Apple’s Surprising iPhone Decision—Bad News Confirmed For Google

You couldn’t make this up. Apple’s surprising new update decision will be very bad news for Google and Android users, despite a long, persistent campaign by Google that looked as if it had worked, finally bringing iPhone closer to Android.

We’re talking RCS, the pre Apple Intelligence highlight from iOS 18, which finally promised more seamless and secure stock messaging between iPhones and Androids. Google had campaigned long and hard to (it seemed) shame Apple into moving beyond its 1980s SMS cross-platform default, while WhatsApp and others took advantage of the deficit and built hyper-scale cross platform alternatives.

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But now that RCS is here it has fallen largely flat. Security and privacy is still a huge between iMessage and Google Messages. There’s no full encryption, and instead of building a direct integration between the two or even deploying a similar architecture to the third-party chats now being developed by Meta/WhatsApp, we need to wait for the actual RCS protocol itself to be changed. That won’t happen anytime soon.

And so, no sooner had Google reached its goal—notwithstanding that it continued to taunt Apple for not doing enough, criticism of the lack of end-to-end encryption in this RCS bridge started to come to the fore. And then worse, stories emerged that RCS wasn’t all that easy to use or widely adopted by carriers after all.

But a much bigger issue has just hit Google and its longstanding intent to build Google Messages into a viable alternative to WhatsApp and other over-the-tops on its platform. The only reason RCS had a chance to displace those others is that iMessage has always been the unchangeable default messaging app on iPhones, meaning it’s stitched into the OS and can be called from multiple apps.

But not for much longer. We knew that default restriction was changing in Europe, with the Digital Markets Act (DMA) forcing Apple to provide users a choice on default apps for core functions, but it now looks like those changes are much more drastic.

“In iOS and iPadOS 18.2 and later,” Apple has now confirmed, “a user may select an app other than the Messages app to send instant messages. The system launches the default messaging app to handle when a user taps an im: link from another app.”

It has also provided instructions to messaging platforms on how to “prepare your app to be the default messaging app,” which you can expect many will rush to do.

While we expected this to be for European users only, that’s not the case. Apple has confirmed in a new advisory that “all users worldwide will be able to manage their default apps via a Default Apps section at the top of the Apps area. New calling and messaging defaults are also now available for all users worldwide.”

This means that for the first time iPhone users can select a fully encrypted, cross-platform messenger as the default on their device. And outside the US, where iMessage still dominates given iPhone’s market position and the blue bubble status symbol nonsense, almost every other key market now defaults to WhatsApp.

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Once this stable door is open it won’t be locked again. This could well spell the end of the stock messenger opportunity for Apple and Google to build a viable alternative between them. It could also have a huge impact on the success of RCS beyond marketing messages and OTPs. And even here WhatsApp is slowly rolling out alternatives, offering businesses access to their platform and reach.

This is hugely surprising and we don’t yet know the impact it will have. As exciting as RCS might have been, it looks like iOS 18.2 could herald the biggest change to iPhone in years, and will provide the game-changing, default secure messaging upgrade for millions that RCS could possibly have been, but isn’t even close.