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

The pictures are not blurry! As a longtime iPhone user married to a longtime Android user, I’ve spent years sending and receiving small and sharp images like raster paintings. But a few minutes after installing the iOS 18 beta on my iPhone 15 Pro, I asked Anna to send me a photo, and what arrived was the cheerful high-res photo I was hoping for. That’s what I call an upgrade at this point.

RCS support is definitely an innovation that iOS 18 brings. A few weeks ago at WWDC, Apple talked a lot about home screen customization, improvements to Siri, an updated Photos app, and more. The company appears to have added support for RCS, a more modern and robust messaging protocol that Google and others have adopted on Android, but only as a hesitant gesture to regulators — it only mentioned the feature at the end of its iOS announcement. But for many iPhone users, and certainly for the billions of Android users who interact with those iPhone users, RCS matters a lot.

But RCS isn’t the solution to all the world’s messaging problems. On the one hand, the green bubble is still there. When using the RCS system, it doesn’t even differentiate between colors; Rather, it remains a green bubble. The iPhone version of RCS is also not encrypted because Apple uses the underlying RCS standard – known as the RCS Universal Profile – rather than Google’s more secure implementation. And RCS is not “iMessage for Android”. And it won’t convince billions of WhatsApp users around the world to switch. It’s just an “advanced SMS service.” But it is very good sms service.

If you use RCS, text messages with green bubbles will be better. Android and iPhone users get typing indicators, read receipts, high-resolution media, and everything else you’d expect from a reasonably good messaging app. Even tapbacks now work fine as long as you use the default options -!!, thumbs up, that sort of thing. In iOS 18 you can now send any It looks like the new Messages app will solve the problem for iPhone users who have been using iMessage for a while, but for now there are some issues.

Apple seems to view its messaging protocols as a three-tier system. In the best case, two Apple devices communicate with each other and Apple uses iMessage by default. If not, switch to RCS. And if RCS isn’t available because carriers don’t support it, no data service or any other reason, resort to humble SMS. It’s smart for Apple not to offer SMS altogether, but hopefully you won’t have to resort to it anymore when you start using it this fall.

But at the moment I still use a lot of SMS. When you first send someone a message from your iPhone, it often looks like you’re sending it as an SMS. Once the person responds, some contact is established, and then RCS is used, at least until the conversation ends and it seems to have reverted to texting. (You’ll always see what kind of message you’re sending in the text box.) Despite setting up my laptop and iPad to send and receive text messages, I never experienced any problems with my phone’s reliability or performance. In my tests I noticed that SMS and RCS were sent much slower than before. These are interface details that often appear in these early beta builds and are often – but not always – resolved before release.

There are still some things that don’t work at all and probably never will. For example, when I’m in an RCS chat I don’t have access to iOS 18’s new text formatting options, and when I send a message with a balloon, it’s sent without the balloon and a stupid addition to the message says “(Balloon Sent). ” You cannot use the iMessage app or reply inline via RCS. Apple really wants the iMessage experience to be better than RCS, and iOS 18 still has that.

However, RCS in iOS 18 is a big win for SMS users around the world. Users have been asking for a better cross-platform way to share photos and videos — Tim Cook’s “buy your mom an iPhone” tagline was actually in response to a question about texting videos — and that’s now largely a solved problem. I know my wife read my text messages and I can see my baby’s face in the video she sent me. This may not seem like much in 2024, but it is a dream.