Good information is coming to your group chat. Today, Apple mentioned it would add assist for the RCS messaging normal to the iPhone. The web site 9to5Mac broke the news that Apple will launch a software program replace a while subsequent 12 months that can carry assist to iOS for the messaging normal, which is already broadly utilized by Android telephones.

RCS, or Rich Communications Standard, is a messaging service that’s a step up from the SMS and MMS messaging requirements that smartphones have used since they first arrived. RCS can do greater than SMS and MMS: It permits customers to share higher-resolution photographs and movies between their units; it helps learn receipts; and there is extra enjoyable stuff, like the flexibility to simply drop emoji and GIFs right into a dialog. It additionally provides additional layers of safety that the older messaging requirements lack.

Apple has famously shunned RCS in favor of its personal iMessage platform, leading to a layer of incompatibility that anybody with an Android telephone—or any iPhone person who repeatedly texts folks with Android telephones—is painfully conscious of. Videos shared between iOS and Android are crunchy and low-bandwidth, and Android customers are sometimes confounded by group chats, with missed messages, absent emoji, and different glitches.

For years, Apple has been counting on SMS and MMS to bridge the digital divide between these messaging platforms. It’s the final main holdout, as RCS is already supported by main gamers like Google, Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile. When Apple provides assist for RCS, it received’t want that outdated bridge, and the transfer might sign the eventual dying of SMS.

“It’s long been time for SMS to go away,” says Anshel Sag, principal analyst on the know-how analyst agency Moor Insights and Strategy. “Now SMS can die, it can be sunset. So all the viruses and all the security flaws that are due to SMS can be eliminated.”

The transfer is not occurring instantly; Apple informed 9to5Mac that RCS assist will come “in the later half of next year.” This timing means that assist might arrive with the subsequent model of iOS, which usually rolls out in September.

So it’s a methods out, nevertheless it’s actually nearer than Apple’s earlier plan for the characteristic, which was apparently “never.” A 12 months in the past, it appeared Apple was not even contemplating supporting RCS on the iPhone. Apple CEO Tim Cook glibly joked that you may “buy your mom an iPhone” for those who’re having bother speaking with customers on completely different units. Since then, strain has mounted on the corporate to implement RCS, and some compatibility has emerged between the platforms as they every have developed.