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Opinion: Why Apple should support RCS

iMessage gets handy improvements in iOS 15, but one thing has been missing for years: support for Rich Communication Services, or RCS. The providers already talked about it in 2012 and Apple is said to have held talks in 2019, but there is still no indication that it is being worked on. The three major American providers have now switched to RCS, Samsung has been offering it in the Messages app since October and Google is making RCS available to all Android users in the Netherlands. You are then no longer dependent on your provider. And the latter is good news, because in the Netherlands only Vodafone offers support for RCS. But iPhone users are failing on all fronts – and that depends on Apple.

Why you would want RCS

If you send a message via iMessage, it is encrypted. If you only have friends within the Apple ecosystem, it works well, but as soon as you want to send something to an Android user, iOS falls back to SMS. This can be recognized by the green speech bubbles. SMS is insecure because it is not end-to-end encrypted, making messages easy to intercept. Yet it is still used for important, privacy-sensitive communications. The vaccination reminders from the GGD are sent by SMS and for logging in to various services you sometimes receive security codes via SMS. Companies such as UPS, KLM, DHL, DPD, Tikkie, Aegon, ABN AMRO, ING, Knab, ICS, Facebook, Telegram, Clubhouse, Paypal, Google Nest and more send codes by SMS. Everyone knows that SMS is insecure and there is a better alternative, but Apple doesn't seem to be in a hurry.

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As a result, many iPhone users prefer not to use Apple's Messages app. If you have many friends with Android, it is more attractive to use WhatsApp. You then have many more functions: you can send photos and videos, use stickers, have group conversations and see when someone types a message or receives your message. You don't have all those functions with SMS, but RCS does support it.

If Apple starts to offer support for RCS, it will be more attractive to use the Messages app in a mixed group of friends. So RCS is not only a more secure alternative to SMS (RCS has been offering end-to-end encryption since the end of 2020), but also offers commonly used extras that you know from WhatsApp, such as audio messages and sending large files. Later in this article, we list the pros and cons of RCS again.

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Why Apple Doesn't Want RCS

RCS Fits very much in the vein of Apple: it offers better security and privacy, two topics that are close to Apple's heart. We can only guess why Apple isn't in a hurry.

RCS in the Netherlands

It's good news if Apple ever supports RCS. But does it also benefit us immediately in the Netherlands? After all, it is often our turn to roll out services years later. There is also good news on that point: Google added RCS support to the Messages app in the Netherlands last fall. This works on all recent Android devices, without being dependent on your provider.

Samsung's Messages app already had support for RCS, but only if the provider itself offered it. However, since December 2020, it has been standard in Samsung's Messages app, even without carrier support. This is thanks to the global rollout of RCS on Android.

That you are not dependent on your provider is a good thing, because in the Netherlands only Vodafone has announced official support. This has been active since October 2020, but the provider writes:

Apple device
Apple does not currently support the global RCS standard and does not provide information about the future. Messages from Android & Samsung to Apple will continue to run via the traditional SMS method for the time being, without the new functionalities. So Apple already uses iMessage, which is comparable to RCS-Chat.

Vodafone is in itself right that Apple offers similar functionality in iMessage, but that does not solve the problem that you still have to exchange unsecure SMS messages between iPhone and Android and that you also receive communication from important authorities via the insecure SMS.< /p>

Pros and cons of RCS

Below we list everything about the pros and cons of RCS.

These are the advantages of RCS:

These are the disadvantages of RCS:

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