Does iOS 18 and iPhone 16 support RCS Messaging in Australia? No – not yet.

Millions of people are updating their Apple iPhones to the newest Operating System iOS 18 this week and there’ll be plenty of people picking up a brand new iPhone 16 from this Friday. For a small portion of those users, there’s a simple question – does iOS 18 support RCS messaging?

We’ve spoken to the telcos, and I’m afraid the answer is no. Well, not yet to be more precise.

RCS stands for Rich Communications Services and comes off the back of SMS and MMS which were the original text messaging then picture messaging formats.

Basically, if we’re honest, it was created after the success of Apple’s iMessage – features like high quality images being sent, notifications that a message was seen, indication that someone is typing a reply, Android didn’t have this.

So RCS was created, and it’s great.

Sadly it’s not ubiquitous, you can still get a new Android phone and get a confusing set of colours from one person to the next when messaging not knowing if they are getting the high quality images or not.

But, for Android users, messaging a mate on iPhone means your image is compressed, and the same happens from iPhone to Android. This is because that picture is being sent by the very old school MMS format.

Apple announced at their Worldwide Developers Conference in June that RCS was coming to iOS 18 and now that it’s here, we’re all left asking – where is it!

EFTM reached out to each of the Aussie mobile networks and the answers were clear, not yet. And it requires some work. It’s not just a simple switch they flick.

There’s a process for implementing it, after which a new “carrier bundle” is developed and that gets sent to iPhones running iOS18 on their network, and boom, the setting becomes available.

Optus told EFTM “At this time RCS will not be available on iPhones connected to the Optus mobile network with iOS 18 installed. Be sure to check back the Optus website for any future updates on RCS on iPhone at Optus.”

TPG Vodafone says “We are currently reviewing the implementation of RCS on iOS18 and are building it into our product roadmap. We’ll keep our customers updated as we firm up a launch date.”

And the big guy Telstra also “RCS messaging is not currently available for iPhones in Australia and will not be available at launch this Friday on the recently announced iPhone 16 series. We continue working with our device partners to enable technology that will improve the experience for customers on Telstra’s network. As support for new features such as RCS messaging are made available in Australia by our partners, Telstra will explore the work needed to enable them for our customers.”

So, we wait.

No doubt people will be up in arms, but relax, it will be ok.

And if it’s that big of an issue, use WhatsApp, it’s way better anyway:)