Apple announced RCS with a whimper when it should have been a bang

Apple will finally adopt RCS in iOS 18, effectively ending a years-long fight for feature parity between iMessage and Android. But the announcement wasn’t a celebration – you could have blinked and missed it. Instead of showing how RCS will improve things, Apple softly announced support for the standard and focused on all the great features coming to iMessage users — not RCS ones.

Apple hasn’t explained how adopting RCS will finally allow iPhone and Android users to send high-resolution photos and videos. He didn’t even say how RCS will enable support for cross-platform read receipts and typing indicators. Apple just highlighted iMessage’s flashy features, including ways to make text bold and italicized, improvements to Tapbacks, and the ability to schedule a text.

These are all big changes, but iPhone users won’t be able to use these features when chatting with someone on Android. And we don’t even know how emoji created with Genmoji, Apple’s new AI emoji creation tool, will also appear in texts sent to Android users.

The company buried RCS in its iOS 18 preview page, also. It doesn’t even refer to Android users by name: “RCS (Rich Communication Services) Messaging brings richer media and delivery and read receipts to those who don’t use iMessage.” The included image shows an RCS chat on iPhone, which has green bubbles indicating that the person you are texting is not on an iPhone.

Apple first confirmed that RCS support was coming last year. “This will work alongside iMessage, which will continue to be the best and most secure messaging experience for Apple users,” Apple spokeswoman Jacqueline Roy said in a statement to On the edge at the time. But it wasn’t necessarily a magnanimous move. Apple was largely forced to support RCS in response to increasing pressure from global regulators and competing companies. This may help explain the somewhat disgruntled approach to announcing its iOS 18 release.

But Apple’s adoption of RCS was years in the making. All major operators have already switched to RCS. Apple was the only holdout, and regulators, combined with some negative publicity (remember when Tim Cook told a guy to buy his mom an iPhone?), made it increasingly necessary for the company to address the issue.

The fact that Apple ignored RCS during its keynote makes it seem like Apple didn’t think it was worthy of showing off – which is silly. The entire Android user population, including me, has been stuck getting photos and videos from iPhone users that you need a magnifying glass to see (while also trying to convince them to download a third-party messenger that actually supports high-resolution media).

This is a huge improvement for Android It is iPhone users! It’s a shame that the long-awaited unification of iPhone and Android messaging systems was drowned out by distracting AI-generated emojis and choppy iMessage bubbles. Even without Apple’s recognition, I’m happy to finally be able to exchange 21st century photos and videos with my iPhone-using friends and family for the first time.