For years, the dreaded green bubble has been a source of frustration for iPhone users. As iOS has regressed conversations with Android phones back to the digital stone age of SMS, it represents a messaging experience that lacks the modern features we’ve come to expect. This lackluster messaging paradigm has reportedly led to social divisions, especially among young people, with some even going so far as to exclude Android users from their dating pools rather than endure the indignity of texting with the green bubble. For Android users, the situation is equally frustrating. While messaging between Android phones is smooth, photos and videos are compressed into unrecognizable pixel clusters in the pipeline to an iPhone. Thankfully, Apple is finally fixing the situation by adding the RCS standard, which has long been supported by Android devices.
What is RCS and Why is it Important?
RCS stands for Rich Communication Services, and it’s basically text messaging updated to modern standards. RCS uses your data connection to deliver the smart internet-enabled messaging features you’ve come to expect from platforms like iMessage, WhatsApp, or Signal. These features include typing indicators, read receipts, emoji reactions, and the ability to send higher-quality media.
For iPhone users, this new, somewhat hidden iMessage feature means that the frustrations Apple has been pushing with green bubble conversations until now will largely be a thing of the past. In the United States, most wireless carriers and Android phones have supported RCS for some time now. When you update your iPhone to iOS 18 and enable RCS, the experience of chatting with an Android user will be much closer to using iMessage to chat with another iPhone user. Here are the main features coming to your green bubble conversations with iOS 18.
Finally High Quality Media Sharing
Throughout the iPhone’s lifespan as a product, users were unable to send or receive high-quality photos and videos to other types of phones. SMS files can be up to 3.5MB at their largest, meaning that when iPhone users sent photos and videos to friends and family on Android, those files were compressed to the point of being pixelated and unintelligible. Apple finally fixed this with iOS 18, adding RCS capabilities to the iMessage app.
For those on the current iOS 18 beta (which is subject to change between now and the official release), photos and videos you send via text message to non-iOS devices will be almost completely uncompressed and will arrive at a much higher resolution than before. Of course, this assumes the recipient is using RCS. Similarly, photos and videos sent from RCS-enabled Android devices to iPhones will retain higher quality, eliminating the small, low-resolution images iPhone users receive from their Android contacts.
However, it’s important to note that you shouldn’t expect to send RAW photos or 4K videos. All media will still undergo some compression, and larger files will suffer the most in terms of quality. For full-size files, cloud hosting services like Dropbox or Google Photos remain the best options. But for casual sharing, RCS will improve the experience significantly.
Read Notifications and Spelling Indicators Are Coming
Another example of the smart messaging features that come with RCS on iPhone are read receipts. These indicators tell you when the other person has opened your message on their phone. On iOS, read receipts appear as text at the bottom of a message. When the message reaches the recipient’s phone, iOS users will see the text “Delivered,” and when it’s read, that text will update to “Read.” On Android, users will see the same indicators they’re used to seeing when sending messages to other Android users with RCS: two circled checkmarks for delivered messages, which turn solid blue when the recipient has read the message.
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However, in the current beta version of iOS 18, read notifications for RCS messaging cannot be turned off. This means that your Android friends who use RCS will be able to see when you’ve read their messages. Google Messages on Android allows users to disable read notifications, so you won’t necessarily know when your own messages have been read by your Android contacts. Apple may add an option to turn off read notifications when iOS 18 officially releases, but that option isn’t currently available.
Advanced Emoji Responses and Typing Indicators
With RCS messaging, typing indicators are finally available, showing three dots to indicate the other person is typing. This standard feature of Internet-enabled rich messaging applications was missing from SMS, with older standard iPhones defaulting to non-iPhone messaging.
Emoji reactions will be more robust and seamless across platforms. Previously, reactions between iPhones and Androids relied on back-and-forth updates between Google and Apple, resulting in text descriptions for emoji reactions. Now, with iOS 18, Apple has integrated true emoji reaction compatibility for both platforms, making cross-platform conversations feel more natural and connected.
iOS Finally Allows Android Users to Join Group Chats
One of the biggest complaints iPhone users have about Apple’s long-standing messaging paradigm has been that group chats with Android users default to MMS, the old multimedia messaging standard that existed alongside SMS. With iOS being updated to include RCS support, group chats that include non-Apple devices will now use RCS instead. All seems to be well in the current beta of iOS 18, with 9to5Google reporting that group chats are working as intended with both iOS and Android users.
Previously, group chats between iPhone and Android users would often refuse to work properly, leading to numerous online complaints. Now that Apple has finally integrated RCS, there’s a page on the official Android website dedicated to explaining the benefits of RCS in iOS 18, promising that “Soon, you’ll be able to say goodbye to blurry videos and choppy group chats, and hello to seamless messaging with everyone.” Clearly, Google is hoping that this update will mark the beginning of the end of the stigma against green bubbles in group chats.
Limitations and Security Concerns
Apple’s new RCS feature has some issues. Messages between iPhones and Android phones are not secure. You shouldn’t send private information using these chats. SMS isn’t secure either, but it’s a shame Apple didn’t make RCS more secure.
RCS only works with AT&T, Verizon, or T-Mobile in the US. You can’t reply directly to messages on other phones. You also can’t undo a message you sent to someone on a different phone. However, you can edit messages if you and the other person are on the same phone, but not if you’re on different phones. Hopefully Apple or Google will fix these issues.
Conclusion: A Step in the Right Direction
RCS on the iPhone represents a significant step forward for Apple. Instead of encouraging users to buy an iPhone for their Android-owning family members, the company has decided to embrace the obvious solution to the cross-platform communication issues that have frustrated iPhone users for years. While there are still some kinks to be worked out, the addition of RCS to iOS 18 is a promising development that should improve the messaging experience for both iPhone and Android users.