RCS in iOS 18: Apple’s New Messaging Standard Almost Fixes the Green Button Problem

The photos aren’t blurry! As a longtime iPhone user married to a longtime Android user, I’ve spent years sending and receiving photos that come out as tiny and sharp as a dot matrix 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 back was the delightfully high-res image I’d been hoping for. This, at this point, is what I call an upgrade.

RCS support is just one of the new things coming in iOS 18, of course. At WWDC a few weeks ago, Apple talked a lot about home screen customization, Siri improvements, a revamped Photos app, and more. The company seemed to add support for RCS, a more modern and powerful messaging protocol that Google and others have adopted on Android, only as a grudging nod to regulators — it only mentioned the feature in passing, at the 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.

But RCS isn’t the solution to all of the world’s messaging problems. For one thing, the green bubble is still there. It doesn’t even change color when you use RCS; it’s just a green bubble. The iPhone version of RCS isn’t encrypted, because Apple uses the underlying RCS standard — known as RCS Universal Profile — rather than Google’s more secure implementation. RCS isn’t “iMessage for Android.” It won’t convince the billions of WhatsApp users around the world to switch. It’s just “better SMS.” But it’s a much better SMS.

When you use RCS, green bubble texting gets a whole lot better. Android and iPhone users get typing indicators, read receipts, high-res media, and everything else you’d expect from a decent messaging app. Even tapback responses 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 The new Messages app looks like it will solve the problem for iPhone users who have been using iMessage for a while, but for now, there are still some glitches.

Apple seems to see its messaging protocols as a three-tiered system. In the best-case scenario, there are two Apple devices communicating, and Apple defaults to iMessage. If not, it moves to RCS. And if RCS isn’t available, either because carriers don’t support it, there’s no data service, or whatever, it’ll fall back on the humble SMS. It’s smart of Apple not to abandon SMS entirely, but hopefully starting this fall, you won’t need to use it again.

But for now, I still use SMS a lot. The first time you send a message to someone from your iPhone, it seems like you’re mostly sending it as an SMS; once the person responds, some connection is established, and then RCS is used, at least until the conversation cools down and it seems like it’s 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’ve set up my laptop and iPad to send and receive texts, and in my tests I’ve found that SMS and RCS are sent much slower than they used to. These are interface details that crop up often 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. For example, I don’t have access to any of the new text formatting options in iOS 18 when I’m in an RCS conversation, and if I send a message with balloons, it’ll be sent without balloons and just a stupid “(sent with balloons)” add-on to the message. You can’t use iMessage apps over RCS or provide inline replies. Apple desperately wants the iMessage experience to be better than RCS, and in iOS 18, it still largely is.

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 famous “buy your mom an iPhone” line was actually a response to a question about text videos — and that’s now essentially a solved problem. I know my wife read my text message, and I can see my baby’s face in the video she sent me. That may not sound like much in 2024, but it’s a dream.