The biggest update coming to Apple's iMessage and Messages app in iOS 18 isn't AI Emoji, Genmoji, or the ability to send texts via satellite. It's finally the ability to send messages at a later date and time, and support for RCS, the next-generation messaging standard that replaces SMS, which makes texting with Android users a lot easier.
Though they got lost amid a flurry of AI announcements and other user interface tweaks at WWDC 2024, these messaging features will have a major impact on how people communicate on a daily basis.
For years, consumer demand for scheduled messages has led developers to develop complex and cumbersome workarounds, including apps that remind you to send a text with a push notification and solutions that only work on jailbroken iPhones. Newer iOS versions offer the ability to schedule messages to send later as a built-in feature.
The feature was only briefly mentioned at WWDC, announced in the same sentence in Apple's press release as the Tapbacks upgrade, which expands to include support for all emojis and stickers in iOS 18. Clearly, Apple doesn't think “Send Later” is a feature worth spending time on. But for those who run a business on their iPhone, or who only need to send text messages when they're lying in bed at 3am, the new Schedule feature will be a very welcome addition. Aside from simply making life easier when you want to text someone across time zones without being disturbed, Apple's screenshots suggest that you can also use the feature to make sure you don't forget to send a birthday greeting.
But more importantly, the Messages app supports RCS, an alternative messaging standard to SMS that addresses many of the frustrations of Android users who send text messages in green speech bubbles.
Image credit: Apple
Google has long been urging and campaigning for Apple to adopt this standard, which would improve the communication experience between Android and iOS users. The Wall Street Journal ran an article about the fight over the green bubble and how the blue bubble is a must-have for American teens. EU regulators ultimately decided that iMessage was not popular enough to force interoperability with other messaging services, but this additional scrutiny likely influenced Apple's decision, as did the interest of the U.S. Congress in Apple's suspension of Beeper, a third-party app that offered iMessage to Android users.
Apple's years of refusal to support RCS meant that texting with Android users meant no typing indicators or read receipts, dropped group chats, blurry photos and videos, and messages were never end-to-end encrypted like iMessages.
Unfortunately for Android users, messages sent via RCS aren't free from the curse of the green bubble on Apple devices, according to a screenshot on Apple's website, which shows the feature in action: Instead, the text box will say in a light grey font that the text you're texting with someone supports both “text messaging + RCS,” but the text itself will remain green.
But it does seem to address some of the issues that have made the Messages app a clunky experience for Apple customers, with Apple saying it will support the standard later this year. Of course, the news was only mentioned briefly in Apple's press release, which said that RCS will enable “richer media and more reliable group messaging compared to SMS or MMS.”
Previous reports have said that Apple will be working with the GSMA to add support for end-to-end encryption to the RCS universal profile, but that it won't support E2EE out of the box, which is likely why there was no mention of encrypted messaging in Apple's RCS announcement.