RCS in iOS 18: Apple’s new messaging standard virtually solves the green-button problem

Photos are not blurry! As a long-time iPhone user married to a long-time Android user, I’ve spent years sending and receiving photos that come in both miniature and pointillist painting-sharp postage. But a few minutes after installing the iOS 18 beta on my iPhone 15 Pro, I asked Anna to send me a photo, and I got the happy high-res photo I was hoping for. That is what I call improvisation.

RCS support is one of the new things coming in iOS 18. A few weeks ago at WWDC, Apple talked a lot about homescreen customization, improvements to Siri, a revamped Photos app, and more. The company appears to have added support for RCS, a modern and powerful messaging protocol adopted by Google and others on Android, only as a pleading gesture to regulators — it only mentioned the feature in passing at the 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.

However, RCS is not a panacea for all the world’s messaging problems. One, the green bubble lives on. It’s not even a different shade when you use RCS; It’s still a green bubble. The iPhone’s take on RCS is also unencrypted, as Apple uses a basic RCS standard called 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 is only “Best SMS”. But this is a very, very good SMS.

When you’re RCS-ing, green-bubble texting is great. Android and iPhone users get typing indicators, read receipts, high-res media, and everything you’d expect from a half-decent messaging app. Even tabback replies now work properly as long as you use standard options — !!, thumbs up, that sort of thing. In iOS 18, you can now send Any The emoji is a tabbag, which works fine between iPhones but now prompts the annoying “David 🍝 what’s for dinner” text in Google Messages. Google will fix it in time — an annoyance for iPhone users using iMessage, which the Messages app has been solving for a while — but for now, it’s a little surprising.

Apple views its messaging protocol as a three-tiered system. In the best case scenario, it’s two Apple devices communicating and Apple defaults to iMessage. Otherwise, it goes to RCS. If RCS is not available, carriers don’t support it or data service is unavailable or any other reason, it will revert to low SMS. Apple is smart not to abandon SMS entirely, but this fall, you won’t have to use it again.

For now, I’m still in SMS land. When you message someone from your iPhone for the first time, it often looks like an SMS; Once they respond, some connection is made and then it’s RCS, at least until there’s a lull in the conversation before it flips back to SMS. (You can always see what type of message you’re sending right in the text box.) Even with both my laptop and iPad set up to send and receive texts, I haven’t noticed any reliability or performance issues with my phone. , and in my testing I found that both SMS and RCS messages sent much slower than before. These are the interface details that often show up in these early betas, and are often — but not always — ironed out before launch.

There are still some things that don’t work and probably never will. For example, when I’m in RCS chat I can’t access any of iOS 18’s new text formatting options, if I send a message with balloons, it sends it without balloons and adds a mute to the message saying “(sent with balloons).” You can’t use the iMessage app or make inline replies with RCS. Apple really wants the iMessage experience to be better than RCS, and in iOS 18, it’s even more so.

However, RCS in iOS 18 is a huge win for texters everywhere. Users 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 — is a problem that’s now basically solved. I know my wife read my text and I can see my baby’s face in the video she sent me. It might not sound like much in 2024, but it’s kind of a dream come true.