Apple's flavor of RCS won't support Google's encryption extension | Hacker News Reader

Apple's flavor of RCS won't support Google's encryption extension

appleinsider.com

24 pointsjacooper8 comments

Yes, that is exactly what Apple said. This was previously discussed here [1], but perhaps few people noticed this specific detail. The quote from the article:

> Later next year, we will be adding support for RCS Universal Profile, the standard as currently published by the GSM Association.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38293082

Hopefully this will provide enough momentum for a non-proprietary extension for encryption to be made, and Google will need to adjust.

As it shouldn't. Apple should be supporting RCS as the GSMA standard, not RCS as what Google forced its way upon carriers to become the canonical sole source host via Jibe Cloud.

> Google forced its way upon carriers

Or was it because carriers couldn’t get their shit together? [1]

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/04/verizon-att-and-t-mo...

> Apple should be supporting RCS as the GSMA standard, not RCS as what Google forced its way upon carriers

Apple and Google are equally guilty of forcing their way upon carriers. Indeed, Apple has probably done more of this (visual voicemail, etc.).

(This is orthogonal to the concept of whether the carriers needed or should have needed forcing).

> There is no known timeline for how long it might be before the Universal Profile gets end-to-end encryption.

...and they would still display as green bubbles, I presume having trained iPhone users that they're bad and to be avoided.

So I know people hate them, but there are meaningful differences between green and blue bubbles:

1. The big one is obviously encryption, but in the hypothetical RCS with actual encryption future wouldn't be as relevant

2. Indicates that the message requires a cellphone (iMessage does not) because RCS is carrier+phone number based

3. Indicates that the message costs money (plenty of carriers still charge for RCS as they do SMS - I have a friend who accidentally spend $5 texting because they didn't realize international messages were "toll" messages not included in their "500 free texts" plans), similarly plenty of carriers charge to receive text messages as well.

Even if RCS were encrypted, that does not fix 2 and 3, and RCS is still unencrypted by default and the ability to send encrypted RCS is solely dependent on carriers not choosing to block it because supporting RCS _requires_ supporting downgrade attacks.

Also, blue implies that attachments will be sent via iCloud, and are practically unlimited size (including images and video), that you can securely send money, make video calls, etc, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com