It's about time. I hop between iOS and Android every so often, and the lack of RCS has always been a major pain in the ass. Goodbye shitty compressed photos and hello read receipts. Unless your Android vendor doesn't fully support RCS... Looking at you, Samsung
what the hell is with the damn downvotes on all the tech posts all the time ?! just dont follow tech if you’re going to just downvote everything all the time.
It’s more about the lack of iMessage features. Things like editing, unsend, text effects, etc are absent in regular texts. If everyone is on iMessage, everyone can use those enhanced features. They’re apparently pretty popular in group chats, but even a single android user will drag the entire conversation into regular text messages instead. So lots of iPhone users (especially the younger gen Z and alpha) started complaining whenever someone had an android, or even outright bullying them for it.
And for android users, texting with an iPhone user is a horrible experience; Images are horribly compressed, videos are severely limited in file size and compressed, group texts need to be opened as an attachment to be read, etc… All because iOS refused to use the more modern RCS texting protocols.
That’s more on the OS than the text protocol. The protocol doesn’t just hold a text in the ether until it’s time for delivery. A scheduled text is you telling the phone “hey, wait to send this message until it’s time.” Then your phone sends it at the proper time.
iOS still doesn’t have built in text scheduling. There are workarounds, (like using the Shortcuts app to build a “send this text” automation that runs at a specific time), but that’s not the same thing as native support.
Re-reading my comment, I see what happened.
I didn't specify "RCS on iOS....", assuming it would be implied based on the thread topic. I have made the edits.
From the way article is worded, I thought maybe they finally added schedule send for imessages, but somehow excluded it from RCS messages.
"RCS chats are still missing many features Apple bakes in for iMessage conversations, like being able to schedule messages to send later"
That is an interesting way of saying Apple is finally supporting an industry standard. By the way what is it with people pretending iMessage is the only messenger? There are many great cross platform options like signal and also some not so good options like WhatsApp. May just be Europe, but the last time I used SMS was in 2021. And I always have used iPhones.
Calling RCS an industry standard is a bit... Questionable. Still, I'm happy to see Apple finally implementing it so there's a good cross vendor texting implementation.
RCS still sucks. It's a marginal improvement over MMS, and not more.
Basically all the stuff people actually care about are proprietary Google features because they had to use proprietary extensions and send everything through their own servers to make it work.
It's really not different than iMessage. It's no more open to any other messaging app or any other OS than iMessage is, and it isn't really capable of being so unless the standard improves.
This is just… super wrong. RCS is more open than iMessage by virtue of being supported on two different platforms from different vendors. Doesn’t really mean it is fully open, it’s not, but 2 is more than 1.
The nice thing about SMS is its on everyone's phone by default.
No apps to download and no accounts to make.
Adding someone is a simple 9 digit number.
imessage bridged the gap between bacsic SMS and feature-rich messages. With them both being in one app and handled automatically, it is very convenient to use. While the extra features are limited to apple phones, you can use imessage to universally message any other phone.
Google made a their own thing, RCS, to compete with imessage.They made it an open RCS is a standard and worked that works with carriers to make it so any phone could use it. it took Apple 7 years since release to add support.
Finally, you can text pretty much anyone with a smart phone a message with the "extra features" without hassle.
Google did not make RCS; RCS is made by GSM consortium as succession of SMS, Google extended it to add some extra features such as end to end encryption (but only when messages are routed through their servers).
China mandated 5G sold in China must support RCS, hence why Apple added support for this. Since Google is basically banned in China, you can pretty much bet RCS going into/out of China is going to be unencrypted.
So you’re basically stuck between getting inferior unencrypted messages, or routing everything through Google.