nothing but disappointment

On June 10th, 2024, Apple Corporation announced a variety of new products and services they plan to launch throughout the next coming months. Many anticipated the ‘Messages’ category eagerly, and as they listed features such as scheduled messages, sending via satellite, etc., but the long-planned Rich Communication Services announcement was mentioned as a footnote at the end of the presentation, among relatively unimportant items.

RCS stands for Rich Communication Services, and is a protocol not unlike Apple’s iMessage developed by Google. Both iMessage and RCS have been offered as replacements to SMS, which does not support longer messages, reactions, replies, voice messages, typing indicators, or leaving MMS group chats. Communicating with these protocols becomes very difficult when one is communicating with a user of a different protocol. For example, SMS messages on iPhone will show up as green, while iMessage messages will be blue.

In other words, RCS is a modernized version of SMS that carriers and Android smartphone manufacturers started adopting a decade ago.

When Apple announced they were adopting RCS messaging in late 2023, it was clear that they had been forced to support it over pressure from regulators, competitor apps, and lawmakers. Because of this, Apple’s adoption of RCS is more of a duty to please people than a desire. Many users still had questions, such as whether end-to-end encryption will be enabled, and if messages will still be green. Critics expected Apple to release information on these RCS features among others at its yearly developer conference, WWDC 2024. Unfortunately, it was only mentioned in passing, and the only information Apple has published are some screenshots of RCS on iPhone that confirm that the green bubbles will remain (as well as its stigma) and that end-to-end encryption, a widely used RCS feature, will not be supported on Apple devices.

Apple’s lack of any explanation of RCS’s debut has left users and critics in surprise and disbelief. With uncertainty ahead, Apple’s community will have to wait until iOS 18 releases to see RCS in effect.