There’s SMS, the text standard that we used when texts first became a thing. Of course, that standard is very basic and doesn’t provide a very rich experience, only allowing for text and mercilessly compressed media to survive. That’s why there’s RCS, which is basically like how we chat on most instant messaging apps.
The problem is, if you’ve ever messaged an iPhone user and tried to send media, its quality gets obliterated. You can’t send voice recordings and use other fancy features either, all because Apple has refused to adopt RCS. Well, they agreed to late last year, and now we finally have a window to look forward to: Fall of 2024.
It Took Them Long Enough: Texting Between Android and iPhone Will Finally Evolve
Late in 2023, Apple finally announced that they were going to adopt the Rich Communication Services (RCS) standard for texting on their iPhones. The impact of this isn’t on conversations with iPhones but on conversations with Androids, which have had a mediocre (and extremely dated) texting experience since the inception of the iPhone.
Android phones have supported RCS since 2019, and you can easily use it when messaging between Android devices, but you’re out of luck when it comes to texting Apple devices. Fortunately, thanks to a new landing page for Google Messages, and a now-deleted section talking about RCS (shoutout to 9to5Google for catching it), it now seems Apple is expected to finally bring in RCS to their devices in the Fall of this year — before, we only knew it was expected in 2024, but this makes things a lot more specific.
The Fall window means that we can likely expect RCS support to be bundled with iOS 18 (and trust me, Apple will likely make a big song and dance out of it). Once active, Apple and Android users will enjoy a lot of benefits when messaging each other, including the following:
- High-quality media
- Longer messages
- Read receipts
- Typing indicators
- GIF support
- Location sharing
- Messaging over Wi-Fi
- Group messaging
Modern-Day Segregation: Apple Has Stuck to SMS For Messaging Androids
If you had asked Apple for their opinion on RCS a couple of years back, they would have scoffed at the concept. The tech giant was notoriously adamant that it wasn’t going to adopt the sensible standard, with Tim Cook himself making the alternative clear: buy an iPhone.
It’s not that Apple hates technological advancements. It’s just that they hate doing anything that makes buying anything but an iPhone more appealing. The silly green bubble-blue bubble debacle is evidence of this. You get blue bubbles because you’re texting from iMessage, but you get green bubbles because you’re some pauper using a “non-fancy” smartphone to text.
Android phones have been using the ancient SMS format to text iPhones since both have existed and despite Androids now being able to text each other more richly for about five years now, Apple is only just going to make things sweeter. Took them long enough. However, iMessage and RCS are still different standards and easy to tell apart in software, so don’t expect those green bubbles to go anywhere. They won’t.
