In a surprising move, Apple has announced today that it will adopt the RCS (Rich Communication Services) messaging standard. The feature will launch via a software update “later next year” and bring a wide range of iMessage-style features to messaging between iPhone and Android users.
Apple’s decision comes amid pressure from regulators and competitors like Google and Samsung. It also comes as RCS has continued to develop and become a more mature platform than it once was.
Until we get an API for RCS on Android as well as FOSS implementations of RCS, I will happily continue using Signal. Even after RCS gets rolled out, Signal will probably still be a better option, because it shares as little metadata as possible and as much of it as possible is end-to-end encrypted.