As hundreds of millions of iPhone users update their devices to iOS 18, tinting their home screens and navigating their new Photos app, the reality is that this update is more about what’s missing than what has been released. No Apple Intelligence—at least not yet, and another gaping omission that has also been confirmed.
This bad news impacts RCS—the biggest non-AI update coming with iOS 18, that brings rich messaging features to stock iPhone-to-Android messaging for the first time, but which The Washington Post warns, leaves “chats with Android friends still [with] security and other compromises that Apple could have avoided.”
There’s still much excitement as the shiny new SMS v2 texting update goes live. “We’ve known it was coming for almost a year, but today’s the day we’ve been waiting for,” Android Police says. “The texting situation between the default messaging apps for Android and iPhone is getting a huge upgrade… Now that Apple has made iOS 18 official, iPhones can finally use the protocol meant to replace SMS and MMS.”
But those pesky green bubbles persist; this is no magic bullet. “The drama has been ongoing for so long,” Gizmodo says, “that we have to recognize the small things that add up to a better texting experience.” That includes typing ellipses, read receipts, sharing non-blurry images. But with “growing pains,” that often seem to depend on the generation of Android phones being messaged, network conditions, and the seamless cross-platform experience we have come to expect from other apps.
But the more serious issue is hidden from sight. “In some important ways,” The Post says, “Apple’s messaging app remains stuck in the flip-phone era, which undermines everyone’s message security.” While Gizmodo says “we have to acknowledge that iOS users will have a different experience texting their iPhone friends than those on Android. The version of RCS Apple is using is not encrypted, unlike iMessage.”
So, was this inevitable and unsolvable? No—not in any understandable way. “Apple largely blames limitations in the technology that meshes iPhone and Android messaging apps,” The Post says. “That’s an incomplete explanation. Apple’s own choices also make chats with Android devices worse.”
What this means—as I’ve explained before—is that Apple and Google could have collaborated on a secure API between their messengers to fully secure content, to better compete with Signal, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or texting within their own walled gardens. Or Apple could have delivered an Android iMessage app.
Instead this doesn’t really compete with the cross-platform security of those over-the-top messaging platforms. And that’s above and beyond some of the other clunky compromises that come from SMS V2 over and above a dedicated cross-platform app.
While RCS has been popularized by Google’s managed push across the entire Android ecosystem, it has done so with a proprietary client that adds a fully encrypted layer along with other updates. RCS itself doesn’t include full security, and it’s that limited protocol that Apple has adopted for its iOS 18 update. Apple has said that it will work with the mobile industry’s standard setters to push for an improved protocol. But that’s not coming anytime soon. And until then these compromises remain.
The net result is that Apple’s iMessage update does not give users in Europe or Asia or Africa—where the likes of WhatsApp, Viber, Telegram and others dominate—any reason to switch, and in the US, where WhatsApp is on a tear, this just underpins Meta’s relentless privacy campaign that has been running all year.
What makes this all the more interesting is Telegram, and the recent travails of its founder and frontman Pavel Durov. Telegram’s issue has always been the gap between its marketing and its reality. The messenger plays the security card but doesn’t fully encrypt its messages either, just like RCS. Telegram’s real play has always been its rogue refusal to collaborate with the authorities—until now, one assumes, and its secrecy—better facilitating anonymity for users.
Durov’s arrest has left many of Telegram’s near billion users pondering who will now get access to the messages sitting ion Telegram’s servers, protected by nothing but the platform’s own encryption (to which it holds the keys) and its voluntary policies.
There are other compromises with the new RCS linkage between iPhone and Android—unsurprising, given that the linkage relies on a cellular protocol versus more dedicated integration between the platforms. Had Google and Apple set out to deliver a less clunky, more secure messaging experience between Android and iPhone, none of these issues or compromises would now be hitting millions of users.
All told, fully encrypted, more seamless platforms—Signal and WhatsApp would be my picks—don’t have any of these issues, albeit bear in mind the metadata shared if you use WhatsApp. But I see no reason for anyone to change their daily messenger to iMessage or Google Messages. It’s simply not worth the compromises or the risks.
