SMS

In a significant shift, Apple has announced it will adopt the RCS (Rich Communication Services) messaging standard, yielding to years of pressure from competitors like Google and Samsung. This strategic move, scheduled for a 2024 release with iOS 18 marks a big change for cross-platform messaging between iPhone and Android users.

Responding to Google's persistent push for adoption, Apple's decision aims to enhance interoperability, addressing issues like poor image and video quality for Android users in group messages receiving scaled-down media via traditional MMS.

Forwarding text or photos in the Messages app on iPhone can be faster than sending a new message from scratch. Whether the content is an iMessage or text message the process is the same. How to forward a message on iPhone, iPad or iPod touch may not be obvious at first. But resending images or a text message only takes a few steps.

Ever worry that someone is trying to spoof the origin of text messages on your iPhone? Well according to developer pod2g you should. Although the security flaw he cites is not capable of executing malicious code, it can be exploited to fake the origin of an SMS to an unsuspecting iPhone user.

Pod2g is hoping Apple fixes the problem before the final release of iOS 6. If iOS dealt with incoming text message information properly, the message would display the reply-to (spoofed) phone number as well as the actual originating phone number. As currently configured, iOS only shows the reply-to number.

The iOS Messages app writes timestamps to selected incoming and outgoing SMS, MMS and iMessage notes. Selected because Apple has designed Messages to only write the timestamp after a certain amount of time has passed. This can result in long threads with no record of when the messages were sent.

Now thanks to the SMS Timestamps tweak on Cydia, you can choose to write a timestamp to every message if desired. The tweak also has options to write a timestamp in the Messages app in intervals of 1, 5 or 10 minutes so you know exactly what's going on.

Apple has released version 3.0.1 of the iPhone OS software. This fixes the recently revealed SMS security flaw. The security hole was illustrated on Thursday by Charlie Miller at the Black Hat 2009 conference in Las Vegas.

iPhone owners can download and install the 3.0.1 update using iTunes immediately. Left unpatched, the problem makes it possible for iPhones to receive malicious binary programs through SMS messages without the user's knowledge.