Google pinpoints Apple’s adoption of RCS for “fall of 2024”

29 March 2024

Last November, hell froze over and Apple finally caved and agreed to support RCS on iPhones, after many, many years in which Google and others have been asking it to. RCS brings iMessage-like features to messages sent in between any devices that support it, regardless of who makes them.

At that time, Apple only said that RCS would arrive on iPhones “later next year”, so “later in 2024”, that is. Today Google has pinpointed a more specific launch time frame: “fall of 2024”. That sounds a lot like a very strong hint at RCS making its debut in iOS 18, which will be announced on June 10 but will only be released alongside the iPhone 16 family this fall.

Of course Google hasn’t said all of that, but it’s a pretty easy conclusion to jump to, especially given how a rumor from January basically said the same thing. So now we have a kind of confirmation, even if not from Apple itself – though this is probably the best we’re going to get.

The image you can see above is a screenshot from Google’s new dedicated site introducing people to its Messages app, which supports RCS of course. We can’t see the section in the screenshot at the moment, and we’re not sure why – maybe because we’re visiting from a Windows machine and not a Mac, or maybe because Google pulled it. Either way, it doesn’t matter since the enterprising folks over at 9to5Mac caught it in time, and thus we brought it to you courtesy of them.

Final note – there’s nothing preventing Apple from continuing to separate the bubble colors in its messaging app, with blue for iMessage (hence, iPhones) and green for RCS. So we would caution you against getting your hopes up that this situation will change with the introduction of RCS on iPhones.