The most important changes to Apple’s iMessage and Messages app in iOS 18 aren’t the Genmoji or AI emoji or even the option to send texts via satellite. Texting with Android users will be a lot easier now that you can finally plan messages to go out at a later time and date. You will also be able to use RCS, the next generation of messaging that will replace SMS.
These messaging tools will have a big effect on how people talk to each other every day, even though they were announced at WWDC 2024 along with AI and other changes to the user interface.
Because people want to schedule messages for years, developers have come up with complicated and annoying workarounds. For example, they’ve made apps that send push notifications to tell you to send a text or solutions that could only be used on iPhones that had been jailbroken. The new iOS will have built-in features that let you schedule texts to be sent at a later time.
At WWDC, the feature was only briefly talked about. It was revealed in the same sentence as the Tapbacks update in Apple’s press release. In iOS 18, Tapbacks now supports any emoji or sticker. It’s clear that Apple doesn’t think “Send Later” is a tool that needs a lot of work. People who run a business from their iPhone, on the other hand, or who remember the important things they need to text while they’re lying in bed at 3 a.m., will love the new scheduling tool. Apple’s picture shows that the feature could be used to make sure you don’t forget to send someone a birthday message, or just to make life easier, like when you want to text someone across time zones without bothering them.
But what’s even more important is that the Messages app now supports RCS, which is a message standard and replacement for SMS. This will fix many of the problems people have with texting Android users with a green bubble.
Google has been pushing Apple to accept the standard for a long time. If Apple did, it would make it easier for Android and iOS users to talk to each other. The fight over the green bubbles was written about in the Wall Street Journal. They also said that U.S. teens must have blue bubbles. Even though EU regulators ultimately decided that iMessage wasn’t popular enough to be forced to open up and work with other messaging services, Apple’s decision here was probably affected by the extra scrutiny. U.S. lawmakers were also interested in Apple’s decision to shut down Beeper, a third-party app that let Android users use iMessage.
Apple has long refused to add support for RCS, so when you texted with someone on Android, you didn’t get type or read receipts, and group chats broke down and photos and videos were blurry. There would also be no end-to-end encryption like there was on iMessage.
Messages sent via RCS will still have the green bubble curse on Apple devices, which is bad news for Android users. This is shown in photos on Apple’s website. Instead, the text box shows that your texts with that person can be read as both “Text message + RCS” in a light gray style. The texts themselves are still green, though.
Apple says it will support the standard later this year, so it looks like the problems that make the Messages app unusable for Apple users will be fixed. Not much was said about the news in Apple’s press statement. It said that RCS would make group messaging “richer media and more reliable compared to SMS and MMS.”
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There were earlier rumors that Apple would work with the GSMA to add support for end-to-end encryption to the Universal Profile for RCS. However, Apple will not support E2EE at first. So it makes sense that Apple didn’t talk about encrypted texting when they announced RCS.
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