The photos aren’t blurry! As a longtime iPhone user married to an Android user, I’ve spent years sending and receiving photos that were both postage-stamp-sized and about as sharp as a pointillist painting. But minutes after installing the iOS 18 beta on my iPhone 15 Pro, I asked Anna to send me a photo, and what I got was the blissfully high-resolution photo I’d been hoping for. Now that’s what I call an upgrade.
RCS support is, of course, just one of the new things coming to iOS 18. At WWDC a few weeks ago, Apple talked a lot about home screen tweaks, improvements to Siri, a revamped Photos app, and more. The company apparently added support for RCS, a more modern and powerful messaging protocol that Google and others have adopted on Android, only as a grudging 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 the billions of Android users who communicate with those iPhone users, RCS is a big deal.
RCS isn’t a panacea for all of the world’s messaging woes, however. For one thing, the green bubble is still alive. It’s not even a different shade when you use RCS; it’s still just a green bubble. The iPhone version of RCS is also unencrypted, because Apple uses the base 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.
If you’re using RCS, the green bubble texting experience is about to get a whole lot better. Both Android and iPhone users get typing indicators, read receipts, high-resolution media, and everything else you’d expect from a decent messaging app. Even Tapback reactions work fine now, as long as you use the default options — !!, thumbs up, that sort of thing. In iOS 18, you can now each emoji like Tapback, which works fine between iPhones, but now brings up that annoying “David responded 🍝 to ‘What’s for dinner tonight?’” text in Messages. Google will presumably fix this eventually — the Messages app has been working to fix annoying iMessage-using iPhone users for a while now — but for now it’s a bit odd.
Apple seems to view its messaging protocols as a three-layer system. In the best case, two Apple devices are 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 some other reason, it falls back to the humble SMS. Apple’s smart not to ditch SMS altogether, but hopefully you’ll never have to use it again starting this fall.
But for now, I’m still very much in SMS land. The first time you message someone from your iPhone, it usually seems to go out as an SMS; once they respond, a connection is made and it’s RCS from then on, at least until there’s a lull in the conversation and it seems to switch back to SMS. (You can always tell 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 have both my laptop and iPad set up to send and receive SMS, and I’ve found in my testing that both SMS and RCS messages send much slower than they used to. These are the kinds of interface quirks that tend to crop up in these early betas, and are often—but not always—ironed out before launch.
There are also still some things that don’t work at all and likely never will. For example, I can’t access iOS 18’s new text formatting options when I’m in an RCS chat, and when I send a message with balloons, the message is sent without the balloons and with some stupid appendix to the message that says “(sent with balloons)”. You can’t use iMessage apps through RCS, or do inline replies. Apple really wants the iMessage experience to be better than RCS, and in iOS 18 that is still the case.
Still, RCS in iOS 18 is a huge win for texters everywhere. Users have been clamoring for a better way to share photos and videos across platforms — Tim Cook’s infamous “buy your mom an iPhone” line was actually in response to a question about texting videos — and now that problem is essentially solved. I know my wife read my text, and I can see my kid’s face in the video she sent me. That might not sound like much in the year 2024, but it’s kind of the pipe dream.