If the latest reports are correct, Apple consumers have just over a fortnight to wait until the launch of iOS 18.1 and the belated arrival of Apple Intelligence, the flagship feature in the latest iOS release. Until then the most significant update is still RCS, the even more belated upgrade of stock SMS on iPhones.
As security experts commented before, Apple’s RCS upgrade has a lot of security flaws—no end-to-end encryption is the key one, with its lack being a major step back, but there’s also patchy carrier adoption, no full iMessage integration, and no end in sight for those dreaded green bubbles.
But Google campaigned hard for years, cajoling Apple into making this move as its own Android Messages app lost ever more ground to WhatsApp and other over-the-tops, while Apple seemingly brushed away any concerns, with its critical US user base continuing to iMessage between themselves.
And, while Google has teased Apple over their flawed RCS implementation, it has also made it clear how welcome this is. But there was always the chance that Google and its consumers would not see the equal playing field they desired, and that risk appears to be coming true.
Android Authority recently claimed that "iPhone users are not as into RCS as their Android buddies would have liked." There are some clear barriers to better adoption, particularly carrier support. But the underlying issue is much simpler: WhatsApp. This long-awaited partial integration of iMessage and Google Messages has been so delayed that WhatsApp has effectively locked down every significant market outside of the United States (and China).
With Apple's iMessage security being one of its main selling points, security and privacy have grown so central to the iPhone and its user base that an update that abandons all of that appears counter-intuitive in every sense. The fact that even Google is unable to view user content due to its extensive usage of end-to-end encryption throughout its own platform—which is akin to Apple's—makes this situation worse. However, all of that disappears when using cross-platform RCS texting.,
