Apple’s blue bubble chat to pop up on Indian android phones

Apple is in talks with rival mobile OS operator Google for introducing the former’s rich communication services (RCS) messaging to Indian mobile phone users this year, people with direct knowledge of the matter told ET.

The potential partnership will allow Apple to extend its proprietary bluebubble messaging feature—currently only available to iPhone users—to Android handsets as well, the people said. Such a move could further stir up India’s business communications market, dominated currently by traditional SMS, but where WhatsApp is increasingly gaining significant share.

“With the current iOS 18.2 version, P2P (person-to-person) RCS is enabled in eight countries—US, Canada, Germany, Spain, France, UK, Belgium and China,” said Inderpal Mumick, chief executive at Dotgo, a global RCS platform provider.

“And it is enabled with many of the operators in each of these countries who have chosen to provide RCS under the carrier’s terms of service. On the back end, Apple and Google have worked together so that the Apple iMessage client works on Google backend servers which are already part of carrier networks,” Mumick said.

“Only in China, since Google is not present, carriers have chosen some other vendor servers.” In India, Apple is likely to take a similar route of integrating with Google, which has in turn partnered with Indian telecom operators Vodafone Idea and Reliance Jio, senior executives confirmed to ET.

Apple, Google and Jio didn’t respond to email queries. Bharti Airtel has for now decided against partnering with Google for RCS messaging as the alternate encrypted channel could spam users. Airtel has called on the telecom regulator to bring OTT (over-the-top) channels under anti-spam regulations. “Until Google allows Airtel to identify spam messages using its proprietary tool, RCS will not be onboarded…since Google RCS is an OTT service, it bypasses the Airtel intelligent solution much as all OTT services do,” said an Airtel executive, asking not to be named.

To be sure, the planned tripartite backend integration between telcos, Apple and Google won’t impact user experience who will be able to exchange RCS messages over mobile data/Wi-Fi unlike traditional SMS. However, the partnerships will be crucial when businesses such as banks, and e-commerce firms start using the channel for sending official communication. This is commonly called A2P (application-to-person) messaging—popular among channels like Google, WhatsApp and SMS.

“Apple’s entry into A2P RCS would be a big enabler to grow the RCS ecosystem as it would bring nearly 100 million premium smartphone users which would be the target segment of nearly all D2C businesses,” said the founder of a communications company.