SMS and RCS messaging?

[Anne]

I am confused about the difference. It's always been SMS, but after the last iOS 18.5 update, I am receiving messages in green in the Messages app. My husband has an iPhone 14 Pro, and I have a 16 Pro and we text each other often. I thought green was associated with an android device, but our messages are green instead of the usual blue.

Trying to read about RCS hasn't been helpful since I don't understand a lot of the terminology ??

 

[Anne]

Thank you for your reply to this Dave, however your response does not show up in this forum, but instead arrived by email to my Outlook mail !

 

[DaveWT]

Odd, I tried to delete it completely because I was so unsure about what I wrote. I wonder how it got to your Outlook mail?

 

[Anne]

Thanks again Dave. Once again the response came to my email, but also in the the Forum! Anyway, while I still don’t quite get the difference, the matter has resolved itself and we are back to normal. My husband was in France recently and his settings got changed because of a travel eSIM. We eventually figured it out, but the settings are so different between the 14 Pro and 16 Pro.

 

[DaveWT]

I see the reason you are getting these in your email is because of a setting in your Preferences for the Forum. I guess when I wrote a reply and later deleted it, it had already gone to your email before I deleted it from the Forum.

Dave

 

[Anne]

Makes sense. Thanks for all your help.

 

[chas_m]

For everyone who didn’t get Dave’s email …

SMS stands for Short Messaging Service, and is still the standard used for text-only message you get on cell phones (does anyone use pagers anymore?) and computers. SMS is the original messaging over cellular standard and is still used for text only messages so as to ensure compatibility across all manner of cell phones and other devices.

MMS stands for Multimedia Messaging Service and was developed to allow photos and short video clips to be sent alongside messages.

RCS stands for Rich Communication Service and supersedes SMS/MMS to allow for pictures, video clips, files and other media to be sent via text messages. This is the current standard on modern smartphones, which have the storage that makes it possible to send and receive larger files.