Messages on iPhoneSource: iMore

What you need to know

  • Google hosted its Google I/O keynote earlier today.
  • During the event, the company highlighted RCS and its expanding adoption and support.
  • The company also scolded Apple for its lack of RCS support on the iPhone.

Google seems to be losing its patience with Apple over RCS.

The company hosted the Google I/O keynote earlier today and, during the event, Vice President of Product Management Sameer Samat took to the stage and highlighted the expanding support for RCS between carriers and Android manufacturers. He also pointed out that over 500 million Google Messages users have already switched to RCS.

After talking about the progress the company is seeing with the new standard, Samat scolded Apple for not yet supporting the new messaging standard on the iPhone. While he did not say Apple by name, his quote below doesn't leave much to the imagination as to who he was referring to:

"We hope that every mobile operating system gets the message, and upgrades to RCS, so your messages are private, no matter what device you're using,"

You can watch the moment that Samat implored Apple to support RCS in the video of the Google I/O keynote below. If you want to specifically watch that moment, it happens a little after two hours and twenty-eight minutes into the keynote:

Tune in to find out about how we're furthering our mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

If you want to watch the version with American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation, that is below:

RCS is a big upgrade over SMS, enabling longer messages, higher-quality multimedia sharing, message reactions, and end-to-end encryption. While Apple has iMessage, its own proprietary messaging service that supports all of those things, messaging between an iPhone and Android is still left to SMS.

Hopefully, Apple announces its move to RCS soon so we can all enjoy many of the same features no matter what operating system we are running.