Apple showed off iOS 18 earlier this month, and while Apple Intelligence may be the headliner, there’s a less buzzwordy feature coming to iPhones that I’m very excited about as an Android user. If you’ve ever been annoyed with the texting experience between iPhone and Android, you should be, too.
iPhone and Android Texting: A Rocky Relationship
It’s well documented that—at least here in the U.S.—texting between iPhones and Android devices is a less-than-stellar experience. This is almost entirely to blame on Apple, who took a long-standing universal standard—phone numbers—and turned them into an exclusive instant messaging app: iMessage.
Everyone knows the rest of the story. Photos and videos sent from an Android phone to an iPhone look terrible. Group chats with iPhone and Android users are a mess. And to make it all worse, iPhone users have been conditioned to believe it’s all the fault of those yucky “green bubble” Androids.
For the last few years, Google has been trying to raise awareness that this whole mess is Apple’s fault and pressuring them to adopt RCS. Many of the problems are due to iPhones falling back to the much older SMS standard for non-iMessage messages. However, there’s never been a benefit for Apple to fix the situation. It’s likely that they only decided to adopt RCS now due to a potential EU decision in the future.
How Will RCS Fix It?
So, why am I so excited about RCS coming to the iPhone as an Android user? For the last couple of years I’ve been running a BlueBubbles server on a Mac Mini so I can use iMessage from my Android phone. It was a fun project that ended up being very useful, but it’s far from perfect.
The thing you may not realize as an Android user is that iMessage really is very good. It’s not only a service that Apple created to lock people into iPhones. iMessage has excellent features that genuinely make texting better, which is why I wanted to be able to use it with my iPhone friends. But many of those features are available with RCS, too.
At the time of writing, we only have a very early look at RCS on iPhones in iOS 18 Beta 2, but the features are there. Delivery and read receipts, typing indicators, emoji reactions, and high-resolution photos and videos are working as you would expect over RCS.
RCS is definitely not on the same feature level as iMessage, but these improvements are enough for me to ditch my hacky BlueBubbles setup. All I’ve ever wanted is for the photos I send to look as good as my Pixel camera is capable of and to have a couple of extra niceties to feel like I’m texting in the 21st century. It was a low bar, but Apple finally managed to cross it. Green bubble be darned.
