> Apple is sticking to the GSM spec and in their original announcement said they were going to be working with GSM to improve the security and privacy One of t

> Apple is sticking to the GSM spec and in their original announcement said they were going to be working with GSM to improve the security and privacy One of the aspects of RCS that was supposed to be a feature but turned into a problem is the spec supports varying profiles which include a bunch of different capabilities. The GSMA publishes a "Universal Profile" with a base set of features but notably absent is E2EE. Google runs their own RCS infrastructure that Android phones can use but not all do. It becomes a shit show when a Google RCS user sends a message to a carrier RCS user. While they might get the nice RCS features, the conversation is not E2EE since the carrier doesn't/can't implement Google's custom RCS profile with E2EE. If Apple hosts their own RCS infrastructure they could make a custom profile allowing E2EE between Apple RCS users but not between Apple and Google or Apple and a carrier. Unless the GSMA includes E2EE in the Universal Profile and gets carriers to actually implement it, RCS is just MMS with better quality. RCS is such a crap standard, it is very much the sort of standard you'd expect from telecom carriers. There's no E2EE built into the core service and its use requires a SIM. Sender verification is also limited to business messaging so there's no inline mechanism to verify messages from normal users.