Editing messages in chat apps has been a thing for many years now, but we finally get to see some of the biggest messaging clients adopting it. Instagram recently rolled out an editing function in its chats along with Facebook's Messenger and WhatsApp. And now, Google is making it possible for RCS messages as well. How editing works The new feature will allow you to edit a message you've sent in the last 15 minutes, and the recipient will be able to see the original by tapping and holding on to the message itself. The tricky part is that all participants in the conversation should...

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...

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman covered some new rumors surrounding the upcoming iOS 18 release in his latest newsletter. According to Gurman’s sources, iOS 18 is seen as one of the biggest software updates in the history of iOS. One of the expected big new updates is support for Rich Communication Services (RCS) in the native Messages app. Apple already announced it will bring RCS support to iPhones in 2024 which open up cross-platform features between iOS and Android phones. These include higher res media sharing, improved group chats, read receipts, typing indicators, location sharing and...

RCS is officially big. 1 billion monthly active users big, in fact. Google announced the milestone today, and to celebrate it's giving the Messages app 7 new features. These will apparently "help your personality shine through". They won't make RCS bubbles blue on iOS, however. RCS, in case you've been living under a rock, is a new standard that's supposed to replace the antiquated SMS and MMS, Google says, although those are still used as backup, so not that much "replace" as "enhance". Anyway, the point is it's like iMessage but for Android phones. Google has been pushing it a lot...

Google has quietly added support for Android's new Ultra HDR Image Format in Google Messages when sending messages over RCS. Images in this format when sent over RCS will maintain their meta data and will display correctly on the receiving device. This was first noticed by TheSpAndroid through the inclusion of the flag bugle.support_ultra_hdr inside the application APK. The authors of the blog post confirmed through crowdsourced testing that the feature indeed works on Google Pixel 8 devices when sending images over RCS. The Ultra HDR Image Format is a recent inclusion in...

The color of chat bubbles is extremely important to people in the US for some reason. Blue is good, green is poor - or something like that, right? We don't know, we're from Europe, and over here people have WhatsApp and Telegram and Facebook Messenger. But in the US, bubbles matter. And they will continue to, unfortunately, even with today's groundbreaking announcement from Apple. The company finally caved and revealed that it plans to adopt RCS in iOS from next year. RCS, as you may know, is the iMessage-like standard that works on top of SMS. But, importantly, it's not iMessage....

Time and time again, someone urges Apple to embrace RCS and implement it into iMessage so that the green and blue bubble divide ends. The latest effort comes in the form of a 30-second clip by Samsung. It's a play on an Android phone chatting with an iPhone, discussing Apple's stubbornness to support RCS in iMessage. Google developed RCS to be a universal standard to replace SMS (and remove the need for a carrier to be involved). Since then Android as a whole has been trying to get Apple to allow RCS into iMessage. But of course that would mean Apple giving up on a big roadblock to...

Apple has been avoiding the adoption of RCS messages ever since Google introduced the standard, but now iPhone users finally can use the service through a third-party app Beeper. The application aims to bundle all messaging systems under one roof, and its latest update added Google Messages to the iPhone. RCS is short for Rich Communication Services and brings features such as encryption, read and typing indications, which is Google's own solution for messages. Apple users have to enable the feat by downloading the latest version of Beeper Desktop and then heading to the settings...