Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge
Apple will finally adopt RCS in iOS 18, effectively ending a yearslong fight for feature parity between iMessage and Android. But the announcement wasn’t a celebration — you could’ve blinked and missed it. Instead of showing how RCS will make things better, Apple softly announced support for the standard and focused on all the great features coming to iMessage users — not RCS ones.
Apple didn’t go over how RCS adoption will finally let iPhone and Android users send each other high-resolution pictures and videos. It didn’t even say how RCS will enable support for cross-platform read receipts and typing indicators. Apple only highlighted the flashy features coming to iMessage, including ways to bold and italicize text, improvements to…