I'm talking about long overdue upgrades for "green bubble" conversations between iPhone users and Android users. Thanks to RCS support in iOS 18, trying to have a conversation with my iPhone-using friends won't be a pain.

There are still plenty of ways we could see green bubble chats improve, but for now, I'm happy with these 5 newly added features.

5. Read receipts

When RCS is enabled on both phones in a conversation, each user can now see read receipts when the other person opens their message.

Previously, when an iPhone user would send a message to an Android user, they'd just see "Delivered" under the bubble. Now, you can tell if you've been left on read.

4. Typing indicators

Similar to read receipts, users with RCS enabled can now see typing indicators from Android users (and vice versa, if your Android messaging app supports it). Now, both parties can see the animated ellipses pop up in a gray bubble to know when someone's actively responding to a message.

3. More functional Tapbacks

iPhone users can react to messages with an emoji — called a Tapback — when there's not much else to say in a conversation. While users can still use the six original reaction emojis, they can now choose from a lot more emojis with the iOS 18 update.

If you're using Google Messages on Android, you can even send your own emoji reactions back to an iPhone user.

2. Better group chat experience

Pre-iOS 18, iPhone users would dread adding an Android user to a group chat because all of the helpful iMessage features they love would disappear, including tapback reactions, audio messages, Memoji stickers, and higher-quality photos and videos.

With the iOS 18 update, not everything disappears anymore when an Android user is added to a group chat. Now, a group chat involving Android and iPhone users supports audio messages, non-compressed media, and a smaller amount of Tapback reactions to use.

1. Higher-quality photos and videos

This is perhaps the most exciting improvement to green bubble chats. Gone are the days of opening a disgustingly compressed photo or video sent via your friend's iPhone.

Thanks to the RCS standard, iPhones can now support a max file size of 105MB per message, so media no longer needs to be massively compressed before heading to an Android user like it would when sent via MMS.

Improvements could still be made

There are still a few features iMessage doesn't support for green bubble chats, like the new feature to schedule messages ahead of time. Also, although the RCS protocol supports end-to-end encryption, Apple is using the basic version of RCS, so your messages aren't as secure as they could be.

That said, updates to iMessage in iOS 18 are still a major win for Android-iOS chats, so we'll take that.