The quaint medium of text messaging has advanced greatly in iOS and Android, between Apple’s iMessage service and Google’s newer “RCS.” But text chats between those two platforms remain about as technologically advanced as Nokia flip phones. They still lack encryption to foil snoopers and interactive features to brighten the banter.

At its I/O conference last month, Google invited Apple to fix that by supporting its attempt to secure and enhance texting: the Rich Communications Services (RCS) standard its Messages app uses.

Touting 500 million-plus Android users using RCS, Android product-management vice president Sameer Samat said in that May 11 keynote: "We hope every mobile operating system gets the message and upgrades to RCS."

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Samat didn’t have to say “Apple.” While Google has lined up U.S. smartphone vendors and wireless carriers to ship its Messages app after a shaky 2019 RCS rollout here, Apple hasn’t added RCS to the iMessage service it launched in 2011 and keeps exclusive to other Apple devices.

And at its WWDC conference Monday, Apple ignored Google’s plea, instead announcing such new iOS messaging features as options to recall or edit recently-sent messages.

Both iMessage and RCS scramble messages in transit (which requires a data connection), but where RCS can encrypt individual chats end-to-end (keeping them scrambled everywhere but the actual phones), iMessage does that for both individual and group chats. Both also support features like typing indicators and “tapback” emoji.

But neither interoperates with the other. A text from an Android user to an iPhone user and vice versa gets sent “in the clear,” arriving in a green bubble on an iPhone and in a light-gray bubble on Android devices.

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