I’ve heard that Apple is rolling out RCS chat in the fall but there’s very little information about how the technology works and what it will be capable of. I know Android has had it for years but it seems like it may have far more potential – specifically for communicating with businesses – now that Apple is getting involved. What are the implications for travel, healthcare, retail, etc?
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RCS is basically the evolution of SMS/MMS messaging. It takes what today is simple text and image sending, and it turns it almost into a login-free application built around a conversation.
A few major selling points.
1. End-to-end encryption
2. Read receipts between Android and iPhone
3. Typing indicators between Android and iPhone
4. Rich snippets can display data from applications right within a thread (great for business texting)
5. Action buttons can launch functionality that you would otherwise need to go to a website for (also great for business texting)
A really cool example of how RCS could be helpful in travel is if an airline texts me about my flight and allows me to change my seat right within a text thread with their bot.
In healthcare, I believe RCS would allow me to book an appointment from a text conversation with a hospital.
If Apple is really playing ball now, it has a ton of potential. It seems like they were doing the Apple thing and building a walled garden and simultaneously keeping Android user text bubbles green.
With both Apple and Google participating in RCS now, it could change the way we interact with texting on a daily basis.
It’s an improved inter-OS texting protocol that will allow iDevice users and Android users to text with something more similar to iMessage instead of the current fallback MMS system.
Apple had no reason to improve communication with Android devices in the past because they don’t sell android devices. They want people who want the benefits of iMessage to buy iPhones and iPads.
I don’t see any groundbreaking changes from this. Photos and videos shared between iPhone and Android users will be higher resolution now, and there will be the potential for more app interaction between platforms.
Similar technology has already existed in the form of third party OS agnostic apps like WhatsApp and Telegram. This just brings that kind of functionality into the default text app.
Apple has a problem with iMessage. It wants iMessage to work well on all of its devices– Macbooks, iPads & iPhones. That breaks down the more there are iPhone only iMessage features.
It’s a messaging protocol. “Texting” happens in one of four protocols:
SMS, the original and most limited format for short, text only messages.
MMS, the second oldest format which allows for longer text and multimedia content but with a very limited maximum size and lacking support for real time meta data features like the “so and so is typing…”.
RCS, an open source rich messaging format that supports more chat like features and much higher caps on data size
iMessage, apple’s proprietary rich messaging format that only iPhones can use.
RCS and iMessage do similar things, but because apple refused to support RCS or allow anyone else to implement iMessage all conversations that involved a mix of iOS and other devices had to downgrade to the older MMS which disabled some chat-like features, resulted in media getting downgraded to potato quality, and generally led to a worse experience.
The reason to do that is basically to make it a pain to text and especially do group chats cross platform and get people to pressure their friends/family to switch away from android.
RCS standard for “Rich Communications Services” and it’s a way for sending text and media messages.
Originally there was SMS, the “short messaging service,” which made use of a debugging feature of old mobile phone networks to send short (160 characters or less) messages between phones. It was not meant to be used that way, but it was pretty reliable and caught on.
Then, people wanted to send pictures and video clips… SMS couldn’t do that, so the telecommunications companies set up a system called MMS (multimedia messaging service) where the phone would effectively write a web page with media files, send it to a server that the phone company operated, then send a link to the other phone (which could download the media, after which it was safe to delete).
RCS was an improvement on MMS. It allowed more media types, bigger files, and did replaced the old system of sending a link with something a more modern scheme of pushing notification messages to the phone.
Apple looked at RCS, but they wanted something that was end-to-end encrypted (RCS had no encryption), would be more flexible on the media types used, that would support their slightly different method of pushing notifications to phones, and that could be plugged into customer support platforms so that companies could let you do chats with their call centers through it. RCS didn’t cut the mustard, so they went their own way and it only worked with their products. Apple phones could still send stuff to non-Apple devices, but it would be using MMS.
Google, on the other hand, figured that RCS was good enough for phone companies there was no need to reinvent the wheel. 15 years later, Google decided that encryption of text messages was probably a good thing, so they added their own special sauce to encrypt messages sent over RCS, but this time, there was no agreement on how that should work (the phone companies didn’t have a plan).
Now Apple has decided that they will move towards supporting RCS to replace MMS, but only the way that the phone companies have it working. This means that you’ll be able to exchange full-resolution pictures and video between Apple and non-Apple phones, BUT it won’t support Google’s homemade encryption. It’s going to wait until the phone companies lay out a plan for how to encrypt messages (and they’ll probably just say “um, what Google does”).
Curious – does RCS kill Whatsapp?
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