RCS in iOS 18: Apple’s new messaging standard almost solves the green-button problem
The photos aren’t blurry! As a longtime iPhone user married to a longtime Android user, I’ve spent years sending and receiving photos that come through both postage-stamp small and about as sharp as a pointillist painting. But a few minutes after I installed the iOS 18 beta on my iPhone 15 Pro, I asked Anna to send me a photo, and what came through was the blissfully high-res photo I’d hoped for. That, right there, is what I call an upgrade.
RCS support is just one of the new things coming in iOS 18, of course. At WWDC a few weeks ago, Apple talked a lot about homescreen customization, improvements to Siri, a revamped Photos app, and more. The company seems to have added support for RCS, a more modern and powerful messaging protocol that Google and others have adopted on Android, only as a begrudging gesture to regulators — it only mentioned the feature in passing, at the very end of its iOS announcements. But for many iPhone users, and certainly for the billions of Android users who interact with those iPhone users, RCS is a big deal.
RCS is not, however, a salve for all the world’s messaging problems. For one, the green bubble lives on. It’s not even a different shade when you’re using RCS; it’s still just a green bubble. The iPhone’s take on RCS is also not encrypted, because Apple is using the basic RCS standard — known as the RCS Universal Profile — and not Google’s more secure implementation. RCS is not “iMessage for Android.” It’s not going to convince the billions of WhatsApp users around the world to switch. It’s just “better SMS.” But it is much, much better SMS.
When you’re RCS-ing, green-bubble texting gets a lot better. Both Android and iPhone users get typing indicators, read receipts, high-res media, and everything else you’d expect from a half-decent messaging app. Even the Tapback responses work properly now, as long as you’re using the standard options — !!, thumbs up, that sort of thing. In iOS 18, you can now send any emoji as a Tapback, which works fine between iPhones but now prompts that annoying “David reacted 🍝 to ‘What do you want for dinner tonight’” text in Google Messages. Google will presumably fix that in time — the Messages app has been solving for annoying, iMessage-using iPhone users for a while — but for now, it’s a little wonky.
It appears Apple sees its messaging protocols as a three-tier system. Best-case scenario, it’s two Apple devices communicating, and Apple defaults to iMessage. If not, it goes to RCS. And if RCS isn’t available, either because carriers don’t support it or there’s no data service or for any other reason, it’ll fall back to lowly SMS. It’s smart of Apple to not ditch SMS entirely, but hopefully starting this fall, you’ll never need to use it again.
For now, though, I’m still in SMS land a lot. The first time you send someone a message from your iPhone, it seems to mostly send it as an SMS; as soon as they reply, some connection gets made, and it’s RCS from then on, at least until there’s a lull in the conversation and it seems to flip back to SMS. (You can always see what kind of message you’re sending in the text box itself.) I haven’t noticed any reliability or performance issues on my phone, though I do have my laptop and iPad both set up to send and receive texts, and I’ve found in my testing that both SMS and RCS messages send much more slowly than they did before. These are the sorts of interface details that often show up in these early betas and often — but not always — get ironed out before launch.
There are also still some things that don’t work at all and probably never will. I don’t have access to any of iOS 18’s new text formatting options when I’m in an RCS chat, for instance, and if I send a message with balloons it sends it with no balloons and a dumb addendum to the message that says “(sent with balloons).” You can’t use iMessage apps over RCS or do inline replies. Apple very much wants the iMessage experience to be better than RCS, and in iOS 18, it still very much is.
Still, RCS in iOS 18 is a huge win for texters everywhere. Users have been clamoring for a better cross-platform way to share photos and videos — Tim Cook’s infamous “buy your mom an iPhone” line was actually in response to a question about texting videos — and that’s now basically a solved problem. I know my wife read my text, and I can see my kid’s face in the video she sent me. That may not sound like much in the year 2024, but it’s kind of the dream.
