“RCS messaging has been a hot topic of debate over the past couple of years, with Google leaving no chance of mocking Apple for refusing to adopt it — until it finally did with iOS 18 last year. However, Apple’s version of RCS came with a major catch: it lacked end-to-end encryption (E2EE), unlike what you’ve used on Android through Google Messages. That’s about to change, and it’s great news for your chats with iPhone users and mixed group chats.”
What is quite obvious is that Google has rushed this implementation a bit. There is nothing wrong with wanting to have had this in place a year or two back, but the sad part (in my opinion) is that Google does not seem to have thought this out properly with regard to decentralisation and interoperability.
It needed to have E2EE (in this day and age) and it could not just be Google managing the world’s messaging, so it needed to allow for functionality across more than just a centralised service.
Give the state of the USA and the UK around “backdoors” there will also be global concerns around how secure the service will be if the servers are hosted inside the USA or under the control of a US owned organisation. Also, will the service continue to be available if a trade, or other, war breaks out.
Yes, I know everything is better than SMS, but still the design process is the chance to get all this right.
But despite this, I’m happy to see RCS moving forward, and I’m hoping it fully replaces SMS at some point in the future for business notifications, and can be a common standard (versus all the different messenger services we see today, of which everyone is not on all the services).
See https://www.androidpolice.com/rcs-encryption-between-iphone-android-coming-soon