The long fight to make Apple’s iMessage compatible with all devices has raged with little to show for it. But Google (de facto leader of the charge) and other mobile operators are now leveraging the European Union’s Digital Market Act (DMA), according to the Financial Times. The law, which goes into effect in 2024, requires that “gatekeepers” not favor their own systems or limit third parties from interoperating within them. Gatekeepers are any company that meets specific financial and usage qualifications, including Google’s parent company Alphabet, Apple, Samsung and others.
And yet, no developer other than Samsung has been granted access to Google’s version of RCS.
I’d love to see a truly standard, rich, secure messaging service, but I’m not convinced what Google is doing here is any better than Apple.
The difference is, you can choose not to use Googles RCS extension and opt for the Universal Profile standard instead and it will interop with people on other RCS profiles, even Googles, just fine.
iMessage doesn’t do any of that, your choice is iMessage with other Apple users or a 30+ year old protocol. That’s it.
Except that’s not what happened in reality before Google started rolling out their version of RCS.
The carriers implemented their own versions that didn’t weren’t interoperable with each other, and that was for the ones that even bothered with it at all.
And now they have even less incentive to try.
RCS is nice in theory, but no one is serious about implementing the universal profile.