With the launch of iOS 18, iPhone users are finally able to exchange rich text messages with their Android counterparts. But beyond Apple's support of RCS, each carrier needs to activate the capability -- and for now, many carriers have yet to jump on the bandwagon.

The GSM Association (GSMA), the organization responsible for developing the Rich Communication Services (RCS) standard, announced on Tuesday that

Thankfully, Apple has a support document available where you can check if your carrier has enabled RCS for the iPhone. The page gives you a list of carriers for each country. If your carrier hasn’t rolled out RCS support for the iPhone, you’ll want to bookmark this page and keep checking back.

The GSM Association promises end-to-end encryption is coming to the Rich Communication Services messaging standard, which will better protect communications between mobile devices.

The talking iPhone and Pixel are back, as Google congratulates Apple on (finally) joining the RCS messaging party.

In the announcement, GSMA technical director Tom Van Pelt said the next milestone for RCS Universal Profile is the “first deployment of standardized, interoperable messaging encryption between different computing platforms.

We've finally made it past the finish line, folks. The day is here, and at long last, the iPhone-to-Android messaging experience is about to get a whole lot better thanks to Apples (likely-reluctant) inclusion of RCS in iMessage.

You can enable RCS messaging on iPhones running iOS 18 or later. Once you install iOS 18 on your phone, you'll need to enable RCS in your messaging settings. You'll also have to check if your carrier supports the RCS protocol or not.