Apple’s iMessage system is a dozen years old, but it still only provides a feature-rich messaging experience between iMessage users. That makes sense for Apple—it’s a big selling point for i-devices—but change may be coming.
One reason for that is industry pressure. Google has for around a year now been trying to publicly shame Apple into adopting the Rich Communication Services standard, which is the communication industry’s successor to old-school SMS (text) and MMS (multimedia) messaging, with added features such as read receipts and the ability to send media in high quality. Google baked RCS support into Android back in 2019, so there’s clear self-interest involved here, but now Samsung—whose Android phones have made it the global smartphone market leader—is also piling into the fight.
