The gulf between the green and blue bubbles in cell phone chat will be filled next year. Apple has announced that it will add support for the Rich Communication Services (RCS) standard.

Apple confirmed its plans in a statement to 9to5Mac, telling the site. "We believe the RCS Universal Profile will provide better interoperability compared to SMS and MMS. It will work alongside iMessage and remain the best and most secure messaging experience for Apple users."

In other words, the RCS Universal Profile is "a new way to send and receive messages.

In other words, iMessage will remain a means of communication between iPhone users. Apple's move is simply to adopt RCS in addition to iMessage.

According to Apple, RCS support will come in the form of a software update "late next year." We have asked Apple for confirmation of its plans and for more details on what the addition of RCS will mean for cross-platform communication.

Google rolled out RCS to Android phones in 2019, allowing users to send messages and images simultaneously. However, Apple has not previously purchased RCS, so messages between iPhone and Android default to MMS, making for a less than satisfactory experience in cross-platform communication.

To say that Apple's sudden adoption of RCS came as a surprise would be an understatement. As recently as last year, when asked about the cross-platform messaging experience, Apple CEO Tim Cook's response was, "Buy your mother an iPhone."

"At this point, we're not hearing from users that they want us to put a lot of energy into it," Cook said when asked about RCS support at the Code 2022 event.

Apple has an incentive to adopt RCS as soon as possible, as the European Union is requiring Apple to open up iMessage as part of its Digital Market Act.

Adding RCS support should allow for typing indicators, read receipts, and other features that iMessage users take for granted when communicating with each other. 9to5Google reports that once RCS support is on the iPhone According to 9to5Google, once RCS support is included in the iPhone, users will also be able to share their location with others in text threads.

Apple has security concerns with RCS because iMessage offers end-to-end encryption. This summer, Google announced that all RCS messages would be encrypted end-to-end by default, but texts from RCS to iMessage are not encrypted end-to-end; it is unclear if that will change once RCS support arrives on the iPhone.