In a surprising move, Apple has announced today that it will adopt the RCS (Rich Communication Services) messaging standard. The feature will launch via a software update “later next year” and bring a wide range of iMessage-style features to messaging between iPhone and Android users.
Apple’s decision comes amid pressure from regulators and competitors like Google and Samsung. It also comes as RCS has continued to develop and become a more mature platform than it once was.
It’s probably relatively trivial for MS since they have the entire codebase to work with.
I’m more curious on how they plan on limiting it to the EEA, I bet we’ll have much simpler/safer one-click mods that will force windows into deploying these EEA only changes in any region in short order