I don’t always agree with John Gruber but he’s dead on with his recent post about RCS. If you have even occasionally visited this galaxy, you will be aware of the ongoing battle between Google and Apple concerning the RCS messaging protocol. Android users have been whining for years about green bubbles and Apple’s failure to support RCS.
Now, after years of resistance, Apple has caved and agreed to support RCS. Gruber discusses why this is and why it’s a really bad idea. The reason for the caving is straightforward. China, other authoritarian governments, and even putatively democratic governments like the EU are insisting on it. RCS does not enjoy end-to-end encryption (E2EE) and governments everywhere love this because it allows them to monitor our communications—for the protection of the children of course.
The reason supporting RCS is a bad idea, Gruber says, is precisely because it does not have E2EE. He makes a very strong case that no protocol without E2EE should be adopted by anyone and this includes RCS and he points to the recent AT&T breach as proof of this. RCS is an old protocol without the safety that we have come to expect. Yes, it’s better than simple SMS but, as Apple has shown, we can do better and data privacy and safety demands that we do.
Gruber says that even if they wanted to, Google can’t fix this because RCS without E2EE is already deployed on millions of devices and handling things like key management are very hard problems. But, of course, Google doesn’t want to fix this because like all those government apparatchiks they like spying on our communications in support of their advertising business and have no interest in stopping.
Instead of complaining about green bubbles and other silliness, Android users should insist on a secure messaging protocol with E2EE. There are plenty of non-Apple solutions out there but Google finds it more convenient to put the blame on Apple for its own failures.