Google's RCS drama with Apple, explained: More than bubble envy, less than noble - Android Police

This time Google has taken a page out of the ol’ Android Police book, making the same claims we made back in 2020: So long as Apple doesn’t support RCS as a fallback for iMessage, it's not actually making good on its privacy values.

Google offered to help Apple transition to the SMS-replacing standard as a backup for iMessage, and Google might have “won” the RCS wars on Android, but the future of the messaging standard is still up in the air, as much because of Google itself as because of Apple.

Networks still need to build that interoperability in — it isn't actually required by the Universal Profile spec, as far as we can tell, but it's the version that makes that easiest.

Google’s Chat requires Google’s Messages app to work, but it doesn’t require that a carrier support Universal Profile standards for messaging.

If a carrier does support Universal Profile, Google’s Messages app will simply use that, and everything will work as expected through the carrier’s servers.

When Google decided to roll out Chat widely without waiting on the carriers to get it right, the carriers exited the conversation entirely, and now it doesn’t matter what they do.

Thanks to Google, everyone with an Android phone willing to use the Messages app now has access to RCS messaging in a full Universal Profile implementation.

As a matter of context, though, this is far from the first time Google’s worked on a messaging service, and basically every single one of its earlier efforts failed — usually because of Google itself getting distracted or making bad and dumb decisions, like randomly starting new overlapping services or abandoning projects that just needed a little love.

In many ways, RCS messaging is Google’s last hope for an iMessage competitor — but make no mistake, it is not an iMessage replacement.

It doesn’t have the same sort of feature set, and you’re not going to install some Google Chat app on your desktop computer and magically get an RCS-based iMessage replacement.

But separately from the ecosystem lock-in Apple imposes to keep its customers, Google SVP Hiroshi Lockheimer also recently highlighted a critical fact we wrote about back in 2020: If Apple actually cared about customer privacy, it would support RCS as a fallback mechanism for iMessage, rather than pushing all its customers to insecure SMS-based messaging.

Whether you accept that claim or not, Google would clearly stand to benefit if Apple did adopt a Universal Profile-compatible RCS messaging standard on iPhones.

Adding RCS support to iMessage — even as a fallback, just as the app supports SMS and MMS — would give Android and iPhone users the ability to communicate using features we now consider essential.

While there are no RCS or Chat clients available on iOS, several iMessage clients are available for Android in the Play Store.

If Apple wasn’t specifically made to support Universal Profile, it could do something dumb like develop its own in-house RCS platform to meet those requirements — potentially one that doesn’t support the Universal Profile or talk to Google’s servers.

Theoretically, Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile could require iPhones on their respective networks to support RCS as a standard, even going as far as to specify Universal Profile support as a must-have.

That’s because RCS messaging needs to connect to a server to work, and Android itself doesn’t support RCS at a system level like it does for SMS.

Of course, Google Chat isn’t the only RCS solution, merely the one that “won,” and another company could spin up its own Universal Profile-compatible backend, but there’s still that issue of a lack of APIs in Android itself, so they’d need to develop, market, and distribute their own app to go with it, increasing the barrier to market entry — that’s a businessy way of saying it’s hard for new solutions to compete.

We’re not sure how or if it plans to monetize its RCS messaging system Chat just yet (its Verified SMS strategy could imply one route), but it’s made sure third-party apps can’t use it, and it has seemingly prevented Android itself from having system-level support for RCS.

We don’t know Google’s motivation, but context could be an indicator: RCS-based Chat is really the first “win” the company has ever had when it comes to messaging, and it probably doesn’t want to let it go or mess that up.

My friend (and AP alumnus) Ron Amadeo at Ars Technica has written what is basically the authoritative text on Google’s self-inflicted messaging failures (and you should read all ~25,000 words of it), but the short version is that Google just can’t get a single messaging service to stick — at least, until now.

A cynic might say now that Google has a real opportunity in the messaging space, it will do everything it can to maintain control by not opening its own APIs or giving Android system-level support that other RCS systems might use