Google Says iPhone Adoption Of RCS Has Led Users To Share 'More Than A Billion' Messages Daily, Yet SMS/MMS Still Reign Supreme In The U.S.
Google Says iPhone Adoption Of RCS Has Led Users To Share 'More Than A Billion' Messages Daily, Yet SMS/MMS Still Reign Supreme In The U.S.
Google says that users are now sending more than a billion RCS messages everyday after Apple gave in and adopted the new standard on iPhone.
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Google knows this, of course, because all of those messages are now routed through Google. As SMS, they were moving through the carriers, but now they’re going through the carriers and Google.
And since end-to-end encryption in RCS is a proprietary extension, not available to non-Google implementations, all of these new messages are wide open and ready for Google to data mine.
Hooray! Big win for everybody?
Universal Profile 3 has since been released by the GSMA, which includes end to end encryption based on MLS. Apple is expected to use the new version of the standard with the upcoming iOS 19. Google announced their adoption as well.
By the way, routing through Google infrastructure is not a given. This is up to the carrier (albeit sadly many do use Google infrastructure).
Exactly. And unless RCS with e2ee is made equally available to companies other than Google and is implemented by the carriers, RCS will continue to be a monopolistic data-harvesting grift.
I'm surprised there is not more outrage directed at Google over this.
TIL google developed the RCS protocol.
Another reason for me to leave it off.