Over the past several years, many carriers and phone manufacturers have joined up with RCS to provide capabilities such as high-quality images and videos, read receipts, and E2EE. None of these are supported by the SMS format, which is almost 30 years old. Still, there’s one business that continues to reject RCS: Apple, which prefers to keep safe behind the confines of iMessage.
Google has openly urged Apple to embrace RCS, but thus far those efforts have been futile. Apple CEO Tim Cook joked in September that iOS customers who are having problems transmitting films to a loved one using an Android smartphone can simply buy them an iPhone.
