The photos aren\u2019t blurry! As a longtime iPhone user married to a longtime Android user, I\u2019ve spent years sending and receiving photos that come through both postage-stamp small and about as sharp as a pointillist painting. But a few minutes after I installed the iOS 18 beta on my iPhone 15 Pro, I asked Anna to send me a photo, and what came through was the blissfully high-res photo I\u2019d hoped for. That, right there, is what I call an upgrade.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
RCS support<\/a> is just one of the new things coming in iOS 18<\/a>, of course. At WWDC a few weeks ago, Apple talked a lot about homescreen customization, improvements to Siri, a revamped Photos app, and more. The company seems to have added support for RCS, a more modern and powerful messaging protocol that Google and others have adopted on Android, only as a begrudging gesture<\/a> to regulators \u2014 it only mentioned the feature in passing, at the very 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n RCS is not, however, a salve for all the world\u2019s messaging problems. For one, the green bubble lives on. It\u2019s not even a different shade when you\u2019re using RCS; it\u2019s still just a green bubble. The iPhone\u2019s take on RCS is also not encrypted, because Apple is using the basic RCS standard \u2014\u00a0known as the RCS Universal Profile \u2014\u00a0and not Google\u2019s more secure implementation<\/a>. RCS is not \u201ciMessage for Android.\u201d It\u2019s not going to convince the billions of WhatsApp users around the world to switch. It\u2019s just \u201cbetter SMS.\u201d But it is much, much better SMS.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When you\u2019re RCS-ing, green-bubble texting gets a lot better. Both Android and iPhone users get typing indicators, read receipts, high-res media, and everything else you\u2019d expect from a half-decent messaging app. Even the Tapback responses work properly now, as long as you\u2019re using the standard options \u2014 !!, thumbs up, that sort of thing. In iOS 18, you can now send any <\/em>emoji as a Tapback, which works fine between iPhones but now prompts that annoying \u201cDavid reacted \ud83c\udf5d to \u2018What do you want for dinner tonight\u2019\u201d text in Google Messages. Google will presumably fix that in time \u2014\u00a0the Messages app has been solving for annoying, iMessage-using iPhone users for a while \u2014\u00a0but for now, it\u2019s a little wonky.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It appears Apple sees its messaging protocols as a three-tier system. Best-case scenario, it\u2019s two Apple devices communicating, and Apple defaults to iMessage. If not, it goes to RCS. And if RCS isn\u2019t available, either because carriers don\u2019t support it or there\u2019s no data service or for any other reason, it\u2019ll fall back to lowly SMS. It\u2019s smart of Apple to not ditch SMS entirely, but hopefully starting this fall, you\u2019ll never need to use it again.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n For now, though, I\u2019m still in SMS land a lot. The first time you send someone a message from your iPhone, it seems to mostly send it as an SMS; as soon as they reply, some connection gets made, and it\u2019s RCS from then on, at least until there\u2019s a lull in the conversation and it seems to flip back to SMS. (You can always see what kind of message you\u2019re sending in the text box itself.) I haven\u2019t noticed any reliability or performance issues on my phone, though I do have my laptop and iPad both set up to send and receive texts, and I\u2019ve found in my testing that both SMS and RCS messages send much more slowly than they did before. These are the sorts of interface details that often show up in these early betas and often \u2014\u00a0but not always \u2014 get ironed out before launch.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n There are also still some things that don\u2019t work at all and probably never will. I don\u2019t have access to any of iOS 18\u2019s new text formatting options when I\u2019m in an RCS chat, for instance, and if I send a message with balloons it sends it with no balloons and a dumb addendum to the message that says \u201c(sent with balloons).\u201d You can\u2019t 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 very much is.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Still, RCS in iOS 18 is a huge win for texters everywhere. Users have been clamoring for a better cross-platform way to share photos and videos \u2014\u00a0Tim Cook\u2019s infamous \u201cbuy your mom an iPhone<\/a>\u201d line was actually in response to a question about texting videos \u2014\u00a0and that\u2019s now basically a solved problem. I know my wife read my text, and I can see my kid\u2019s face in the video she sent me. That may not sound like much in the year 2024, but it\u2019s kind of the dream.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n