With RCS messaging arriving on iPhones with iOS 18 earlier this year, texting Android phones has gotten significantly better. Unfortunately RCS messaging on iPhone is only available if your carrier actually supports it.
While only a handful of major carriers supported the standard at launch, the list has grown over the past few months.
So how do you know whether your carrier supports RCS on iPhones? Apple’s been keeping tabs on everything and has recently updated its support page noting which U.S. carriers and MVNOs that allow RCS on iOS 18. They include:
- AT&T
- C Spire
- Consumer Cellular
- Cricket
- First Net
- H2O Wireless
- Metro by T-Mobile
- PureTalk
- Red Pocket
- Spectrum
- T-Mobile
- Tracfone/Straight Talk
- US Cellular
- Verizon
- Visible
- Xfinity Mobile
As Android Authority points out, this list isn’t totally complete. Boost Mobile added RCS support with the release of iOS 18.2, but is absent from Apple’s support page. There are also a few carriers missing, including US Mobile and Google Fi — with the latter claiming only Apple could enable RCS for its customers.
The benefit of RCS is that messaging is done over the internet, rather than traditional cell signals, and that allows for a much smarter range of features. For starters image and video sharing doesn’t undergo the same obscene levels of compression, meaning the quality at the other end is significantly better. It also offers read receipts, typing indicators, reactions and all the other things you’d normally lack when you’re not using iMessage or some other third-party messaging service.
The one thing that isn’t included is end-to-end encryption. While Apple has promised encryption is coming, RCS messaging between iPhone and Android remains as insecure as SMS was — to the point where the FBI recommends not using it.
That's something you do need to keep in mind if you plan on messaging Android phones. Try one of the best encrypted messaging apps instead.
