RCS Messaging Working for Some in iOS 18 Beta 2

iOS 18 beta 2 RCS switch
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It’s been widely known for some time that Apple plans to bring RCS messaging support to the iPhone this year. The company announced its plans last fall, long before we’d heard anything else about iOS 18. However, it’s been less clear about when and how it will arrive.

Apple’s November RCS announcement merely said it would be coming “later next year.” While it was a safe bet that it would be part of iOS 18, it wasn’t entirely clear whether that would be iOS 18.0 in September or a later point release.

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The company also conspicuously downplayed RCS messages during its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) presentation, relegating it to mostly a footnote next to other features that it considered more important, such as text effects and satellite messaging. Hence, there was no word on when we’d see RCS, just that it was still on the roadmap. You probably would have missed that if you blinked.

It wasn’t encouraging when the first developer beta arrived with no sign of RCS support. While it was hidden inside the code — some inventive hackers found a way to turn it on — there were no user-facing components. Since code for new features often shows up long before those features are released, that didn’t answer the question of when Apple plans to turn the key on RCS support.

However, promised features are also often missing in early betas, so the absence of RCS didn’t say much either. The good news is that the second iOS 18 beta, released earlier this week, appears to have enabled RCS for at least some folks, and while its reliability is still spotty, they’ve confirmed it works.

For those with access to RCS, iOS 18 beta 2 now includes a toggle under Messages in the Settings app, located above the switch for MMS Messaging that’s been there for years — provided your carrier has enabled support for it.

What is RCS?

RCS stands for Rich Communication Services, a technology that’s the successor to traditional SMS Messages and has been considered the holy grail of cross-platform messaging for the past few years.

It’s a standard that modern Android users should be familiar with since Google embraced it as its core messaging protocol a few years ago. However, RCS is an open standard that goes back to the days when iMessage was only a gleam in Apple’s eye. It was proposed to the GSM Association in 2007 but failed to go anywhere because there were too many cooks in the kitchen.

In 2015, Google decided to begin championing RCS messaging. After a few delays, while carriers tried to snap up their own piece of the pie, Google’s implementation rose above the rest to become what some have called an “iMessage killer” since it could allow many of the best features of iMessage — read receipts, high-resolution photos and video, typing indicators, and more — to work when messaging folks outside of the iPhone ecosystem.

This probably explains why Apple stubbornly held out on RCS for years, dismissing it as irrelevant and insisting that tie isn’t something Apple customers were asking for.

However, the company changed its tune last fall when it abruptly announced that RCS would indeed arrive for iPhone users this year. Naturally, Apple put the most positive spin on the news possible, but it did so relatively quietly; there was no big press release, just a media statement sent to a few high-profile outlets like Bloomberg and 9to5Mac.

Apple would never admit this outright, but the consensus is that it’s adopting RCS somewhat grudgingly, hoping to stem the mounting tide of anticompetitive allegations. That probably explains why it wasn’t exactly shouting about RCS support from the rooftops at WWDC.

The State of RCS in iOS 18

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With RCS support now appearing on some carriers in the second iOS 18 developer beta, we’ll likely see it go live with the iOS 18.0 release this fall. Still, you may be disappointed if you were hoping to test it during the beta cycle.

Like SMS and MMS, RCS remains a carrier-based messaging service. That means your carrier has to support it. Most carriers do, but if yours isn’t one of them, you’ll be out of luck.

However, more significantly, carriers also have to add the necessary information in their carrier profiles so your iPhone knows which servers to use for RCS messaging. Until that’s there, the RCS switch won’t even appear in the Settings app.

The same thing occurred when Apple added MMS support to the iPhone 3G in “iOS” 2.0 sixteen years ago. Until the carriers updated their profiles, there was no MMS switch and no ability to send MMS messages. In those days, it was possible to modify the carrier profiles to add that information yourself, but that’s no longer an option since the bundles are all digitally signed now to prevent such tampering.

So far, the big three US carriers appear to have provided Apple with new carrier bundles in the second iOS 18 beta, but we haven’t seen evidence of that happening for carriers in other countries like Canada and the UK. Those will almost certainly arrive by the fall, but until they do, RCS won’t be available for testing, even in the public betas. There’s not much that Apple can do about this since it’s up to the carriers to provide the iPhone maker with the information specific to their networks.



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