Apple will lastly undertake RCS in iOS 18, successfully ending a yearslong struggle for function parity between iMessage and Android. However the announcement wasn’t a celebration — you might’ve blinked and missed it. As a substitute of displaying how RCS will make issues higher, Apple softly introduced help for the usual and targeted on all the good options coming to iMessage customers — not RCS ones.
Apple didn’t go over how RCS adoption will lastly let iPhone and Android customers ship one another high-resolution photos and movies. It didn’t even say how RCS will allow help for cross-platform learn receipts and typing indicators. Apple solely highlighted the flashy options coming to iMessage, together with methods to daring and italicize textual content, enhancements to Tapbacks, and the flexibility to schedule a textual content.
These are all nice adjustments, however iPhone customers received’t be capable of use these options when chatting with somebody on Android. And we don’t even know the way the emoji created with Genmoji, Apple’s new AI emoji creation device, will seem in texts despatched to customers on Android, both.
The corporate buried RCS on its iOS 18 preview web page, too. It doesn’t even check with Android customers by identify: “RCS (Wealthy Communication Companies) messages deliver richer media and supply and browse receipts for many who don’t use iMessage.” The included picture exhibits an RCS chat on the iPhone, which has the inexperienced bubbles indicating the particular person you’re texting isn’t on an iPhone.
Apple first confirmed RCS help was coming final 12 months. “It will work alongside iMessage, which is able to proceed to be the perfect and most safe messaging expertise for Apple customers,” Apple spokesperson Jacqueline Roy mentioned in an announcement to The Verge on the time. However it wasn’t essentially a magnanimous transfer. Apple was largely pressured to help RCS in response to the mounting stress from world regulators and competing firms. That will assist clarify the considerably disgruntled method to asserting its rollout in iOS 18.
However Apple’s adoption of RCS has been years within the making. Each main provider already made the swap to RCS. Apple was the one holdout, and regulators, mixed with some dangerous press (bear in mind when Tim Cook dinner advised a man to purchase his mother an iPhone?), made it more and more crucial for the corporate to handle the difficulty.”
The truth that Apple ignored RCS throughout its keynote makes it look like Apple didn’t suppose it was worthy sufficient of displaying off — which is goofy. The entire inhabitants of Android customers, together with myself, has been caught getting photographs and movies from iPhone customers that you just want a magnifying glass to make out (whereas additionally attempting to persuade them to obtain a third-party messenger that really helps high-res media).
It is a large enchancment for each Android and iPhone customers! It’s simply too dangerous that the long-awaited unification of the iPhone and Android’s messaging methods was drowned out by unsettling AI-generated emoji and jiggling iMessage bubbles. Even with out Apple’s acknowledgment, I’m simply stoked that I’ll lastly be capable of trade photographs and movies from the twenty first century with my iPhone-wielding family and friends members for as soon as.
