Bingo. RCS is yet another proprietary protocol, one controlled by Google (GSMA who originally designed it have practically forgotten about it for a decade) and without an open specification. RCS also doesn’t have a standardised approach to encryption as it’s designed for lawful interception.

So unless Apple have licensed Google’s implementation and extended version of RCS, this will be a shitty, insecure way to communicate between the Apple Messages and Google Messages apps and nothing more.

Google did an impressive job applying pressure and suggesting RCS was a perfect solution when in fact it’s just putting more control in Google’s hands. RCS is not an open “industry” standard. You nor I as individuals can implement it without paying license fees to see the specification and fees to have our implementations tested and accredited.

And Google have extended GSMA’s RCS with their own features (such as encryption) which is not part of the official standard and they haven’t made open either.

If Apple had been pressuring Google to implement the iMessage protocol or whatever, we’d have been up in arms (and rightfully so).

But instead of us all collectively hounding Apple and Google to ditch proprietary protocols and move to open ones such as Matrix, Signal, XMPP, etc (ones where we could all implement, use open source software clients, etc) we’ve got this shit:

Proprietary, insecure, non-private communication protocols baked into the heart of hundreds of millions of devices that everyone is now going to use by default instead of switching to something safer, private, public, open, auditable, etc etc.

Samsung messages was using RCS since 2012... Years before Google messages adopted it.

There are others out there that use it but call it by different names like "advanced messaging", "SMS+" etc

Google was the first to add e2e encryption and push it hard though, but if you send a RCS message from Google messages to Samsungs messages app, it won't have e2e, and most likely will be the same with messaging Apple.

But given how much Apple have fought to make it hard (or at least inconvenient) to message between them, and shut down any apps that made messaging between Apple and Android better, this is a big step for Apple