While the company’s first radical iPhone 16 update has already made headlines, with Apple’s iPhone 15 still relatively new on the market, it has become apparent that there is a significant potential problem in the mix that has just been made worse by an unexpected new update.
A vital component of its ecosystem, iMessage has drawn more attention lately for both positive and negative reasons. Therefore, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta described it as “a key linchpin of [Apple’s] ecosystem—which is why iMessage is the most used messaging service in the U.S.” It continues to be the go-to glue that keeps Apple’s walled garden intact.
However, Apple’s decision to restrict its iMessage platform to users inside its walled garden has drawn a lot of criticism, particularly when it seemed like a more business-driven than technical decision was made. Therefore, its apparent capitulation to user pressure and semi-reversal, allowing iMessage users to text across platforms via the RCS standard that Google is pushing throughout the Android ecosystem, was much appreciated.
“Later next year,” Apple announced in November, “we will be adding support for RCS Universal Profile, the standard as currently published by the GSM Association.” And while Apple lauded the “better interoperability experience when compared to SMS or MMS” this will bring to cross-platform messaging, it also said that it will work in parallel with iMessage, “which will continue to be the best and most secure messaging experience for Apple users.”
RCS is a protocol that controls messaging traffic between client devices, taking the place of SMS while essentially using the same inter-network architecture. It is not end-to-end encrypted. Although RCS has recently switched to end-to-end encryption, it is still not as secure as WhatsApp, Signal, or Google’s own Messages app. Still, RCS is a safer option than SMS. However, it has only added this layer to RCS; RCS has not been altered.