The arrival of RCS on iPhone could well be more limited than expected, with certain functions absent.
After a first announcement last November, Apple finally confirmed again the arrival of the RCS messaging protocol in Apple Messages during the WWDC conference which was held last week in Cupertino. If support for this messaging protocol will not arrive before the public beta of iOS 18 this summer, a user of the social network X (formerly Twitter) indicates having had access to it.
As reported by the site Phone Arena, developer Dhinak G posted several observations about the RCS features supported by Apple Messages. Overall, the management of RCS by Apple messaging is rather complete, with the integration of many features managed by the protocol and by iMessage.
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This is particularly the case for emoji reactions to a message which can be made from an Android smartphone and will be indicated correctly in a conversation on iPhone. The same goes for sending multi-megabyte files, like MP3s or PDFs, from Apple Messages to an Android smartphone using Google Messages. Group conversations also seem to be supported, with the possibility of chatting with several people without this creating several discussions on one of the devices as could have been the case until now, by SMS or MMS.
Still limited integration
However, as Dhinak G indicates, the integration of RCS on iPhone still has some limits. This is particularly the case for end-to-end encryption, indeed offered on Google Messages, but absent from Apple Messages. The same goes for replies to a particular message, which appear to display like a regular message on Apple Messages. Finally, read receipts do not yet seem to be supported correctly on Apple’s messaging application in group conversations.
Apple warned last November: if the manufacturer finally decides to deploy the RCS protocol on its iPhones, it nevertheless intends to continue to distinguish blue bubbles (using iMessage) from green bubbles (using RCS). For Apple, its proprietary protocol, iMessage, is more secure than RCS which, although it can integrate an end-to-end encryption system, is not managed natively, but only by the applications themselves.
It is also possible that Apple will continue to extend the functions integrated into RCS on iPhone between now and the release of iOS 18 in final version. As a reminder, the update should only be deployed on iPhones from this fall in final version.
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