Apple's move to support RCS on the iPhone is a warmly welcomed surprise But who made this U-turn? It turns out that government pressure may have been the cause

According to Daring Fireball's John Gruber, it appears that the Chinese government forced Apple to support RCS messaging Apparently this could be due to the fact that China (via Reddit) is working on a new law that will force 5G devices to support RCS if they want to be certified for sale in the country

Gruber believes that Apple would prefer to ignore RCS and continue to refuse to support the new messaging protocol, although he does not know for sure However, China is a huge cell phone market, and Apple managed to take the lead last year with a 173% market share

Needless to say, any profit-seeking company would not be foolish enough to throw it all away by stubbornly refusing to improve inter-platform communication between the iPhone and Android Since withdrawal would lead to a huge loss of profits, the only other option is to follow the government's new rules

Many thought that the EU and the then-imminent threat of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) may have prompted Apple to support RCS However, the EU recently confirmed that iMessage is not large enough to be a "core platform service," and experts have turned to this new Chinese law as the backdrop for Apple's shift

WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are not so lucky and will need to offer third-party support in the future; it is not clear what, if any, impact Apple's announcement regarding RCS had on this case

So if you are as happy as we are that RCS is coming to the iPhone, perhaps you can thank the Chinese government We don't know when support for this protocol will be available for iOS, let alone by the end of the year, but it makes sense that Apple would offer it with iOS 18 in the fall

No doubt we will hear more about that plan when iOS 18 is first unveiled at WWDC in June