RCS Messaging Comes to iPhone: What You Need to Know

For years, the dreaded green bubble has been a thorn in the side of iPhone users. It represents a messaging experience devoid of the modern features we’ve come to expect, as iOS shunts conversations with Android phones back to the digital stone age of SMS. This lackluster messaging paradigm has reportedly led to social divisions, especially among young people, and some even go so far as to cut Android users out of their dating pool rather than suffer the indignity of messaging a green bubble. For Android users, the situation is equally frustrating. While messaging between Android phones is smooth, photos and videos are compressed to unrecognizable clumps of pixels in the pipeline to an iPhone. Thankfully, Apple is now finally remedying the situation by adding the RCS standard long supported by Android devices.

What Is RCS and Why Does It Matter?

RCS stands for Rich Communication Services, and it’s essentially text messaging updated for modern standards. RCS uses your data connection to deliver Internet-enhanced smart messaging features you’ve come to expect from platforms like iMessage, WhatsApp, or Signal. These features include typing indicators, read receipts, emoji reactions, and the ability to send higher-quality media.

For iPhone users, this new, somewhat hidden iMessage feature means the frustrations Apple has imposSlahed on green bubble conversations until now will largely become a thing of the past. In the United States, most wireless carriers and Android phones have supported RCS for some time. When you update your iPhone to iOS 18 and enable RCS, the experience of chatting with an Android user will be much closer to using iMessage to chat with another iPhone user. Here are the main features coming to your green bubble conversations with iOS 18.

High-Quality Media Sharing at Last

For the lifespan of the iPhone as a product, its users have been unable to send or receive high-quality photos and videos to or from other types of phones. On SMS, files can be about 3.5 MB at the largest, which means that when iPhone users send photos and videos to their friends and family on Android, those files compresses to such a point that they become pixelated and unintelligible. With iOS 18, Apple has finally fixed this by adding RCS capabilities to the iMessage app.

For those on the current iOS 18 beta—which is vulnerable to change between now and the official release—photos and videos you send to non-iOS devices via text message will not be nearly as compressed and will arrive in much higher resolution than before. This assumes, of course, that the recipient is also using RCS. Similarly, photos and videos sent by RCS-enabled Android devices to iPhones will maintain higher quality, eliminating the tiny, low-resolution images iPhone users used to receive from their Android contacts.

However, it’s important to note that you shouldn’t expect to send RAW photos or 4K videos. All media will still undergo some compression, with larger files experiencing the most reduction in quality. For full-size files, cloud hosting services like Dropbox or Google Photos remain the best options. But for casual sharing, RCS will significantly improve the experience.

Read Receipts and Typing Indicators Arrive

Another example of the smart messaging features bundled with RCS on iPhone is read receipts. These indicators tell you when the other person has opened your message on their phone. On iOS, read receipts will appear underneath a message as text. When the message has arrived on the recipient’s phone, iOS users will see text reading, “Delivered,” and when read, that text will update to say, “Read.” Over on Android, users will see the same indicators they’re used to seeing when messaging other Android users on RCS—a set of two encircled check marks for delivered messages that turn solid blue when the recipient reads the message.

However, in the current beta of iOS 18, read receipts cannot be turned off for RCS messaging. This means your Android friends who use RCS will be able to see when you’ve read their messages. Google Messages on Android does allow users to disable read receipts, so you won’t necessarily know when your own messages have been read by your Android contacts. Apple may add the option to switch off read receipts by the time iOS 18 is officially released, but as of now, that option does not exist.

Enhanced Emoji Reactions and Typing Indicators

With RCS messaging, typing indicators—which show three dots to indicate the other person is typing—are finally available. This standard feature of Internet-connected rich messaging apps has been missing from SMS, the older standard iPhones defaulted to for non-iPhone messaging.

Emoji reactions will also be more robust and seamless between platforms. Before, reactions between iPhones and Androids relied on back-and-forth updates between Google and Apple, resulting in text descriptions of emoji reactions. Now, with iOS 18, Apple has integrated true emoji reaction compatibility for both platforms, making cross-platform conversations feel more native and connected.

iOS Finally Lets Android Users into the Group Chat

One of the biggest complaints iPhone users have had of Apple’s long-standing messaging paradigm was that group chats with Android users in them defaulted to MMS, the older standard for multimedia messaging that exists alongside SMS. By updating iOS to include RCS support, group chats that include non-Apple devices will instead use RCS. Things seem to be running smoothly in the current beta of iOS 18, as 9to5Google reported that group chats with both iOS and Android users are working as intended.

Previously, group chats between iPhone and Android users often refused to work correctly, leading to numerous online complaints. Now that Apple has finally integrated RCS, the official Android website has an entire page dedicated to explaining the benefits of RCS in iOS 18, promising, “Soon, you’ll be able to say goodbye to blurry videos and broken group chats, and hello to seamless messaging with anyone.” Clearly, Google hopes that this update will spell the beginning of the end of the stigma against green bubbles in the group chat.

Limitations and Security Concerns

Conclusion: A Step in the Right Direction

RCS on iPhone represents a major step forward for Apple. Rather than encouraging users to buy their Android-owning family members an iPhone, the company has decided to adopt the obvious solution to the cross-platform communication issues that have frustrated iPhone users for years. While there are still some kinks to iron out, the addition of RCS to iOS 18 is a promising development that should improve the messaging experience for both iPhone and Android users alike.