Does Apple support RCS?

Apple's decision was the inflection point for the whole channel. Before it, roughly half the US smartphone base could not receive RCS at all, which made an RCS-first programme hard to justify. After it, RCS reaches over 80% of US smartphones, and the question for a business changed from whether the channel is worth building for to how quickly to move.

RCS messaging on iPhone, how it works

RCS lives inside the standard Messages app rather than in a separate application. Apple keeps iMessage as its own service for Apple-to-Apple conversations, and uses RCS for messages to Android and for messages from businesses. In practice the user does not choose: the phone picks the best channel available for each conversation, and RCS replaces the SMS and MMS fallback that used to handle anything iMessage could not.

What iPhone users gained is what Android users already had: high-resolution images and video instead of degraded MMS, typing indicators, read receipts, larger group chats that behave properly, and messages that work over Wi-Fi.

Turning RCS messaging on or off on an iPhone

It is one switch: Settings, then Apps, then Messages, then RCS Messaging. On a carrier that supports it the switch is on by default and the phone registers itself the first time it has service.

Turning it off does not break anything. Those conversations return to SMS and MMS, which means compressed images, no read receipts, and no typing indicators, but messages still send and arrive. iMessage threads with other Apple devices are unaffected either way, because they never used RCS to begin with. How to turn RCS on and off covers both platforms, and why RCS is not working covers the case where the switch is missing or greyed out.

The 2026 encryption milestone

iOS 26.5, released on 11 May 2026, turned on end-to-end encryption for RCS conversations between iPhone and Android. It is built on GSMA Universal Profile 3.0 and the Messaging Layer Security protocol, which Apple helped publish. Encryption is on by default where supported and the conversation displays a lock icon, though Apple still labels the feature beta.

It requires a current Google Messages on the Android side and carrier support for Universal Profile 3.0 on both ends, which is a separate qualification from carrying RCS at all. This applies to private conversations, not to business messages. Is RCS encrypted explains why the two cases differ.

RCS business messages on iPhone: what Apple support means for a sender

Three things follow, and they are the reason this question matters commercially at all.

First, reach stopped being the objection. An RCS-first campaign now lands richly on the large majority of US handsets, with automatic per-recipient fallback covering the rest. See how RCS falls back to SMS.

Second, your brand now renders on iPhone. A verified sender shows your name, logo, and checkmark in the Messages app on the device population that historically saw an anonymous number. That is a bigger change for trust than for aesthetics, because iPhone users had no way at all to distinguish a real business text from a phishing attempt.

Third, your measurement improves on the Apple side. Read receipts and suggestion taps come back from iPhones as they do from Android, so engagement data is no longer split between two very different levels of visibility.

What Apple still does not do

Businesses cannot send iMessage. There is no commercial API for it, and there will not be one. iMessage is a consumer service between Apple devices, so any brand wanting to reach iPhone users in the native messaging app does it over RCS. RCS vs iMessage covers the comparison in full.