RCS in iOS 18: Apple’s refreshed messaging almost solves the same old, green-button conundrum

Photos are not blurry! As an established iPhone user married to an established Android user, I’ve spent years sending and receiving photos that are as small and smart as the pointillist paintings on each postage stamp. However, a few minutes after I installed the iOS 18 beta on my iPhone 15 Pro, I asked Ana to send me a photo, and what happened was the delightfully high-resolution photo I was hoping for. That, right there, is what I call an upgrade.

In fact, RCS support is one of the freshest issues coming to iOS 18. At WWDC a few weeks ago, Apple talked about homescreen customizations, improvements to Siri, a built-in Photos app, and more. The company appears to have provided additional support for RCS, a more popular and robust messaging protocol that Google and others have adopted on Android, merely as a thankless formality to regulators — it only added support for its iOS Discussed components at the end of the bulletin. However for a lot of iPhone users, and undoubtedly for the billions of Android users who are connected to those iPhone customers, RCS is a heavy business.

Alternatively, RCS is not a solution to all international messaging problems. For one, the golf green bubble survives. It’s not even a separate shadow anymore when you’re using RCS; Yet it is only a green bubble. The iPhone’s address RCS can no longer be encrypted, as Apple is using the plain RCS standard – called the RCS Universal Profile – and no longer has Google’s additional cache implementation. RCS is not “iMessage for Android”. It is no longer able to convince billions of WhatsApp customers around the world to make the change. It’s simply “Better SMS”. However it is a much, much better SMS.

When you’re RCS-ing, green-bubble texting will get a batch more. Both Android and iPhone users get typing prompts, receipts, high-resolution media, and everything else you’d expect from a half-decent messaging app. Even tapback reactions work properly now, as long as you’re using the usual options – !!, thumbs up, that kind of thing. In iOS 18, you will now ship Any Emoji in the form of a tapback, which matches very well between iPhones, but now activates that annoying text in Google Messages “David asked ‘What do you want for dinner tonight'” reacted. Google will likely fix this within a month — the Messages app has been fixing an issue that’s been plaguing iPhone customers using iMessage for some time — although for now, it’s a bit awkward.

It seems as if Apple views its messaging protocol as a three-tier machine. The simplest case, it’s two Apple units speaking, and Apple has iMessage on by default. If not now, it’s going to RCS. And if RCS is not available, either because the carriers do not support it or have the wrong data carrier or for some other reason, it will fall back to lousy SMS. It would be wise of Apple not to just abandon SMS, but after the Q4’s inaugural launch, you’ll never want to use it again.

At the moment, though, I’m still in batch one in SMS land. For the first month when you send a message to someone from your iPhone, it usually seems to be sent as an SMS; Once they reply, some connection is made, and it’s RCS from the next, at least until the conversation calms down and it feels like switching back to SMS. (You can always see in the text box what type of message you’re sending.) I haven’t noticed any reliability or performance issues on my phone, even though I have my computer and iPad nearby. Both are ready to send and receive texts, and I found in my testing that both SMS and RCS messages are sent much slower than before. These various types of interface are key points that appear frequently in these early betas and are always – though not always – fixed well before installation.

Yet there are some issues that just don’t work and probably never will. For example, when I’m in RCS chat I don’t have access to any of the new text formatting options of iOS 18, and if I send a message with a balloon it sends it without the balloon and dumb Addendum to message that claims “(sent with balloon).” You won’t be able to use iMessage apps or reply inline on RCS. Apple very much wants the iMessage experience to be better than RCS, and in iOS 18, it still very much is.

However, RCS in iOS 18 is a big win for texters everywhere. Customers were demanding a better cross-platform approach to sharing photos and videos — Tim Cook’s infamous “buy an iPhone for your mom” layout was actually tailored to a question about texting videos — and it’s now Basically a solved problem. I know my wife read my text, and I can see my baby’s face in the video she sent me. It probably won’t be that pitched in 2024, but it’s almost the dream.