– because I don’t care about your preference of social messaging app anymore but I do care about mine.
iOS, the thing on iPhones, gets updated regularly with new versions; 26, 26.1, 26.2, etc, etc. We’re on 26.4 right now. 26.5 is rumoured to be the update that brings end-to-end encryption to RCS for Apple Messages users.
Do what?
RCS is a messaging protocol, like SMS (“text messages”) is a messaging protocol. You’ve been using protocols ever since you picked up a smartphone or even used the Internet with a computer. E-mail uses protocols, so does the web. That’s your crash course in protocols.
Eh?
RCS stands for Rich Communication Service. Means very little still, I bet. OK, so let’s break it down from the back: it’s a service, that lets you communicate, sure – but how’s it gonna make me rich, Lief?
Rich doesn’t mean that kind of rich, it means you can send things more complex than just text over a text message; photos etc. You know, like you do with iMessage blue bubbles, Messenger, Instagram or WhatsApp. You can make groups, too. Done – I’ve explained it to you.
So what
OK, let’s backtrack to the bit where I used the word, protocol. What’s so special about that word is that RCS is not an app. A protocol – you might have heard it in a sci-fi or military context – is a way of doing things. With a protocol, you formalise how things work. In the case of RCS, the protocol formalises the method of communication between phones, so people with either Android or iOS phones can chat, it doesn’t matter which. Not important? No, it is.
The RCS protocol isn’t run by just one greedy megalomaniac, it’s run by a conglomerate of greedy megalomaniacs. This is a good thing. They are called the GSMA and they can disagree and form a committee of greedy megalomaniacs who, in an ideal world, can work together in harmony and not ruin the protocol they’re working on. They can make something good. The point I’m burying here is they’re not Meta. This means privacy.
RCS has been around for a long time now, but hasn’t been good enough for me to afford to drop my social media in favour of it, not until this report of it soon supporting end-to-end encryption on iOS. Fucking nerds and their big words. No, really, it’s good that the term, end-to-end encryption, isn’t dolled up in a corporately think-tanked brand name for you. It’s descriptive of what it is. You’re at one end of the line, your friend is at the other. There’s a service in the middle e.g. WhatsApp, RCS carriers, iMessage, etc. Those services, for all the good they seem to be doing for you, might someday (and one has already: Meta) become corrupt and try to take over the world. If it weren’t for end-to-end encryption (read: security), the service could easily read what you’re saying to each other and use the insight, gained from that, to control your newsfeed and influence your views. Heaven forbid that, but Meta do it. They’ve been caught making feeds addictive, and charged for it; I’ve believed they’ve been exploiting our data and attention since the Cambridge Analytica scandal and now that I’ve got RCS as the escape coming up, I can say without fear of being the village kook, that I’m going to stop using them and ignore any protest from the people who believe they have nothing to hide and want me to stay on their feeds.
I’ll be over here if you need me
RCS with end-to-end encryption, on iOS, allowing me to chat with friends on Android, with far less fear of my chats being mined for adware attacks on the rest of the world; this has me glad, relieved and in a very small way, happy. RCS might actually cure my addiction to the newsfeed that comes with every other messaging app I have to use out of social pressure, peer ignorance and scepticism. I hope it could do that for others too.
It’s gross that I have to write this, but it is the future after all.
This is an opinion post. I’m not here to teach but to rant and rave in as an informed context as I can tolerate to create. Thankfully, you are still allowed to look up how to use RCS for yourself. Top tip: Apple Messages and Google Messages have it built in; Google has end-to-end encryption already and Apple might soon too.
People who have my number can already message me, though I’d prefer to not message at all until May 11th’s potential release of iOS 26.5. Those who don’t have my number should have my E-mail instead: lief@lief.name.
Internet trivia flex
Here are some fun, relatable protocols you use, or could use, every day:
- IMAP and SMTP: You use these for checking and sending E-mail.
- HTTPS: You use this when you browse the web; Meta’s Facebook and Instagram apps use it too, the apps being, basically, glorified web pages that could do almost exactly the same thing if they were in your browser, it’s just that Meta wouldn’t have easy access to your location, camera, microphone and photo library if it weren’t an app.
- TCP: The whole Internet runs on this as its foundation. Before the Internet, we used to steal it from the nurse’s office in school.
- IRC: This is left up to the reader to research and enjoy.
- RSS: The red herring you might have seen before. Though it requires a special app to use, to subscribe to web sites (mostly blogs), it’s actually a “web standard”, not a protocol. It uses HTTPS as its protocol, to serve RSS formatted data to the reader app, which can display the blogs’ content in an easy to follow list, on a regular refresh for you. Yep, just like a newsfeed, but again – and I’m beginning to enjoy using this phrase – it’s not Meta, which means privacy, though it can be addictive still.