The only RCS clients that are in use support axlotol ratchet encryption. Apple could literally take the MIT licensed implementation that Matrix wrote and got audited and slap that into their RCS implementation if they cared to support this interoperable feature.

I'm very curious what the state of specifications has been. Saying clients can do whatever encryption they want doesn't help anything, in my view. Something based around group communication standards like Message Layer Security would be good. But even that leaves a ton of implementation details & exchanges up to implementers.

It's really a pity GSMA has such a strong hold on this industry. It seems like there just aren't a lot of other forums for this kind of work. Or perhaps the forums are all, like GSMA pretty slow big business plodding institutions. Reading up on RSC Business Messaging (RBM) and why GSMA started doing this stuff; it quickly sours any illusion this was some noble effort. This is a way to start charging businesses more, it seems like, with fancy expensive differentiation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services#RC...

On the web it's so amazing how many enthusiasts & craftsfolk are empowered have such great forums to propose & get help trying to create standards. W3c and whatwg and wicg and tc39 and ietf are models we don't see repeated often, nor do there seem to be that many other empowered agents of progress helping championing & pioneering.

Google has an end-to-end encryption capability, no? Did they try to specify or standardize that anywhere? What are the efforts in the field here?

Android restricts RCS to Google’s proprietary Messages app. That supports encryption with what appears to be a reasonably open protocol BUT they restrict it to their key servers:

https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf

Apple could implement their own but unless Google is willing to open up their proprietary messaging system, nobody on Android would be able to use it. Oddly, they left they out of their deceptive PR campaign which tried hard to portray E2EE as an RCS feature.

I would love it if google would implement support for RCS in google voice too…

It's probably more because they're pulled into this kicking and screaming, e.g by the EU, when for years they internally decided iMessage was the moat they'll never give up even a millimeter of.

If privacy was the primary motive trumping everything else they'd have ported it to android a decade ago to reduce sms use.

EU has nothing to do with it. It’s china who mandated it.

EU has done mostly terrible things so far. I don’t expect this to change for the foreseeable future.

They promised RCS right when the EU was deciding if iMessage would be on the DMA and got the pressure away, that's not what we call a coincidence.

The EU has done a favor with most decisions; but hate whatever you want, I hope you‘ll be able to read the positive impact, ones you get sentiment