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?
In: Technology
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”).
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