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Beeper vs Apple battle intensifies: Lawmakers demand DOJ investigation - Android Authority
(www.androidauthority.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
It's also a huge security hole
So is having unencrypted messages with all non-iOS devices with no real solution in sight. Security is obviously not their concern here, it's vendor lock in.
SMS doesn’t support encryption, nor is Apple preventing you from downloading any number of encrypted chat apps that work cross platform.
If google didn’t release a new chat app every 6 months we might have a more widespread standard in the US already - and yes RCS is coming to the iPhone next year.
Apple isn't adopting RCS with encryption, and having iMessage as the default messaging app without any way to allow cross platform E2E encryption is a decision they've made.
As far as Google releasing a new chat app is concerned that's on them. But RCS has existed since 2008 and was included as a feature in Android 5.0 Lollipop all the way back in 2014.
Encryption extension on RCS is a non-standard addon to RCS which is not part of the standard. RCS on Android in general is also run through google servers and Jibe, and isn’t exactly an open standard to begin with.
Apple isn’t preventing cross platform encryption at all, every popular messenger (even Signal) is available in the App Store.