Apple introducing support for the RCS messaging standard in iOS 18 finally made cross-platform texting between iPhone and Android users an experience befitting of the smartphone age.
It enabled delivery and read reports, high resolution images and videos, a little encryption, and support for reactions in those group chats where one Android user or one iPhone user dragged the experience down.
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However, another feature Apple introduced within iOS 18 was the ability to use any emoji for those Tapback reactions rather than just the usual love, like, dislike, haha, exclamation, or question mark.
In what’s become somewhat of a meme, when Android users attempted to react with an emoji to an Android user, it would appear in a separate line with both the emoji itself and a description of the emoji.
That’s no longer the case according to multiple reports, including one from The Verge, that points out that messages between phones running iOS 18.1 and various phones are now playing nice when it comes to emoji tapbacks.
However, no-one is quite sure who to thank for this development and which platform had to make an adjustment to ensure everything was working as intended.
The support for emoji reactions is, as the report points out, available in RCS version 2.7 which wasn’t thought to be supported by Apple yet. Indeed, message editing between iPhone and Android users is a feature associated with that version and that isn’t available between iPhone and Android users yet.
However, in this instance, we’re just happy to report the emoji react experience is working as it should be and your cross platform group chats are now a little more harmonious.
Come together in perfect harmony…
Apple’s adoption of RCS messaging in iOS 18 was a long time coming. Google campaigned for it solidly, Apple resisted knowing that iMessage was loved by its user base. In the end it came down to a compromise: Apple kept iMessage for Apple-to-Apple communications and added RCS for iPhone-to-Android texting. This ended a litany of annoyances on both sides and also improved security. This wasn’t always going to be the smoothest experience, but I’ve been quite surprised by how quickly any little kinks have been ironed out. Long live cross-platform texting harmony.
