Michael Tsai - Blog - RCS in iOS 18
mjtsai.com/blog/2024/12/06/rcs-in-ios-18
What Jamie wrote
Some grounding: SMS is basic texting that was invented decades ago and never meant for what we do with it. MMS was a failed attempt to bring multimedia to that. RCS is a modern, open standard meant for interoperability. iMessage is Apple's proprietary messaging service that is fully encrypted.
RCS is now in iOS 18 and for some of the interactions I have with non-Apple devices it is amazing. It brings a lot of parity to group messages, handles images well, allows for emoji responses. Great stuff. However, support in Android devices is frustratingly variable. Not all RCS is the same. I've been surprised at how many Android folks I know don't even have this on.
This writeup is a good overview of various RCS aspects in iOS 18 and a good reference for those that do a lot of cross-platform messaging. It drives me crazy that carriers are also a variable in this.