Why RCS on the iPhone Is Good News for Everyone

Apple is finally adding RCS support to its Messages app, but the bubbles will still be green.

In iOS 18, the iPhone will finally be able to send and receive RCS, or Rich Communication Services, messages. RCS is a replacement for SMS and has been supported on Android phones forever. At first glance, it seems like RCS on the iPhone is only for the convenience of those Android-using friends, but as we shall see, it'll actually be a huge improvement for iPhone owners, too, making inter-platform chats seem almost like iPhone-to-iPhone chats, with one big (possible) exception…

"RCS, or Rich Communication Services, significantly enhances the messaging experience for iPhone users who communicate with Android users. Unlike SMS and MMS, RCS will enable features like sending high-resolution media, typing indicators, and read receipts for iPhone users communicating to Android users. This means iPhone users won't have to deal with small, grainy photos and videos from Android friends anymore; instead, enjoy high-quality images and videos," smartphone data discovery and digital forensics expert Ryan Frye told Lifewire via email. "Additionally, RCS supports messages sent over Wi-Fi and mobile data, eliminating the character limits of traditional SMS."

Green Bubbles

Green bubbles get a bad rap, and apparently, iPhone-using teens use them to shame peers who use cheaper Android phones. But teens shame their peers for anything and everything, and those green bubbles have a legitimate purpose.

If you chat with somebody using the iMessage protocol on a Mac, iPhone, or iPad, you get several advantages, perhaps the most important of which is end-to-end encryption. SMS does not support encryption, but instead of busting it out into a separate SMS app, Apple includes it in the Messages app. So, coloring the messages green lets you know that those messages are not encrypted.

But that's not all. SMS messages do not support typing indicators, read receipts (which you should turn off anyway, for your own sanity), or high-resolution photos. They also don't manage well with tapback reactions, although that's mostly been down to Apple refusing to implement them properly.

This could go either way for users, depending on how much they want to communicate with businesses, but they also get advantages.

"For the business sector, the adoption of RCS on Apple devices unlocks new possibilities for enhanced communication, including features like branded messaging, verification, encryption, two-way chat, and recognizable sender IDs, all of which contribute to a more dynamic and secure business messaging landscape," RCS Pioneer and Dotgo CEO Inderpal Mumick Singh told Lifewire via email.

RCS changes all that, so now the green bubbles are less useful as indicators of what you can expect from a message conversation, except for encryption. RCS can support encryption, but if it's not on by default, it will probably never get used.

End-to-End

Encryption needs to be on by default for anyone to actually use it. For plentiful evidence of this, look at email. It's possible to encrypt your email, but how many encrypted emails have you ever sent or received? Probably none. And if you're a nerd who fancies encrypting their email conversations, good luck, because you're going to have to convince every single person you communicate with to set it up on their end, too; otherwise, it won't work.

Compare that to iMessage, WhatsApp, or Signal, which are end-to-end encrypted by default. All your messages are protected and unreadable by anybody but the recipient or anyone who has access to their phone. That not only means that bad actors cannot grab the messages in transit. It also means that the providers of those services cannot give up your communications to third parties like governments or enforcement agencies, nor use the messages' contents for training their algorithms or marketing to you (if you include your messages in iCloud backup, though, they are accessible to Apple).

Now, we get along just fine with email, even though none of it is remotely protected by encryption. But that doesn't mean a modern replacement for SMS should not be encrypted. Google's Messages app does now encrypt RCS messages by default, as of summer 2023, which is great news, so hopefully, Apple will manage to interoperate with this when it integrates RCS sometime this year.

In the end, RCS support is an overall win for iPhone users. Green bubble conversations are annoying because they are limited compared to the iMessage conversations we have in the same app. RCS reduces these annoyances while still letting teens taunt each other over meaningless differences.