If Android users already had problems exchanging text messages with iPhone users via iMessage, the situation may get even worse with iOS 17. According to XDA Developers, the new version of the system will bring many benefits to iOS users, but will prevent Android users from even seeing some incoming messages.
Among the novelties of iOS 17, Apple announced that now conversations in groups in iMessage will be able to have edited messages, photos sent with maximum quality and even respond to topics as already occurs in WhatsApp and Telegram, for example.
The problem is that the protocol used by iMessage does not support these functions via RCS, which is used on Android phones and carriers around the world.
In this way, Android users will not be able to see messages edited by iMessage users, they will receive photos with reduced quality and will not have access to topics, with messages only being shown in the order in which they were sent. In short, group conversations will become a complete mess on any phone that doesn’t have iMessage.
As iOS 17 has not yet been released, we can still hope that Google and Apple will create some adaptation to avoid these problems, although Apple’s own CEO has admitted that he would rather sell an iPhone than integrate RCS into iMessage.
This means we should see new Google campaigns to push Apple to adopt RCS until iOS 17 launches in September or October 2023, when the iPhone 15 lineup should also be introduced.
