SMS technology “was never intended to be used to transmit high risk content,” warns the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre. Encryption and secure messaging is finally making some headway whilst making a stamp on how we will message contacts going forward.” “Once the go to of messaging,” says ESET’s Jake Moore, “SMS texting is slowing down at a tremendous rate and left to send postal updates and some one time passcodes. Users are well-advised to steer clear of using SMS for anything other than the most benign of messages. SMS messages travel in relatively open-form and are wide open to interception and abuse. “iPhones use outdated tech for group conversations with Android, so you can’t leave the chat-even when you want to.”īut the security issues are very real. “Apple turns texts between iPhones and Android phones into SMS and MMS,” Google says, “out-of-date technologies from the 90s and 00s.” The group experience when it crosses operating systems is also dire. Exchanging rich messaging, sharing videos, emoji responses. The major driver towards RCS interoperability between Android and iOS is functionality rather than security. “I don’t hear our users asking that we put a lot of energy in on that at this point,” Tim Cook told an event this week in response to a question on iMessage and RCS, suggesting instead that “I would love to convert you to an iPhone.” And when the questioner complained this impacts texting with his mother, he was told to “buy your mom an iPhone.”

But they can fix it by switching from SMS/MMS to RCS.”īut the Apple is clearly not for turning. “The bad experience you get when texting Android users is created by Apple. “Apple should fix what’s broken,” it says. Google is now on a mission to embarrass/shame Apple into adopting RCS within iMessage.

MORE FROM FORBES This Is The Best Way To Cheat At Wordle By Zak Doffman And then, critically, by introducing end-to-end encryption. First by taking over responsibility for driving RCS adoption across its user base.

The carriers were slowly deploying SMS v2, known as RCS or Rich Communication Services, but that still relied on the archaic SMS architecture that bounced from carrier to carrier, exposing data to all along the way. Google had no real alternative to iMessage. Until fairly recently, there was no solution to this.

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