The long fight to make Apple’s iMessage compatible with all devices has raged with little to show for it. But Google (de facto leader of the charge) and other mobile operators are now leveraging the European Union’s Digital Market Act (DMA), according to the Financial Times. The law, which goes into effect in 2024, requires that “gatekeepers” not favor their own systems or limit third parties from interoperating within them. Gatekeepers are any company that meets specific financial and usage qualifications, including Google’s parent company Alphabet, Apple, Samsung and others.
Google wants Apple to use Google’s proprietary extension of RCS, which runs on Google’s own servers as is precisely as open as iMessage. Effectively nobody uses the industry-standard version of it.
Where’s the source for that? Last I read, Google was using the GSMA Universal RCS profile
Google does own and run the Jibe platform as an RCS vendor, but Apple doesn’t need to use it. They can go with a different vendor or run their own RCS servers just as easily
Google’s astroturf campaign for “RCS” promotes encrypted messages but RCS has no support for this. Google wants to force people to use its proprietary extension, which runs exclusively on Google’s servers.
And absolutely nothing is stopping Apple from rolling its own RCS extensions that apps can support as well
So what’s the idea here? Apple rolls out another extended version of RCS that’s proprietary as well?
It might be proprietary, but at least any messaging app Android, iOS or some future third competitor will be able to implement it.
Unlike iMessage which is both proprietary and closed off from third party use
And yet, no developer other than Samsung has been granted access to Google’s version of RCS.
I’d love to see a truly standard, rich, secure messaging service, but I’m not convinced what Google is doing here is any better than Apple.
The difference is, you can choose not to use Googles RCS extension and opt for the Universal Profile standard instead and it will interop with people on other RCS profiles, even Googles, just fine.
iMessage doesn’t do any of that, your choice is iMessage with other Apple users or a 30+ year old protocol. That’s it.
Except that’s not what happened in reality before Google started rolling out their version of RCS.
The carriers implemented their own versions that didn’t weren’t interoperable with each other, and that was for the ones that even bothered with it at all.
And now they have even less incentive to try.
RCS is nice in theory, but no one is serious about implementing the universal profile.