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 the form of a postage stamp, small and as sharp as a pointillist painting. But a few minutes after installing the iOS 18 beta on my iPhone 15 Pro, I asked Anna to send me a picture, and what I got was the blissfully high-resolution picture I was hoping for. That, right there, is what I call an upgrade.
RCS support is just one of the new things coming to iOS 18, of course. At WWDC a few weeks ago, Apple talked a lot about home screen customization, Siri improvements, a redesigned Photos app, and more. The company appears to have added support for RCS, a more modern and powerful messaging protocol that Google and others have adopted in 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.
However, RCS is not a panacea for all the world’s messaging problems. On the one hand, the green bubble lives on. It’s not even a shade different when using RCS; it’s still just a green bubble. Taking an iPhone for RCS is also not encrypted, as Apple uses the underlying RCS standard – known as the RCS Universal Profile – rather than Google’s more secure implementation. RCS is not “iMessage for Android”. That won’t convince the billions of WhatsApp users around the world to switch. It’s just “better SMS”. But it’s a much, much better SMS.
When you’re working with RCS, texting with a green bubble just gets a whole lot better. Both Android and iPhone users get input indicators, read receipts, hi-res media, and everything else you’d expect from a half-decent messaging app. Even Tapback replies now work properly as long as you use the standard options — !!, thumbs up, that sort of thing. In iOS 18, you can now send any kind emoji like Tapback, which works fine between iPhones, but now prompts that annoying “David reacts 🍝 to ‘What do you want for dinner tonight'” text in Google Messages. Google will presumably fix this over time — the Messages app has been dealing with annoying iMessage-using iPhone users for a while now — but for now, it’s a little uncertain.
Apple seems to view its messaging protocols as a three-tier system. At best, two Apple devices communicate with each other, and Apple uses iMessage by default. If not, it goes to RCS. And if RCS is not available, either because carriers don’t support it, or there is no data service, or any other reason, it will fall back to low SMS. It’s smart of Apple not to ditch SMS entirely, but hopefully starting this fall you’ll never have to use it again.
For now, though, I’m still very much in the land of SMS. The first time you send someone a message from your iPhone, it looks like they’re sending it mostly as an SMS; as soon as they answer, some kind of connection is established and from then on it’s RCS, at least until there’s a lull in the conversation and it seems to revert back to SMS. (You can always see what kind of message you’re sending in the text field itself.) I haven’t noticed any reliability or performance issues with my phone, even though the laptop and iPad are set up to send and receive text messages, and in my tests I’ve found that both SMS, so RCS messages are sent much slower than before. These are the kinds of interface details that often crop up in these early betas, and are often – but not always – ironed out before launch.
There are still some things that don’t work at all and probably never will. I can’t access any of the new iOS 18 text formatting options when I’m in RCS chat, for example, and if I send a message with bubbles, it sends it without bubbles and a dumb addition to the message that says “(sent with bubbles) .” You cannot use iMessage apps through RCS or make inline replies. Apple really wants the iMessage experience to be better than RCS, and in iOS 18 it still 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 sending text videos — and that’s a problem now. I know my wife read my text and I can see my child’s face in the video she sent me. That might not sound like much in 2024, but it’s something of a dream.
