RCS and scheduled texts are finally making their way to Apple’s iMessage. These new features are available in the public beta of iOS 18. The final update is expected to be released later this year.

Customers from Apple requested these features for years and the tech company finally announced its arrival at the WWDC 2024. However, the announcement did not seem to get much traction as the AI highlights of the event overshadowed it.

RCS and Scheduled Texts

Rich Communication Services (RCS) is a communication protocol which is considered the fill-in for SMS. Support for RCS has been released in the latest public beta amid pressure from Google to submit to the messaging standard. With the introduction of RCS in Apple's iMessage, communication between Android and Apple will be heavily improved.

This may finally solve the issue of a lack of a typing indicator, poor image and video quality, and no read receipts. However, the problem of the Android green text bubbles may persist even with support for RCS.

Another feature that has been waited on by many is the Send Later feature which as the name suggests, sends messages later.

It schedules messages to be sent at a specific time and this feature could be useful for people conducting business through their phones. Users can even schedule messages to send happy birthday texts.

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