Apple's RCS Texting Experience

 First Look at Apple's RCS Texting Experience 

Apple's Messages app will be getting RCS texting support later this year as part of iOS 18, but the feature providing better texting between an iPhone and an Android phone didn't get much more than a passing reference during the company's WWDC 2024 keynote. But buried in Apple's iOS 18 preview page -- scroll all the way down to the Messages section or just check out the above photo, is a screenshot that displays what an RCS conversation could look like when an iPhone texts with an Android phone. This is our best look at RCS on iPhone, yet. Following are the some of the important points:- 

One crafty iOS 18 beta tester has managed to get RCS working.

RCS is only supported on AT&T and T-Mobile for now, though this likely won’t be the case by the time the feature fully launches with iOS 18.

The experience is currently a little rough as some features still don’t fully work, but file transfer and group chats work well already.

Apple have confirmed that rich communication services (RCS) support is on its way to iOS 18 and it would eventually arrive in the beta as well. Apple's RCS texting screenshot shows a "Delivered" status update, media and a few green bubbles. While it might look a lot like a current MMS conversation, it's likely the biggest improvement a non-iMessage conversation has seen in years on the iPhone. Although the current iOS 18 beta technically doesn’t support RCS, there’s always someone who manages to turn these features on anyway. You’ll notice that the green bubble denoting Android users is still very much present, but now iMessage at least offers features like delivery status. File transfers also work great, supporting higher resolutions and sizes than SMS.

While it looks a lot like an SMS or MMS conversation, featuring two green bubbles and a green audio waveform, there are three noticeable RCS features on display. The biggest is the "Delivered" status message, which is a huge step forward since SMS and MMS cannot provide such confirmations. Although it works well enough in most cases, RCS on iOS 18 is still a work in progress. Android users can send messages to iPhone users and even participate in group chats, though there’s no end-to-end encryption (E2EE) support between the two platforms yet. Additionally, the iPhone doesn’t send read receipts for group chats, and the receipts sent by Android phones in groups are not visible either. These receipts work fine in single chats, however.

Next is the (hopefully) high-quality photo, which doesn't look great in this screenshot so we're going to have to believe from the green bubble text beneath it that it is indeed "vibrant." Current MMS texting on the iPhone supports audio messages with Android phones, but hopefully the audio in this conversation is clearer than what currently goes through. And in the text box at the bottom of the image, there's labelling which now says "RCS" to the right of "Text Message," the latter of which is currently used by itself for SMS and MMS chats.

However, even though Google's Messages app supports several features which rival Apple's iMessage by taking advantage of RCS, including RCS support in iOS 18 does not necessarily mean that Apple's Messages app will support the same features one-for-one. For instance, Apple said last year it will work with the GSMA to improve the encryption standard included within RCS rather than adopt another company's such as the one Google Messages uses. Apple also announced that its iMessage service will continue to be supported alongside RCS, so it's likely that we'll continue to see iMessage features which will stay separate from RCS.

It's only a peek, but the "Delivered" status update could make a big difference. RCS is a more modern texting standard that's been tipped to replace the aging SMS and MMS formats, due to its ability to support features like typing indicators, group chats and high-quality media sharing. The standard has been championed by the industry group GSMA and has been used by Google's Messages app for Android for several years.

There are still a lot of questions left to answer about Apple's support of RCS. For instance, how well will it support group chats? Will it translate message reactions that are sent by Android phones to the iPhone? And will RCS texting work over satellite? For now, those details will remain under wraps, possibly until Apple is ready to unveil its next iPhones later this year. For now, the ability to turn on RCS in the iOS 18 beta is pretty much reserved for extreme tinkerers, but at least we have a better idea of what it will look like now. Even if you could get it to work, the feature currently only works on AT&T and T-Mobile in the US. Of course, carrier support is expected to widen by the time the iOS 18 stable build rolls out.