It’s been a few months since an Apple executive said in an interview, which had plans to bring CSR to iOS in 2024. Since then, however, there have been no further reports in this regard, so we are left waiting for any development in this regard, since it represents a great improvement in terms of communication possibilities through the iPhone, despite the fact that Apple has resisted it until that moment.

In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, RCS is a proposal by Google and operators to replace the already more than veteran short message format (SMS). It was already defined in 2016 and in 2019 Google began to prioritize it over SMS. The problem is that the entire industry has not bought into this necessary development. Apple has decided that iOS will stick with SMS/MMS and its own iMessage service as native (i.e. included by default in the operating system) instant messaging systems.

Google has since been pushing Apple to bring RCS to iOS, and even launched a campaign for this purpose in the summer of 2022, but it was of little use, because only a month later, when a journalist asked Tim Cook about this matter, the CEO of Apple gave an answer that was somewhat First, in response to criticism that he bought his mother an iPhone. An answer that may seem laughable at first glance, but to me personally, in the face of such a logical request, it seems like a ridiculous solution.

Image of the section, now removed from the site, taken from its version at the Internet Archive.

Be that as it may, they seem to have finally decided that this position is not sustainable in the long term and now Google has confirmed that RCS will arrive on iOS this fall (in the northern hemisphere). Of course, the confirmation had to come before Cupertino’s communication plans, because said confirmation was removed from where we could find it, which is the official page dedicated to Google Messages, which was published at the end of March.

So if we compare its currently published version with the version we find in the Internet Archive, We can see that the “archived” version shows a “Hello High Definition, Goodbye Blur” sectionwhich is not in the current one, and if we click on the “Show more features” button, several elements will appear, among which we will find the one you can see in the screenshot above, called “Better messaging for everyone“, label “Coming soon to iOS» and which contains the text «Apple has announced that it will roll out RCS in the fall of 2024. Once it does, it will mean a better messaging experience for everyone.«.

In fact, what strikes me the most is that they put it in a section dedicated to the quality with which messages can be sent and received using RCS, which makes me wonder if the removal of this section is because they’ve moved on, or if they thought it was better to reorganize the content the said website. But what already seems absolutely obvious is that RCS is coming to iPhones with iOS 18so it’s possible that Apple will confirm it at WWDC 2024.