iOS 18 will be revealed next week and the feature I’m looking forward to most is RCS for iPhone. Spare a minute and let me explain why.
Apple is Set to Announce RCS for iPhone Next Week, Finally Bridging a Gap Between Android and iOS Messaging
Usually, people disagree with me when I tell them an iPhone gives me more choice. I have access to every single smart home architecture on my platform and one extra which Android users don’t have – HomeKit. But that’s not all, I get access to every single voice assistant out there in addition to Siri. I can access and use every single smart speaker out there and one which Android users can’t, and that’s the HomePod.
The one big thing that sets iOS and Android apart in terms of software is iMessage and RCS.
The latter too, is coming to iPhone, allowing millions of users around the world to dive into rich conversations over a data network (cellular or Wi-Fi) with people even if they don’t have an iPhone. Having said that, RCS on iPhone will give users a reason less to buy an Android phone. But, the tables would have turned massively if iMessage was coming to Android, and I don’t see that happening any time soon.
Right now, messaging between platforms is kind of a mess and you have to shuttle between two apps to keep cross-platform conversations going. With RCS coming to iPhone, you can expect a bit of coherence. In fact, I’ll go as far as saying Android users don’t have to worry about iMessage as a single best reason to move over to iPhone. Hence a feature coming to iPhone also gives Android users one less reason to switch over to iPhone, too.
Artificial intelligence, or Apple Intelligence, is said to be a huge part of the announcements coming next week. However, it doesn’t have me excited that much given my experience with Meta AI, Gemini and even ChatGPT. The hallucinated answers along with made-up facts at times doesn’t spark too much confidence. Maybe I’m wrong and Apple has some fact-checker in place (which I highly doubt) to make sure things are better inside the Apple Intelligence platform than anywhere else.
For me, messaging remains a key tool in communication and I’m glad RCS is going to solve a massive problem. It only takes one massive WhatsApp outage and your friends and family are knocked off grid. With RCS in place, you know for sure you’ll get to them easily even if one platform fails.
It just remains to be seen whether RCS bubbles will be blue or green.
