Apple made chats better with green bubble friends. They still stink.
Starting Monday with the release of iOS 18, Apple is overhauling the iPhone messaging app to make your chats better in mixed company — when at least one Android phone user is involved.
We’ve been testing the changes, and found major improvements to sharing photos and video and managing chats. But the green bubbles remain. And in our experiments, chats with Android friends still had security and other compromises that Apple could have avoided.
In some important ways, Apple’s messaging app remains stuck in the flip-phone era, which undermines everyone’s message security and makes your group chats trash (and not in the fun way).
Apple largely blames limitations in the technology that meshes iPhone and Android messaging apps. That’s an incomplete explanation. Apple’s own choices also make chats with Android devices worse.
What is changing with iPhone chats
Apple’s iMessage is pretty great, but you’re only fully using it when everyone you chat with is using Apple devices, too.
When your iPhone chats involve one or more people with Android phones, you’re not actually using Apple’s technology. Instead, everyone’s messages are funneled over flip-phone era SMS technology in the dreaded green bubbles that you get every time you message someone with a non-Apple device.
What changed with iOS 18 is Apple stitched its Messages app with a global standard update to SMS known as RCS.
While now you see “text message” in your chat box when you’re messaging with Android friends, with iOS 18 you’ll all see “RCS” most of the time. That shows everyone in your chat has some (but not all) capabilities of purely internet-based chat apps like WhatsApp.
What’s better
In our tests with an iPhone 15 Pro and a Pixel 6 Android phone, RCS does a much better job exchanging messages that include photos, GIFs and videos with Android friends.
That’s a huge help for people sharing memories from birthday parties and outings. We did discover a problem where an iPhone-generated “sticker” image kept disappearing from the Android chat app after a few seconds. Apple says it’s aware of this issue and working with Google to fix it.
These upgraded chats also give you some nice-to-have features including delivery and read receipts. Similar to individual chats with an iPhone person, you and an Android friend will now see three dots when the other person is typing.
In group chats, you can add (and remove) people with different kinds of phones to chains. And you can assign the groups fun names.
You can also send messages to anyone when you’re in places where you might have WiFi but no cell signal, like trains. (It doesn’t work yet on in-flight WiFi. Apple says it and Google are working on it.)
What’s still not so good
We’ll start with smaller gripes.
Apple is joining other email and chat apps in letting you schedule messages ahead of time, like if you’re a night owl and want texts to arrive when your friends are awake. You’ll only see that option, though, if you’re scheduling messages to people with Apple devices.
Apple says that’s because of RCS’s limits. The Google Messages app for Android phones is based on RCS, too, and it does let you schedule messages to anyone, no matter the device, in most cases. Your message might not go out if your phone is turned off and disconnected from internet service. That’s a fair trade for a handy scheduling feature.
When Geoff was on public transit with shaky reception, he had trouble sending and receiving some messages and they didn’t go out immediately when he was back on solid cell service again.
Apple says this type of message failure can happen on spotty service even solely among iPhone users. You can tap on the message to resend it when cell service or WiFi is available.
The biggest problem is that Apple didn’t fix the security and privacy compromises anytime your chats involve at least one Android user.
Apple’s iMessage technology scrambles chat contents so no one but you and the recipients can see them — not hackers, Apple or law enforcement. This end-to-end encryption only applies, however, if everyone you chat with is also using an Apple device.
Even in the upgraded Messages app, if one Android device is in the chat then no one’s messages are encrypted in this way. They’re less secure and private.
Apple says end-to-end encryption isn’t standard in the global version of RCS technology. That’s true, but Apple could have made different choices.
Udbhav Tiwari, who works on messaging technology and is the director of global product policy for web browser company Mozilla, said Apple could have used a security add-on to the standard RCS — as Google does in its Android messages app. That would have made iPhone chats encrypted no matter what devices your friends and family use.
Apple says it’s working with Google and others to build a more capable and secure global standard of RCS. Apple also says iMessage remains the best option for Apple device owners.
On that point, Apple could make a version of its messaging app for Android devices. That would give you and your contacts an option for equally functional and secure chats no matter the device. Or Apple could have decided there’s no way to make its chat app secure and fully functional at all times — and told its customers to instead use end-to-end encrypted chat apps like Meta’s WhatsApp or Signal.
You should expect Apple to give you a messaging app that’s at least as functional and as safe as WhatsApp or Signal, which is run by a nonprofit. Apple doesn’t clear that bar.