Google wants to give the world back some of its privacy. Go ahead and chuckle, but please take a minute to gather yourself — this is serious business.
Google — one of several global superpowers presumed to know everything about everybody alongside the likes of Apple, Facebook, and the FBI — wants your private messages to remain just that: private messages. The Silicon Valley giant recently pledged its allegiance to end-to-end encryption for Rich Communication Service, a text messaging technology Google hopes to use to supplant SMS as the messaging standard on Android devices.
What is Rich Communication Service?
Rich Communication Service, or RCS for short, is essentially what it sounds like. You’ve likely come across RCS if you’ve ever used Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, or GroupMe. And if you do belong to any one of those messaging platforms, you’re also likely familiar with just how much better the experience is on those platforms than what you typically find via standard SMS. It’s night and day.
RCS offers some popular features such as quality group messaging, read receipts (for agents of absolute chaos), and everybody’s favorite, response bubbles.
Let’s take a minute to talk about that last one. Those beautiful three little dots, wrapped around a beloved thought bubble to let you know that you are not, in fact, screaming into the ether. It’s a big reason why iPhone users are staunch iPhone users — why so many people willingly accept just-above-average phone specs year after year (like me). It’s the same reason why so many of the iPhone faithful roll their (/our) eyes when they (/we) get a text message from somebody outside of The Ecosystem. You don’t know it until you try it, and once you’ve tried it, there’s really no going back.
Google, in a way, understands the unwavering devotion for iMessage. The tech giant sees the deficiencies in standard SMS, especially when it’s expected to be the default option on Android devices across the market. It’s time for a new standard, per Google, and RCS is the frontrunner.
To be clear, the fight between iPhone and Android isn’t anywhere near over. iPhone users will still have to deal with green bubbles when communicating with Android users, and Android users will still need to cope with the fact that they’re ruining all the fun. Except now Apple users will be ruining the fun for Android users too. That is, at least, until Apple does what it rarely ever does and caves into the pressure. But considering its massive market share of the smartphone economy, Apple doesn’t have much of a reason to do that just yet.
But let’s get back to the cybersecurity aspect of this blog post.
End-to-end encryption
Perhaps Google recognized the importance of digital privacy in 2020. Or, perhaps Google realized there was no way it could roll out a next-generation text messaging standard across smartphones all over the globe (sans Russia and China) without the promise that those messages would remain private from the company providing the platform.
As mentioned earlier, Google is already jokingly mentioned in a laundry list of companies that maybe, probably, possibly spy on you. End-to-end encryption essentially eliminates that fear.
“We recognize that your conversations are private and it’s our responsibility to keep your personal information safe,” Google wrote in a statement. “We’re continually improving security protections to safeguard your privacy and will be rolling out end-to-end encryption, starting with one-on-one RCS conversations between people using Messages.”
Google also probably knows that E2EE is a fairly standard feature across many of the world’s most popular messaging apps, like iMessage and WhatsApp. There’s no way RCS could live without it.
E2EE ensures that your messages will remain unreadable to Google and any other third party (like your phone carrier, manufacturer, or internet provider). Only you and the person with whom you are communicating will be able to read those messages as they travel from device to device.
Google says it will roll out E2EE to beta testers this month, with the hope of having it accessible to all of those users sometime in 2021. Eligible conversations will be automatically upgraded to the high encryption standard, although Google does note that E2EE will only be available on one-on-one conversations when both users have Google Messages installed with chat features enabled.
Cool, now what?
About that.
So here’s the thing about Android smartphones. They’re often celebrated for the liberties they provide users with a penchant for customization. Android devices can, more or less, look and feel however the user wants it to look and feel.
That’s great… until it isn’t.
Customization all but eliminates the hope for a standard across all Android devices. The reason iMessage works so well on iPhones is because A) it’s built in as the stock option across every single standard iPhone in the world, and B) iPhone users don’t know any better.
That second point may seem like a self-deprecating jab at the iOS community, but it also highlights an inherent issue that Google will have to overcome if it wants to create the de facto messaging application on Androids: Loads of Androids users already know what they like, and many of them aren’t willing to give that up.
Plenty of Android users already have their preferred messaging app, whether it be the built-in default option, or one of the various others available on the Google Play App Store. Forcing this change upon them effectively bulldozes one of the pillars that hold up the Android community altogether.
Then again, not forcing this change upon users effectively limits the heights that RCS can reach. Time will tell whether Google’s RCS becomes the standard, or just another option for Android users to pick from.
