Apple took a big step in improving the messaging experience between Android and iPhone by adding RCS support to iOS 18’s Messages app.
This ultimately gives Android and iPhone users a better cross-platform text messaging experience, with features like typing hints, the ability to share high-resolution images, and more.
In Apple’s app, however, there was a flaw where when an Android user reacted to a message, it arrived as separate text. Now, however, that problem seems to have been fixed.
According to The Verge, emoji reactions are displayed correctly on both platforms. They tested this by sending emoji reactions to messages from an iPhone running iOS 18.1 and an Android phone. In both cases, the reactions appeared correctly on the other device.
Apple supports version 2.4 RCS in iOS 18, which does not support emoji reactions. This feature is part of RCS v2.7. So either Apple upgraded iPhones to the newer RCS standard with iOS 18.1, or Google made changes to the backend so that iPhones can better handle emoji reactions sent by Android devices.
RCS v2.7 also allows editing of a sent text, but this feature does not yet work on iPhone. iPhone users are limited to editing texts sent to other iPhone users via iMessage.
Source: techblog.gr
