Apple will bring RCS messaging to iPhones in 2024

Earlier this week, Apple sent a surprising statement to multiple media outlets, confirming that RCS Universal Profile will get support for iPhones in 2024. Although Tim Cook said last year that improvements to iOS-to-Android text messaging were not in the cards, a lot has changed since then. Obviously, the pressure from Google and the European Union's regulatory bodies had an impact on his decision to rethink Apple's strategy.

This is the entire statement mentioned above: "Later next year, we will be adding support for RCS Universal Profile, the standard as currently published by the GSM Association. We believe RCS Universal Profile will offer a better interoperability experience when compared to SMS or MMS. This will work alongside iMessage, which will continue to be the best and most secure messaging experience for Apple users."  

While the old-school text messaging standard known as SMS has been around for decades, it has a few limitations that make it obsolete to many users. The list of limitations includes a maximum length of 160 characters, no encryption or support for sending multimedia files. The RCS standard arrived in 2007 and was supposed to replace SMS, but that didn't happen and Apple's refusal to embrace it was one of the reasons.

In the end, the most interesting part of this deal is that Apple promises to add encryption to RCS messages. However, unlike Google's approach that involves end-to-end encryption via the Messages app, the Cupertino-based giant is planning to improve the RCS standard instead.

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