Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge
Green bubbles, rejoice: your iPhone-using friends are finally going to have a much better time texting you. As part of iOS 18, which was released for everyone on Monday, Apple added support for RCS, the Rich Communication Services protocol for messaging. This means that chats between iPhone and Android users will finally have a bunch of sorely needed features that should have been in place a long time ago.
A big reason I’ve stayed on iOS (and haven’t even considered switching to Android) is because iMessage conversations work especially well for my family group chats, and I don’t want to nerf those chats. This new RCS support is a great step toward making iPhone-to-Android texts work a lot better (though there are still enough drawbacks…
