The long-awaited day is here: Apple has announced that its Messages app will support RCS in iOS 18. The move comes after years of taunting, cajoling, and finally, some regulatory scrutiny from the EU.
Right now, when people on iOS and Android message each other, the service falls back to SMS — photos and videos are sent at a lower quality, messages are shortened, and importantly, conversations are not end-to-end encrypted like they are in iMessage. Messages from Android phones show up as green bubbles in iMessage chats and chaos ensues.
Apple’s announcement was likely an effort to appease EU regulators.
Everybody is using WhatsApp which is available for all platforms. I’m not the biggest fan of that but a user base of literally billions is hard to avoid.
It’s not really a thing in the US, which is kind of weird since it’s such a big deal elsewhere. Then again, I’m happy it’s not a thing here because I’ve avoided Meta/Facebook entirely, and I’d like to keep it that way.
The issue is WhatsApp from a few years ago versus WhatsApp today - meta/favebook is probably the worst possible company to have bought it, their record on security, privacy, and features is horrible.
The app today is full of enshitification (meta ai being shoved down my throat by the communication monopoly) and nobody can ever fully trust their security or privacy because its not open source.
Signal sadly doesn’t yet have the ubiquity of whatsapp - but for everyone that has it (now I’m finding even non tech-savvy family are switching over) use signal, and where you have to, use WhatsApp.