In November, Apple unexpectedly announced its intention to introduce support for the RCS (Rich Communications Services) standard on the iPhone; This support is expected to emerge this year. According to the original version, the company decided to take this step due to the European “Digital Markets Act” (DMA), but authoritative technical blogger John Gruber is sure that Beijing’s opinion is decisive.

RCS is a modern protocol for sending SMS messages. It has been supported on Android smartphones for a long time and provides high-resolution encryption, reading notifications, writing indicator, image and video transfer. Sending geolocation is also supported. Just like SMS and MMS, messages in RCS format will be displayed with a green background on iPhone.

“Chinese telecommunications operators have supported RCS for many years, and last year Chinese authorities introduced a procedure to legalize RCS support for the certification of new 5G devices. Surprisingly, the Chinese government does not seem to be concerned about the RCS standard’s lack of encryption provisions. All sources I spoke to said the same thing: RCS support in iOS is only in China. Apple will prefer to continue to ignore RCS on the grounds that they do not want to support new end-to-end encryption protocols or carrier-controlled protocols (with or without encryption). But when PDA [Комуністична партія Китаю] When asking manufacturers to jump to sell products in China, Apple explains: “How high?” – said John Gruber.

He later confirmed the version failure regarding the EU’s involvement in the implementation of RCS on iOS. DMA makes no mention of RCS; Instead, the European Commission officially confirmed that the iMessage audience in the region was not large enough for the law to apply to Apple’s messaging app.