At Google I/O 2023, the search giant took another swipe at Apple for not supporting RCS, a growing point of contention between the two companies.

Google has adopted RCS as its advanced messaging protocol. RCS offers the same benefits as iMessage, including group admin, file sharing, read receipts, encryption, and more. Unfortunately, Apple still falls back to the older SMS protocol for texting between iOS and Android devices.

Google has repeatedly called on Apple to support RCS as its fallback option, pointing out that it would not have any impact on Apple to Apple communication but would greatly benefit Apple-to-Android messaging. That argument is especially true in the context of security. SMS offers no encryption, so Apple-to-Android texting has virtually no security or privacy. Switching to RCS as its fallback would eliminate this issue, but Apple refuses to do so, a stand very much at odds with its supposed focus on privacy and security.

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Google didn’t let an opportunity to take another swipe at Apple slip by:

“We hope every mobile operating system gets the message and adopts RCS so we can all hang out in the group chat together no matter what device we’re using,” Google VP Sameer Samat said at Google I/O.

According to Sarbjeet Johal, the comments were the most cheered comments of the event.

There was a time when Apple was working to bring its products and product compatibility to other platforms, and Microsoft was the company fighting to remain proprietary. How times have changed, with Microsoft becoming a true multi-platform software company and Apple actively working to keep its users in a proprietary walled garden.

See Also: Google Wants Apple to Fix Texting