iPhone has picked up support for Rich Communication Services (RCS) from more than a dozen wireless carriers in the United States, but the feature is still not universally supported.

For example, Mint Mobile and Ultra Mobile still don’t support RCS. Together, these two wireless operators have about three million subscribers in the United States. Curiously, both brands are owned by T-Mobile, one of Apple’s major launch partners for RCS. The following carriers currently support RCS on iPhone in the United States.

The information comes via a refreshed support page on Apple’s website, listing wireless network provider support and features for iPhone in the United States and Canada. Some but not all carriers overseas support RCS on iPhone. Apple has separate support pages listing RCS support by carriers in Europe, the Middle East and India, Asia-Pacific, and Africa.

All chat participants must have RCS support enabled on their device and supported by their carrier for the dream of messaging interoperability to come true. Apple introduced support for RCS messaging on iPhone, iPad, and Mac with the September release of iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia updates. At launch, only the major carriers, such as AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, supported the feature.

Apple supports the RCS Universal Profile standard as defined by the GSM Association. You must manually turn on RCS support in Settings > Apps > Messages. However, the switch doesn’t appear unless your carrier supports the feature. With it enabled, RCS messages are delivered as green bubbles, with blue bubbles reserved for iMessage.

RCS brings a better messaging experience between iPhone and Android vs. SMS or MMS. RCS chats have some features found in iMessage that are unsupported by SMS or MMS.

For example, there are read receipts and typing indicators. More importantly, RCS messages support high-resolution media attachments. Without RCS, sending an image from an iPhone to an Android owner causes the Messages app to fall back to MMS, which results in poor image quality and low resolution. That can be especially problematic when iPhone owners share an attachment with their Android counterparts in a group chat.

RCS also supports message reactions, meaning Android emoji reactions are displayed as proper reactions to iPhone owners and vice versa. However, the RCS standard doesn’t support end-to-end encryption like iMessage does. However, Google Messages supports end-to-end encryption over RCS via the company’s proprietary extension, but only if all chat participants use RCS via Google Messages.

Source: 9to5Mac