll just goes “nope, you shouldn’t do that you should send the actual file”, and seamlessly intervenes and just does it.
But since IOS can’t receive files, instead preferring to use their proprietary AirDrop system which they don’t feel like making available to other developers, Android phones are forced to send it as an SMS. Problem with that is there is a max file size and the image has to be heavily compressed in order to fit.
So then iPhone users (who typically know less about technology than my grandmother) start to complain about the terrible quality of Android photos, even though it’s actually an issue with transferring the file, and it’s not Androids fault. So what’s going to happen is that next year the quality of Android photos is massively going to jump really weirdly 🤔.