For some reason, the color of chat bubbles is extremely important to people in the United States. Blue is good, green is poor – or something like that, right? We don’t know, we come from Europe, and around here people have WhatsApp, Telegram and Facebook Messenger. But in the United States, bubbles matter.
And they will continue to do so, unfortunately, even with today’s groundbreaking announcement from Apple. The company eventually relented and revealed that it plans to adopt RCS in iOS starting next year. RCS, as you may know, is the iMessage-like standard that works over SMS.
But, above all, it is Not iMessages. Apple will integrate RCS into iPhones, but iMessage will still exist, and even if it hasn’t said it outright, we’re willing to bet that messages sent via RCS will still receive green bubbles.
Here’s what an Apple spokesperson told 9to5Mac:
Over the next year we will add support for RCS Universal Profile, the standard currently published by the GSM Association. We believe RCS Universal Profile will provide a better interoperability experience than SMS or MMS. It will work alongside iMessage, which will continue to be the best and most secure messaging experience for Apple users.
RCS will bring many iMessage-like features to cross-platform messaging between iPhone and Android: read receipts, typing indicators, high-quality image and video sharing, location sharing, everything in between.
And in the end it won’t matter, because the bubbles will continue to be green. So that’ll be it for Nothing, which, interestingly, will still present you with the only way to get blue bubbles from an Android device with its recently unveiled Nothing Chats.
Start a new Thread