Apple’s long-awaited iOS 18.2 update is due to hit phones from today, and while the real user excitement is reserved for a raft of new Apple Intelligence features, the build-up to this release has taken the mobile world by surprise. No-one saw this coming, and the net result is especially bad news for Google users.
iPhone and Android headlines over the last week have been dominated by just one story, and that has overshadowed the release of iOS 18.2 as well as Samsung’s delayed release of its Android 15 beta and even Google’s world-beating new quantum chip.
When the FBI warns hundreds of millions of U.S. citizens to stop texting, the world takes notice—as they have done. The stop texting story even outweighed the Chinese hacking story that led to the FBI warning in the first place. But now as the dust settles on that genuine furor, along comes iOS 18.2 at just the right time for Apple and at just the wrong time for Google.
In amongst the Apple Intelligence updates, your iPhone will now let you change your default messaging and calling apps for the first time. Neatly this lets iPhone users select encrypted options (when available) just as the FBI wants. Don’t expect options from day one—but that will quickly change.
Calling is a relative sideshow here, albeit you can now selected an end-to-end encrypted VOIP app instead of cellular calling which is a very positive step. But the real news is messaging, because it marks a change of direction for iPhone in shifting its entire messaging approach from only focusing on iMessage.
Absent those FBI warnings, most Apple users in the U.S. would have left things as they are and stuck with iMessage and it’s reassuring blue bubbles. But with the FBI warning and the ongoing political storm around Chinese hackers marauding through U.S. networks, many will see the option to change defaults as well timed.
That’s a huge issue for Google and the entire RCS upgrade it has sponsored and pushed out across the Android ecosystem, and which relies on iPhone user take-up to complete the seamless, cross-platform messaging vision it has painted. That includes the multi-billion-dollar RCS business messaging industry that is flying off the back of Apple’s take-up and which now needs to watch and wait to see what happens next.
The decision not to encrypt iMessage to Google Messages was down to Apple not Google, and I suspect Google would have been open to an encrypted bridge between the two platforms had Apple asked. But Google is taking much more flak. Unlike Apple, Google set its stall out on RCS, including its campaign to convert Apple, and it is now in the firing line for the debacle this has become.
Tech blogger John Gruber has been extremely vocal on this. “It’s shamefully misleading,” he posted, “regarding Google Messages’s support for end-to-end encryption… Google Messages does support E2EE, but only over RCS and only if all participants in the chat are using a recent version of Google Messages. But the second screenshot in the Play Store listing flatly declares ‘Conversations are end-to-end encrypted,’ full stop.” That he says colorfully, is palpably untrue.
Apple hasn’t campaigned for any of its users to turn to RCS. Quite the opposite, in fact. “If you aren’t using iMessage, you can use RCS. RCS text messages can be sent to non-Apple devices as well as another iPhone or another Apple device with Text Message Forwarding turned on… Apple’s implementation of RCS is based on the industry’s standard. RCS messages aren’t end-to-end encrypted, which means they’re not protected from a third-party reading them while they’re sent between devices.”
Gruber also warns that RCS needs to work out how to better show users what’s encrypted and what’t not in light of these new warnings. “SMS messages, at least on my Pixel 4, are pale blue with black text. Google Messages does put a tiny lock in the timeline to indicate when an RCS chat is secure, and they also put a lock badge on the Send button’s paper airplane icon, so there are visual indications whether an RCS chat is encrypted, but because the messages bubble colors are the same for all RCS chats, it’s subtle, not instantly obvious like it is with Apple Messages, where green means ‘SMS or RCS, never encrypted’ and blue means ‘iMessage, always encrypted’.”
All told, it’s a mess. RCS has been pushed cross-platform but that’s an issue, users were told to wait for encryption but now the FBI has warned users to move to an encrypted platform now, and Apple is not pushing iPhone users to RCS in any way, shape or form. This surprise default messaging option is a gift to the likes of WhatsApp and Signal, which while not replacing carrier messaging will become more stitched into the OS. But it’s bad news for Google users who have bought into the heavily promoted Google Messages RCS vision and now need a rethink.
