Apple agrees to implement RCS in iPhone under pressure from China

Apple Agrees to Incorporate RCS Support on iPhones

Apple unexpectedly announced in November, its plan to provide support for Rich Communication Services (RCS) standard on iPhones, scheduled for release later this year. Initially, this decision was associated with the European “Digital Markets Act” (DMA), but tech blogger John Gruber believes that Beijing’s opinion was the deciding factor.

RCS is a modern protocol for transmitting SMS messages. It has long been supported on Android smartphones, offering end-to-end encryption, read receipts, text input indicators, high-resolution image and video transfer, as well as geolocation sharing capability. RCS messages, like SMS and MMS, will appear on iPhone on a green background.

“Chinese communication operators have been promoting RCS for years, and last year the Chinese government initiated the legislative procedure to mandate RCS support for obtaining certificates by new 5G devices. Surprisingly, the Chinese government does not seem concerned about the lack of encryption provisions in the RCS standard. All the sources I spoke to said the same thing: RCS support in iOS is solely thanks to China. Apple would have preferred to continue ignoring RCS on the grounds they do not want to support any new protocols with end-to-end encryption, or any operator-controlled protocols (encrypted or not). But when the Communist Party of China says that manufacturers need to jump in order to sell products in China, Apple asks, ‘How high?'” – explains John Gruber.

Over time, the theory of the EU’s involvement in the implementation of RCS in iOS has been debunked. The DMA does not mention RCS at all. Moreover, the European Commission has officially confirmed that Apple’s iMessage user base in the region is too small for the legislation to apply to the Apple messenger.