Apple offers iOS 18 for download on iPhone and one of the new features is the support of RCS, namely the successor to SMS, for better communication with Android users. Unfortunately for the French, only SFR currently offers RCS on iPhone.
On iPhone, RCS is limited to SFR
RCS on iPhone with SFR has been available since beta 3 of iOS 18 which was released on July 9th. It was a good start, but Orange, SFR and Bouygues Telecom were missing. The following betas unfortunately did not change anything. And the situation remains the same today with the final version of the update.
This summer, Orange said it was doing what was necessary behind the scenes to offer RCS support on iPhone with iOS 18. But the incumbent operator had not added anything more. Today, the support account on X (ex-Twitter) does not really reassure:
Also this summer, Bouygues Telecom indicated: “Bouygues Telecom is actively working on activating this protocol, but does not have a date to communicate at the moment.”. As for Free Mobile, there was no comment.
Still SMS at Orange, Bouygues Telecom and Free Mobile
For its part, Tiino-X83 indicates today that several operator bundles have been updated to version 59.1, in time for the release of iOS 18. These bundles allow for improvements and new features. Unfortunately, none of the bundles concern Orange, Bouygues Telecom or Free Mobile.
So, if you have an iPhone running iOS 18 and are a customer of Orange, Bouygues Telecom or Free Mobile, you will stay with the good old SMS for now. If you are with SFR, you have access to RCS. This allows you to have acknowledgments of receipt, sending images and videos in good quality, better managed group conversations, the ability to converse from a Wi-Fi connection, reactions to messages with emojis or even audio messages. However, there is no support for encryption of conversations unlike iMessage.
