The most important updates coming to Apple’s iMessage and its Messages app in iOS 18 aren’t its AI emoji, Genmoji, and even the flexibility to ship texts through satellite tv for pc. It’s the flexibility to lastly, lastly schedule messages to ship at a later date and time, in addition to help for RCS, the next-gen messaging normal and alternative for SMS that can make texting with Android of us a lot much less painful.
Although buried amid a slate of AI bulletins and different person interface tweaks at WWDC 2024, these messaging options could have a major influence on how folks talk every single day.
For years, shopper demand for scheduling messages has led builders to create difficult and cumbersome workarounds, like apps that remind you through push notifications to ship a textual content, for instance, or options that solely labored on jailbroken iPhones. The brand new iOS will provide the flexibility to schedule your messages to be despatched later as built-in performance.
The characteristic solely acquired a quick point out at WWDC. In Apple’s press launch, it was introduced in the identical sentence because the Tapbacks improve, which has expanded to incorporate help for any emoji or sticker in iOS 18. Clearly, Apple doesn’t suppose “Ship Later” is a characteristic price spending a lot time on. However for anybody who runs a enterprise from their iPhone — or individuals who solely keep in mind the necessary issues they should textual content whereas laying in mattress at 3 a.m. — the brand new scheduling characteristic will likely be a much-welcomed addition. Past merely making life simpler, like once you need to textual content somebody throughout time zones with out disturbing them, Apple’s screenshot suggests you would additionally use the characteristic to make sure you don’t miss sending somebody a birthday greeting.
Of even larger significance, nonetheless, is the Messages app’s help for RCS, the messaging normal and alternative for SMS that can deal with lots of the grievances of texting these Android customers with a inexperienced bubble.
For a very long time, Google has urged and campaigned for Apple to undertake the usual, which might enhance the communication expertise between Android and iOS customers. The Wall Road Journal ran a report on the combat over the inexperienced bubbles and the way blue bubbles are a must have for U.S. teenagers. Whereas EU regulators in the end determined that iMessage was not standard sufficient to be compelled to open up and change into interoperable with different messaging companies, the extra scrutiny doubtless influenced Apple’s choice right here — as did U.S. lawmakers’ curiosity in Apple’s shutdown of Beeper, a third-party app that introduced iMessage to Android customers.
Due to Apple’s longtime refusal so as to add help for RCS, texting with Android customers meant no typing indicators or learn receipts, damaged group chats and blurry images and movies. It additionally meant that messages wouldn’t be end-to-end encrypted as they have been on iMessage.
Sadly for Android customers, Messages despatched through RCS received’t be relieved of the inexperienced bubble curse on Apple gadgets in response to screenshots on its web site, which present the characteristic in motion. As a substitute, the textual content field signifies in a light-weight grey font that your texts with somebody help each “Textual content message + RCS,” whereas the texts themselves are nonetheless inexperienced.
Nonetheless, points that make the Messages app a damaged expertise for Apple’s clients will likely be addressed, it appears, as Apple says it’ll help the usual later this yr. The information, after all, solely acquired a quick point out in Apple’s press launch, the place it famous that RCS would permit for “richer media and extra dependable group messaging in comparison with SMS and MMS.”
Earlier reviews indicated Apple intends to work with the GSMA so as to add help for end-to-end encryption within the Common Profile for RCS, however received’t help E2EE out of the gate. That’s doubtless why there was no point out of encrypted messaging in Apple’s announcement of RCS.