Comment by enginous
12 hours ago
I'm pretty unclear about how the experience they showcase in the video would work on iOS. Maybe Android has APIs for this, but on iOS it looks like RCS just supports green-bubble messages, links and files/multimedia. But in the demo they show multi-choice cards, carousels, cards with buttons, and reply auto-suggestions.
Also, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but it also looks like this needs to be agent-initiated, ie. you can't add a "Text us" button that will take you to this experience. (But you could capture a phone number, and text them _iff_ they have RCS available and enabled.)
Overall, seems questionable whether this is worth integrating if the experience is so fractured across platforms and many people might not even have RCS. The concept of a platform for rich messaging across platforms sounds good though.
I have never seen any of this in real life.
However, all of this is in the RCS spec. If Apple implements the RCS spec beyond the bare basics, all of this should Just Work.
RCS is much more than just "SMS but via weird HTTP" and things like chatbots and interactive components were one of the selling points towards ISPs to bother supporting it.
Unfortunately, nobody seems to bother dealing with the standard. Now Google is at it again, selling "RCS for business" when the RCS standard itself is supposed to be used in a federated, carrier-to-carrier fashion just like SMS.
I have, on my iPhone, RCS messages from businesses that don’t show up as a green bubble, have (somewhat) interactive components, and exhibit non-standard (also non-intuitive) behavior I didn’t expect of either an RCS or an iMessage.
So I guess they did implement all that.
(Not that they are particularly nicely implemented - the layout and padding is all wrong, alignment is off, and it looks distinctly non-native… but that’s par for the course on iOS 26.)
I did just manage to dig up a source that says these things are somewhat implemented in iOS 18 with illustrative screenshots rather than actuals, and it seems to be implemented but currently janky:
- On iOS, rich cards have a message length limit of 144 characters. (Implies this is not a limitation on Android.)
- On iOS, multi-CTA might fold some of the options away. So you might give 4 options and it renders 2 options and makes you use a drop-down for the others.
- On iOS, carousels display as cards, which might not be as obvious to interact with.
https://www.infobip.com/blog/apple-rcs
Potentially improved in iOS 26. It's a little hard to work out the state of this, and of course not trivial to test without joining some kind of partner ecosystem.
This page is specifically talking about A2P (Application to Person) RCS with business messaging rather than Person to Person (P2P). The rich message types shown in the demo are only available for A2P / businesses.
Not a ton of businesses were interested in using RCS until Apple said they would support it. Businesses are now starting to adopt RCS, but for a variety of reasons it'll take a while for it to replace SMS / MMS.
I posted some more info above. Also, it is possible to create a "text us" button, but support (especially on iOS) is flakey. Carriers are not enabling RCS on the numbers businesses use for SMS / MMS in order to help eliminate spam.
> it also looks like this needs to be agent-initiated, ie. you can't add a "Text us" button that will take you to this experience.
This is correct as of when I researched RCS capabilities. Not sure if it's changed at all but it was a deal breaker for me.
What I think this is: as a reward to themselves for not stopping the tidal wave of fraud and phishing distributed via sms, they're going to charge businesses to message you in verifiable manner. So when your bank, ups/fedex for package delivery, walgreens/cvs for prescriptions, etc want to contact you google is going to charge.
As a reward for helping make sms untrustworthy, they're going to tax trustworthy communications.