Google says that Apple RCS support will come in the fall

RCS support will be added to the iPhone sometime in 2024

Apple’s November 2023 announcement that it would add RCS messaging support to the iPhone, committed to it being done “later next year.” The addition, possibly forced on the company by China, is presumably taking months because Apple is ignoring Google’s RCS in favor of working on a new version with a standards body.

“Apple has announced it will be adopting RCS in the fall of 2024,” said Google’s page. “Once that happens, it will mean a better messaging experience for everyone.”

Strictly speaking, Fall 2024 starts on September 22, which is likely to be after the launch of the iPhone 16 Pro, and therefore also the public launch of iOS 18. It’s not clear if it will be in the early betas of iOS 18 expected at WWDC 2024.

Note, too, that Google’s page is a series of short segments that pop out to optionally offer more detail. It’s sufficiently busy and with so many such elements, that this quote can’t be found with a search on the page.

Consequently, it’s possible that the announcement is simply buried somewhere on the page. Or it could be that the announcement has since been removed, and Google’s search is showing up only cached earlier versions.

Google’s new page does quite clearly include an explanation that “RCS stands for ‘Rich Communication Services’ and is the modern messaging technology standard.” Oddly, it doesn’t mention RCS’s problems, or how Google has previously failed to entirely adopt this itself.