Photos aren’t blurry! As a long-time iPhone user married to a long-time Android user, I’ve spent years sending and receiving photos that come out as small as a postage stamp and 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 photo, and what came out was the gorgeous, high-resolution photo I was hoping for. Now that’s what I call an improvement.
Of course, RCS support is just one of the new things coming with iOS 18. At WWDC a few weeks ago, Apple talked a lot about home screen customization, Siri improvements, a revamped 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 on Android, only as a grudging gesture to regulators (it only mentioned the feature in passing, at the end of its iOS announcements). But for many iPhone users—and certainly the billions of Android users who interact with those iPhone users—RCS is a big thing.
RCS isn’t a balm for all the world’s messaging woes, though. For one thing, the green bubble lives on. It doesn’t even change color when you use RCS; it’s still just a green bubble. The iPhone version of RCS isn’t encrypted, either, because Apple uses the basic RCS standard (known as the RCS Universal Profile) and not Google’s more secure implementation. RCS isn’t “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’s much, much better.
The bubbles are green, but the images are high-resolution. Image: David Pierce / The Verge
When you use RCS, green-bubble text messages get a lot better. Both Android and iPhone users get typing indicators, read receipts, high-resolution media, and everything else you’d expect from a halfway decent messaging app. Even Tapback replies work properly now, as long as you use the standard options: !!, thumbs up, that sort of thing. In iOS 18, you can now send any emoji as a Tapback, which works fine between iPhones, but now results in that annoying “David reacted 🍝 to ‘What do you want for dinner tonight?’” text in Google Messages. Presumably Google will fix that over time (the Messages app has been fixing annoying issues for iPhone users using iMessage for a while now), but for now, it’s just a little weird.
It seems that Apple views its messaging protocols as a three-tier system. At best, it’s two Apple devices communicating, and Apple defaults to iMessage. If not, it uses RCS. And if RCS isn’t available, either because carriers don’t support it or there’s no data service or for any other reason, it will fall back to SMS. It’s smart of Apple not to get rid of SMS entirely, but hopefully starting this fall, you won’t need to use it anymore.
Sometimes it’s SMS, sometimes it’s RCS. It’s very confusing, but it usually works. Image: David Pierce / The Verge
For now, though, I’m still in the SMS world. The first time you send a message to someone from your iPhone, it seems to send it primarily as an SMS; as soon as they reply, some sort of connection is established, and it’s RCS from then on, at least until there’s a pause in the conversation and it appears to revert back to SMS. (You can always see 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 do have my laptop and iPad set up to send and receive text messages, and I’ve found in my testing that both SMS and RCS messages are sent much more slowly than before. These are the sort of interface kinks that often show up in these early betas, and are often — but not always — fixed before release.
There are also some things that don’t work at all, and probably never will. I don’t have access to any of iOS 18’s new text formatting options when I’m in an RCS chat, for example, and if I send a message with balloons, it sends it without balloons and with a silly add-on to the message that says “(sent with balloons).” You can’t use iMessage apps over RCS or do inline replies. Apple very much 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 texting users 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 a response to a question about texted videos) and that’s basically one problem solved. I know my wife read my text, and I can see my son’s face in the video she sent me. That might not seem like a big deal in the year 2024, but it’s a dream.
Keynote USA News
For Latest Apple News. Follow © Keynote USA News on Twitter Or Google News.