Android owners with iPhone friends who are running the iOS 18 beta, you’ll want to hear this news: RCS has been enabled and appears to be working between iOS and Android devices. We’ve been doing a bit of testing with it this morning, and while there still seems to be improvements to be made, the overall messaging experience between platforms seems better.
The highlights of this implementation is high-res media sharing, file attachments, sending and receiving voice notes, as well as what seems to be better GIF support. One thing we’re not seeing improvement on are message reactions, which still show a separate message such as, “Loved an image,” or “Haha’d an image.”
Under the Messages app settings on iOS 18 you’ll want to ensure RCS is enabled, but even after doing so, you can expect things to maybe be a bit janky at first. For example, reactions to audio notes appear busted, plus the audio clips themselves aren’t embedded into the chat and instead appear as file attachments on iOS. There’s certainly work to be done.
If you and an iPhone user want to get to testing and playing with RCS, start up a chat and let us know what you think.
