Despite the recent calls from Google’s foot And Samsung, Apple has for years refused to adopt the enriched short message standard, RCS (Rich Communication Services), instead favoring its in-house messaging solution, iMessages. Apple will however give in, as the company has confirmed to the American media 9to5 Thursday November 16: it will adopt the RCS during 2024.
The text messages of Apple smartphone owners will be enriched when they communicate with Android mobiles, and vice versa. Acknowledgments should appear, the quality of photos and videos should improve. It could even become possible to encrypt your messages and launch group discussions circulating smoothly between iPhone and Android mobiles.
But Apple is not abandoning iMessage. They will remain the standard for communications between iPhones and will retain their characteristic blue color on Apple mobile, distinguishing them from RCS standard messages, which will adopt the traditional green SMS and MMS that they replace, according to 9to5. In other words: the two standards, RCS and iMessages, will coexist on iPhones.
European Commission investigation
Apple’s conversion to RCS is a surprise. Its CEO, Tim Cook, had, in fact, spoken publicly on the issue at the end of 2022 during a conference, suggesting at the time that such a scenario was improbable. When a member of the public explained his difficulties in sending certain videos to his mother equipped with an Android mobile, Tim Cook replied: “ Buy an iPhone to your mother! »sparking a controversy.
This development occurs two and a half months after the entry into force of the regulation on digital markets (Digital Markets Act or DMA), European legislation requiring in particular large groups specializing in digital that their services are interoperable, and while iMessage is precisely the object ofan investigation by the European Commission to determine whether or not they are affected by the text.
This investigation also concerns Microsoft, and more specifically three of its products: the Edge browser, the Bing search engine, and the Microsoft Advertising advertising network. Just like Apple, the American company announced Thursday in a blog post measures to better comply with the DMA: it will soon be possible to uninstall your Windows Edge browser, as well as its Bing search engine. These and other changes will arrive in the coming months through Windows updates.