- Apple has finally added RCS support in the Messages app.
- RCS is a modern alternative to SMS and MMS.
- The bubbles are still green.
Apple finally added RCS support to its Messages app, but bubbles are still green.
In iOS 18, iPhones will finally be able to send and receive RCS (Rich Communications Services) messages. RCS is an alternative to SMS and has always been supported on Android phones. At first glance, RCS on iPhone seems like it's just for the convenience of our Android-using friends, but as we'll see, it's actually a huge improvement for iPhone users too, making cross-platform chat look almost like iPhone Same as chatting between iPhones, with one (possibly) big exception…
"RCS, or Rich Communications Services, significantly enhances the messaging experience for iPhone users to communicate with Android users. Unlike SMS and MMS, RCS will provide iPhone users with the ability to send high-resolution media, input indicators, and read content when communicating with Android users. Features like Receipts mean iPhone users will no longer have to deal with small, grainy photos and videos from their Android friends; instead, they can enjoy high-quality images and videos," said Ryan Frye, smartphone data discovery and digital forensics expert email told Lifewire. "In addition, RCS supports messaging over Wi-Fi and mobile data, eliminating the character limitations of traditional SMS."
Green bubbles get a bad rap, apparently, and iPhone-using teenagers use them to shame their peers with cheaper Android phones. But teenagers will shame their peers for anything, and these green bubbles have a legitimate purpose.
If you use the iMessage protocol to chat with someone on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad, you'll gain several benefits, perhaps the most important of which is end-to-end encryption. SMS does not support encryption, but rather than breaking it out into a separate SMS app, Apple includes it in the Messages app. Therefore, coloring messages green lets you know that these messages are not encrypted.
But that's not all. Text messages don't support typing indicators, read receipts (you should turn them off anyway, for your own sanity), or high-resolution photos. They also don't handle pushback reactions very well, though that's mostly due to Apple's refusal to implement them properly.
For users, this can go either way, depending on how much they want to communicate with the business, but they can also gain advantages.
"For the business world, adopting RCS on Apple devices opens up new possibilities for enhanced communications, including features such as branded messaging, authentication, encryption, two-way chat, and identifiable sender ID, all of which help Enabling a more dynamic and secure communications landscape," Inderpal Mumick Singh, CEO of RCS Pioneer and Dotgo, told Lifewire via email.
RCS changed all that, so now the green bubble is less useful as an expected indicator of message conversation (except for encryption). RCS can support encryption, but if it is not enabled by default, it may never be used.
By default, anyone needs to enable encryption to actually use it. For extensive evidence of this, check out the email. It's possible to encrypt your email, but how many encrypted emails have you ever sent or received? Maybe not. If you're a nerd who likes encrypted email conversations, good luck with that, because you'll have to convince everyone you communicate with to set it up as well; otherwise, it won't work.
Compared to iMessage, WhatsApp or Signal, they are end-to-end encrypted by default. All your messages are protected and cannot be read by anyone except the recipient or anyone with access to their phone. Not only does this mean bad actors cannot access messages in transit. This also means that the providers of these services cannot discard your communications with third parties such as governments or law enforcement agencies, nor can they use the content of your messages to train their algorithms or market to you (however, if you include your messages in your iCloud backup , they are accessible to Apple).
We're pretty good with email these days, even though none of it is remotely protected by encryption. But that doesn't mean modern alternatives to text messaging shouldn't be encrypted. Starting in summer 2023, Google's Messages app will now encrypt RCS messages by default, which is great news, so hopefully Apple will interoperate with RCS when it integrates it sometime this year.
Ultimately, RCS support is an overall win for iPhone users. Green bubble conversations are annoying because they are limited compared to our iMessage conversations in the same app. RCS reduces these annoyances while still allowing teenagers to laugh at each other over meaningless differences.
