Google Reveals New RCS Update For Android—iMessage Users Need This Now Hallie Frederick | usagoldmines.com

Apple’s game-changing new iPhone replace is now only a few weeks away. And whereas iOS 18.2 is all about Apple Intelligence, it additionally massively improves the safety and privateness round picture sharing, and—in a surprise move—will allow customers to alter their default messaging, telephone and different apps.

This comes only a few months after Apple’s u-turn on RCS, which has gone dwell inside iMessage, albeit it’s nonetheless service and geography dependent. However there’s an enormous difficulty with RCS, one which’s about to get a lot worse, and whereas Google has revealed a brand new replace to repair this on Android, it’s vital that Apple does the identical.

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We’re speaking spam, unsolicited “RCS Enterprise Messaging.” Gown it up any means you need, that is partly pushed by spam messages pushed out to billions of gadgets. it’s such a major problem, that Google started addressing it before iPhone jumped onboard. However that’s not sufficient. Juniper Research forecasts “that RCS enterprise messaging site visitors will attain 50 billion messages globally in 2025; Apple’s first full 12 months of help for the expertise—single-year progress from 33 billion in 2024.”

The numbers are staggering. One main platform offering RCS Enterprise Messaging has simply announced that “it has crossed 10 billion RCS messages globally, on its platform in 2024, marking a 5x progress as in comparison with 2023,” including that this “highlights the rising adoption of RCS as a most well-liked messaging platform for enterprises globally, notably in markets like India, Brazil, Mexico, Europe, and Africa, the place the expertise has seen exponential progress over the past 12 months.”

Not all of that is spam, in fact, however whereas “RCS is a superb function for probably the most half,” says Android Authority, “it additionally comes with some annoyances. In sure areas, ‘verified’ companies have been utilizing RCS to spam customers with unsolicited commercials. The RCS advert spam difficulty on Google Messages was very annoying as soon as upon a time, and whereas the frequency is decrease lately, it’s nonetheless an issue.”

Properly now evidently Google is about to launch an answer for Android customers that can add one-click simplicity to RCS messaging opt-outs, albeit one sender at a time. As found by Android Authority in one in every of its APK teardowns, “Google Messages is testing a brand new ‘STOP’ button to unsubscribe from RCS Enterprise Messages, which customers acknowledge as advertisements despatched by RCS. The function goals to simplify the method of opting out of undesirable RCS communications.”

Whereas customers can already simply reply STOP to do the identical, there’s an enormous psychological distinction between sending a textual content and tapping a button in an app. This can make it a lot simpler and extra seemingly for customers to show down the deluge of spam. “This can make it considerably simpler to handle the incessant enterprise advertisements that customers in some areas usually obtain after they activate RCS.”

Apple provides various protections against such spam messaging already. Customers can filter unknown senders, report messages as junk, block these senders, and there’s additionally a brand new toggle to disable RCS enterprise messaging, albeit that requires enabling by a service and received’t be out there for all customers.

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It will be nice to see an identical one-click possibility for iMessage, albeit most iPhone customers exterior the US already use over-the-top platforms like WhatsApp greater than iMessage anyway. Partly as a result of iMessage is a honeypot for spam, enterprise notifications and OTPs and doesn’t have the pure cleanliness of different platforms—most of our WhatsApps (or comparable) come from family and friends.

Android customers ought to make use of this feature when out there. And iPhone customers ought to use what’s there right this moment forward of any future updates which will or might not come. RCS additionally suffers from a scarcity of end-to-end safety cross-platform, mixed with this spam difficulty, it is not the compelling offering Google and others want it to be.