Photos aren’t blurry! As a longtime iPhone user married to a longtime Android user, I’ve been sending and receiving postage-stamp, pointillist-clear photos for years. But a few minutes after installing 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 was hoping for. Now that’s what I mean by upgrade.
RCS Support It’s just one of the new things Coming to iOS 18Of course, Apple had a lot to say at WWDC a few weeks ago about home screen customization, improvements to Siri, and a revamped Photos app. The company also announced support for RCS, the more modern and powerful messaging protocol that Google and others are adopting on Android. Unwillingness To regulators, the feature was only mentioned briefly at the end of the iOS announcement, but to many iPhone users — and, of course, the billions of Android users who interact with them — RCS means a lot.
But RCS isn’t a solution to the world’s messaging problems. For starters, the green bubble lives on. It doesn’t change color when you’re using RCS. It’s just a green bubble. And RCS on iPhone isn’t encrypted. That’s because Apple uses the underlying RCS standard, called the RCS Universal Profile. Google’s more secure implementationRCS is not “iMessage for Android” – it’s not going to convince the billions of WhatsApp users around the world to switch to it. It’s just “better SMS”. But it’s much better SMS.
With RCS, typing text with green bubbles becomes a lot more enjoyable. Both Android and iPhone users get all the features you’d expect from a decent messaging app, including typing indicators, read receipts, and high-res media. Tapback responses now work fine too, as long as you use the standard options (!!, thumbs up, etc.). With iOS 18, Any Using emojis as Tapbacks works fine between iPhones, but in Google Messages you’ll now see the annoying text “David responded with a 🍝 to ‘What do you want for dinner tonight?'” Google will likely fix this in due course. The Messages app has been solving an annoying problem for iPhone users using iMessage for a while now, but for now it’s a bit wonky.
Apple appears to view messaging protocols as a three-tier system. Best case scenario, two Apple devices communicate and Apple defaults to iMessage. If not, it’s RCS, and if RCS isn’t available because the carrier doesn’t support it, you don’t have data service, or for any other reason, it falls back to the lower-level SMS. It’s smart for Apple not to abandon SMS entirely, but hopefully we won’t have to use it again starting this fall.
For now, I still rely heavily on SMS. The first time you send a message to someone from your iPhone, it almost always goes as an SMS. As soon as they reply, some kind of connection is established, and from then on it’s RCS. At least, it’s RCS until the conversation dies down and it reverts to SMS. (You can always see what type of message you’re sending in the text box itself.) I haven’t noticed any reliability or performance issues on my phone, but I have both my laptop and iPad set up to send and receive texts, and in my testing, I found that SMS and RCS messages were sending significantly slower than they were before. These are the kinds of interface nitpicks you often see in early betas, and they often (but not always) get ironed out before launch.
There are also a few things that don’t work at all and probably never will. For example, RCS chats don’t have access to the new text formatting options in iOS 18, and when you send a message with a balloon, it’s sent without the balloon and the message has the silly extra information “(Sent with balloon)”. You can’t use iMessage apps or reply inline via RCS. Apple is keen to make the iMessage experience better than RCS, and iOS 18 isn’t changing that.
Still, RCS in iOS 18 is a big win for text users around the world, who have been clamoring for a better, cross-platform way to share photos and videos since Tim Cook’s infamous “Buy your mom an iPhoneThe “” line was actually a response to a question about text videos, and that problem is basically solved. I know my wife read my texts, and I can see my kids’ faces in the videos she sends me. That might not sound like a big deal in 2024, but it’s kind of a dream.
