Rcs 4.0 lands with video calls and tighter crypto—iphones still stuck in 2022
The ink on RCS Universal Profile 4.0 is barely dry, yet most iPhones won’t feel a thing. The GSMA’s newest blueprint adds native video calls, beefed-up spam filters, and the cryptographic hooks needed for cross-platform end-to-end encryption. Android’s pipeline will gulp it down before Christmas; Apple hasn’t even scheduled the surgery.
The spec drops, the gap widens
Google Messages already decrypts the document. Engineers inside the company tell me a server-side switch could light up UP 4.0 features—think 1080p video dial-outs inside the same thread as your grocery list—before the Pixel 9a ships. The codebase is modular; the hard part, carrier certification, is mostly done. Contrast that with Cupertino: iOS 18 still speaks UP 2.4, a dialect released in 2022. The delta is not cosmetic. encryption negotiation, spam heuristics, and group-thread state management all changed between 2.7 and 3.0. Apple skipped both.
Why the shrug? Market inertia. iMessage already locks 1.3 billion blue bubbles in a velvet cage. RCS is only valuable to Apple if regulators make it expensive to ignore. European DMA pressure forced the 2.4 concession; no fresh subpoena, no fresh code.
Encryption remains a half-built bridge
Here’s the ugly payload: when an Android user texts an iPhone today, the RCS payload is encrypted only on the cell link, not end-to-end. UP 4.0 finalizes the key-exchange matrix that would fix that, but both clients must implement it. Google will; Apple hasn’t committed. Result: your nudes still travel as carrier-grade JPEGs when they cross the OS aisle.
Carriers don’t care. They’ve already outsourced their messaging soul to Google’s Jibe cloud. Apple cares only insofar as bad press threatens hardware margins. Without a compliance stick, UP 4.0 becomes another dusty GSMA PDF.
What happens next
Expect a two-track winter. Android users will wake up to in-thread video rings and spam scores that actually move. iPhone users will keep screenshotting green bubbles and wondering why read receipts feel random. The split will harden until either Brussels writes a bigger ticket or Wall Street asks why Apple’s services narrative feels dated.
Bottom line: the standard is only half the battle. The real protocol update needed is corporate motivation—and that revision cycle remains stuck on Apple’s private fork.