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.”
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.
