Apple Confirms RCS for iOS 18

At the end of 2023, Apple made a commitment to support RCS in the iPhone Messages app at some point in 2024. The news was huge, but we didn’t know at the time if a big update to iOS would be required or if they could push support on the backend. Then in March, Google went ahead and confirmed that support would arrive in the fall, leading us to believe that RCS support could hit iMessage with iOS 18.

As it turns out, that was correct. Apple, during WWDC today, said that the next version of iOS will indeed have RCS support. You can see the mention in the screen capture below.

Apple trolled a bit in their confirmation by taking a special moment to talk new Messages features as a part of the new iOS, only to never mention RCS. We actually began to think they weren’t going to say the letters “RCS” after rumors have circulated suggesting they would. And then to finish off their iOS 18 talk, they posted this slide and then said in a single sentence that RCS support was coming. That was it.

So there it is. We still don’t know everything, but RCS should at least make text messaging between Android and iPhones not such a disaster. The bubble colors aren’t likely to share, just the messaging experience. We sure hope this leads to non-broken group chats, better media sharing, and other RCS features will be a part of messaging, no matter the platform of the person on the other end.

Once the beta builds of iOS 18 rollout, or if Apple provides more details, we’ll try to share how RCS on an iPhone might look and work.

• UPDATE 1: Apple showed off a screenshot of RCS in action, saying it will “bring richer media and delivery and read receipts for those who don’t use iMessage.” As you can see, the bubbles will still be green if you aren’t sending from an iPhone or other Apple devices, but we knew that. That’s not news. Only iMessage messages get blue bubbles and RCS is just an advanced text message.