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Where is RCS then?

Piplodocus

Piplodocus

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Apr 2, 2008
543
549
Got iOS 18. Thought I'd try RCS on a friend. That just seems to say text messages are available. Went in the messages app settings. Nothing in there. A quick look round the web seems to imply there was an "enable RCS" above "enable MMS" in the settings menu in some betas at least. Where is it? Do I still have to keep using f'kin WhatsApp to send most people a picture? 🤦‍♂️

FYI: I'm in the UK, on O2, which talks about using RCS on android on their website, so I assume it's supported by the network?
 
Believe it has to be supported specifically for iOS by the provider. Most in the UK aren’t yet. I’m with smarty (3) and have not seen sight nor sound of RCS on 18 beta under the last few months.
 
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Piplodocus said:
I thought the point of RCS is that it's cross-platform and a standard. Guess I'll have to wait then. And keep having to use 2 different apps for messaging everyone. 😢
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Yes, it is a standard that every phone carrier can implement. And they have had years to do it. And very few of them did. Hence, Google came out with their own thing based on the standard, but improved in some ways. (That's why an Android phone on O2 can send RCS. It's because of Google's efforts, not anything O2 did.) But I guess Google didn't give Apple access to it and Apple doesn't want to build their own (I am sure there were some negotiation talks, but nothing public), so it is back in the hands of carriers to go and implement the original standard. Maybe iOS 18 adoption will give carriers the kick in the butt to go do it finally?
 
I don’t know if this helps but we were looking into it tonight. Or son has a Samsung s24. If he sets Samsung messages app as a default RCS doesn’t work since that app doesn’t support it. As soon as he changed his default app to Google messages RCS worked and we got delivered and read receipts.
 
Paddle1 said:
It seems to be only EE in the UK.
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I'm on EE and have been on the public betas over the summer. I've found RCS to be very unstable.

One minute my texts to my boss on his Android phone are SMS messages, then it seemed to realise we could both do RCS, the messages then switched to RCS, and then more recently it's dropped back down to SMS and stayed there. Lots of comments on other threads describe similar experiences wherever a provider has enabled RCS.

I think it's going to take some tweaking by Apple and the networks, and time to bed in.
 
I was expecting my 41MB picture to go through uncompressed. My iphone received a 2MB version :(
 
I'm going through all my texts to non-iPhone users - green bubbles. Every single one says "Text Message - SMS" in the text field. I have RCS enabled. I restarted my phone. And I've had 18 since Beta 1. On the RC now.
 
Rob9874 said:
I'm going through all my texts to non-iPhone users - green bubbles. Every single one says "Text Message - SMS" in the text field. I have RCS enabled. I restarted my phone. And I've had 18 since Beta 1. On the RC now.
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Mine said RCS on a few of my friends who have higher end phones. The techy folk. Today they all say SMS. I dunno.
 
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Piplodocus said:
Got iOS 18. Thought I'd try RCS on a friend. That just seems to say text messages are available. Went in the messages app settings. Nothing in there. A quick look round the web seems to imply there was an "enable RCS" above "enable MMS" in the settings menu in some betas at least. Where is it? Do I still have to keep using f'kin WhatsApp to send most people a picture? 🤦‍♂️

FYI: I'm in the UK, on O2, which talks about using RCS on android on their website, so I assume it's supported by the network?
Click to expand...
I've been playing with RCS since beta... it hasn't been smooth. Couple of things to consider:
  • Your carrier needs to have provided an updated carrier profile to apple that allows RCS to be toggled on. I use two carriers in the US, one of them has it one doesn't. Obviously for the one that has it, RCS works great.
  • Your recipient needs to have RCS turned on: Even android users on RCS enabled carriers may not have RCS turned on for their phones. Out of my Android contacts, roughly half have RCS not enabled. This may be due to ancient phones, using some 3rd party messaging app, or a variety of other reasons. The advice from the android community has been "have them download google messages." This is frustrating, because the whole selling point of RCS is that your recipient doesn't need to download another app.
  • EVERYONE in an RCS group chat needs to have RCS enabled. Seems obvious, but many people have been asking why their group chats aren't suddenly RCS. iOS users need to be on iOS 18 or greater, and android users need to be on an RCS enabled app.
 
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My brother has a pixel 9 and it works perfect form iPhone to pixel. I don’t know anyone with a Samsung
 
I have a Samsung S24 Ultra with Google Messages on Verizon and I can report RCS is working well with all my iPhone contacts that have updated to iOS 18. It's not quite as fully featured as Android to Android and of course currently lacks E2EE when texting an iPhone, but it's a huge improvement over SMS/MMS. My sister, brother and I have a group chat. She has an iPhone and we both have Android phones. The group chat automatically updated and has a lot more functionality now.

I think adoption will ramp up quickly for many users and then stall out once you hit either an iPhone user that never updates their software, a few Android users still not using Google Messages and the smaller more obscure carriers taking forever to support the standard. However, for a vast majority of Android and iPhone users this is a big improvement.
 
Rob9874 said:
I'm going through all my texts to non-iPhone users - green bubbles. Every single one says "Text Message - SMS" in the text field. I have RCS enabled. I restarted my phone. And I've had 18 since Beta 1. On the RC now.
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Update: My texts to Android users still say SMS. My wife was texting an Android friend and it showed RCS, but her friend couldn't get her texts. I changed her settings and turned RCS off, and now that friend gets the messages.

Why didn't it just send SMS if her friend can't get RCS?
 
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