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RCS in iOS 18: What You Need to Know About Apple's Android Messaging Overhaul
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I hate it when MR repurposes nearly year old articles and comments. 🤬
And yet, that is exactly what the article illustration shows. Messages from an (assumed) Android user go from green to blue.
I was excited about this early on in the Betas. Used to be I never got the point of RCS in a world where WhatsApp, signal and countless other apps exist.
Android people on reddits r/android always said RCS was better than 3rd party messenger apps because it doesn’t require the recipient to download a new app.
I found out that half my android contacts don’t have RCS enabled (US based users). I complained about how little adoption there was of RCS over on r/android.
r/android brain trust told me “just have those users download Google messages” 🙄
Android people on reddits r/android always said RCS was better than 3rd party messenger apps because it doesn’t require the recipient to download a new app.
I found out that half my android contacts don’t have RCS enabled (US based users). I complained about how little adoption there was of RCS over on r/android.
r/android brain trust told me “just have those users download Google messages” 🙄
This is BS. Learn something about the politics of industry standards. RCS was declared a zombie in 2015. Google and Microsoft didn’t announce support until 2017. It has only been adopted by AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile over the last couple of years, primarily due to Google’s persistence at trying to get their non-standard version of RCS supported by major carriers.
Of course Apple didn’t support RCS while the industry was wracked with incompatible implementations. And now that it is finally supported by all major players (Verizon didn’t agree to support RCS on Android until this year), you see Apple has rolled out an implementation.
This is one of those quality of life items that Apple should've addressed at least five years ago during Covid. We could've been on to more important features in 2024. This is one of those areas where Android outshines iOS.
The majority of them do in the US, including the big three, so most people can and will have it.
It actually indicates which messages are end-to-end encrypted vs. which travel in clear text for at least part of their transmission. When Huawei and Samsung sell phones that are more expensive than a standard iPhone and carriers give away iPhones for free to attract customers, the only people concerned about color indicating rich vs. poor are idiots who’ve bought some marketing or political BS.
Hope so too. Hopefully there are other service providers in your area as that will motivate them to support it lest lose customers to a competitor that does.
Clearly you don’t understand telecoms or the tech. As soon as they have a reason SMS/MMS will be sunset and I’m sure they had a quiet hand in pushing Apple into RCS. While not a standard, plan on it becoming one. SMS has already started being phased out. Example is the shutdown of most email to SMS gateways quietly in the background. SMS relies on clunky SS7 intergration that I’m sure everyone wants to see shutdown. While cellular data is tied to IP networks, SMS/MMS is not. As things move away from legacy SS7 backends to IP networks, SMS will be killed. The telecoms want nothing more to reduce SS7 to nothing more than PSTN handoff and caller ID translation (which is just bolted on IP database servers to SS7 networks). SMS is going bye bye like it or not.
Protip- switch RCS to "off". It's used frequently for ads and spam messages.
RCS Features Not Yet Implemented
One big current missing feature is that with iMessage to iMessage sending photos, you can include all meta data such as date taken, location, etc. With SMS that gets stripped. Now with RCS when iPhone users send to Android it can include all the meta data when sending to close friends and family, etc. But when sending from Android to iPhone via RCS it's still stripping the data since Google Messages hasn't updated yet to presumably include full meta. This is the number one thing I've been waiting for since when using Messenger, What's App, and others run into the same issue. So was exciting with RCS this would finally be resolved and could communicate with android users the same way as iPhone users. Hopefully fixed soon, then the big thing will just be waiting for encryption.Just note that the big three only started supporting the RCS on Android within the last two or three years. With Verizon only starting this year.
I get plenty of SMS spam, but no RCS spam.
We have a mixed household. Myself on an iPhone and my wife on a Pixel. Kids are one android and one iPad... I'll be keeping it on.
The Google implementation is their own proprietary extension to the standard. Google has been trying to strong arm every carrier (quite successfully too) to buy the Google implementation instead of supporting the industry standard. Don’t expect full compatibility while Apple faithfully implements the standard and Google plays these time-worn marketing games.
Another repost from years ago. If anyone is reading this down here, I figured out why my Verizon line wasn't sending RCS with another Verizon user. That user uses Textra. RCS only works with Google Messages. This should be emphasized much more clearly. It's all over the Ars message boards.
Green bubbles on an Android phone is not a "quality of life item". If they don't want green bubbles, buy an iPhone.
This is one of the "upgrades" that I could care the absolute least about. Some of my friends have Android phones and we text regularly. I couldn't care less what color the bubbles are or whether our texts are E2EE - I'm not sharing national security secrets with them, I'm asking them what time they're getting here because they're late, or where they want to go for dinner. Or I'm sending them a picture of something that they're not going to blow up to 24x36 and hang on a wall in their house, they're going to look at it on the phone and be done with it.
It's not my duty or responsibility to make Android users feel good about their phone choices, or care what color their bubbles are. This is all a big push from Google themselves, Apple wanted nothing to do with it in the first place and I'm not sure how much enthusiasm they have toward it.
RCS is the ONLY iOS 18 upgrade I care about. My wife is a loyal Pixel user and will never use or own an iPhone.
I don't care about bubble colors and they could all be grayscale for all I care. Just give me full, default data-only texting between iOS and Android. Deprecate SMS.
I use an Android phone, but I don't use Googles text app, so i only use SMS and receive SMS.
Some of us don't want to use Apps like Signal and WhatsApp. SMS is standard, everyone can receive SMS, no matter what phone they use. RCS, I have no interest in and don't use it.
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Android is for people who love to use technology and make it do what they want; Apple products are for people who want some of what technology offers but have no idea how to use it.
Nice to see this rolling out - this will essentially upgrade the baseline communication standard (most of the time) up to a nicely usable level between platforms here in the U.S. (& Canada and maybe a few other places). It's a big deal to bring the baseline up like this.
Although most of the world is centered on 3rd party calling / messaging apps (which they did to get around country to country call charges / messaging charges way back and some still), the U.S. didn't experience that since most calling / messaging was in country - so the default on device startup (SMS, eventually iChat for iOS users) is why old RCS is something to bring the baseline up here and RCS is often not even used in alot of other countries.
It's too bad Google ignored and then killed off Hangouts back when that was the default messaging app in Android, it included SMS integrated into it just like iChat (but Google had a iOS version as well - it was multiplatform), they could have made that the cross platform messaging app in the U.S. with some upgrades...(that was many generations of completely different Google chat apps back of course)
Although most of the world is centered on 3rd party calling / messaging apps (which they did to get around country to country call charges / messaging charges way back and some still), the U.S. didn't experience that since most calling / messaging was in country - so the default on device startup (SMS, eventually iChat for iOS users) is why old RCS is something to bring the baseline up here and RCS is often not even used in alot of other countries.
5 years ago the U.S. carriers didn't have compatible RCS standards, with most being different from Google's own RCS standard (RCS messages wouldn't flow between them). RCS in Android (in the U.S.) was a mess at that point and it would have made no sense for Apple to try to standardize on one because of it.
It's too bad Google ignored and then killed off Hangouts back when that was the default messaging app in Android, it included SMS integrated into it just like iChat (but Google had a iOS version as well - it was multiplatform), they could have made that the cross platform messaging app in the U.S. with some upgrades...(that was many generations of completely different Google chat apps back of course)