I’m trying to talk to someone over text who has an android, but every text i send is being sent as SMS and all of theirs are being sent as RCS. It keeps flipping back and forth and it’s annoying.
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
iPhone 11, iOS 18
This finally worked for me!
“You are going to want to turn off RCS in your Messages settings, then turn on Airplane mode. After that, restart your phone. Then go back in, enable the RCS setting and THEN turn off Airplane mode and it should work.
This is assuming you have the bug where your contact’s messages come through as RCS, but yours still come through as SMS. And make sure they are the one who sent the most recent message, so the latest chat came through as RCS.
If you’re not already receiving as RCS, I don’t know if this will work. Apple pls fix”
***!!! This is the only thing that worked for me! I reset network settings, restarted, turned off iMessage, SMS and did everything else suggested in this thread and finally the airplane mode with RCS disabled restart worked for me. THANK YOU!
This finally worked for me!
“You are going to want to turn off RCS in your Messages settings, then turn on Airplane mode. After that, restart your phone. Then go back in, enable the RCS setting and THEN turn off Airplane mode and it should work.
This is assuming you have the bug where your contact’s messages come through as RCS, but yours still come through as SMS. And make sure they are the one who sent the most recent message, so the latest chat came through as RCS.
If you’re not already receiving as RCS, I don’t know if this will work. Apple pls fix”
***!!! This is the only thing that worked for me! I reset network settings, restarted, turned off iMessage, SMS and did everything else suggested in this thread and finally the airplane mode with RCS disabled restart worked for me. THANK YOU!
You are going to want to turn off RCS in your Messages settings, then turn on Airplane mode. After that, restart your phone. Then go back in, enable the RCS setting and THEN turn off Airplane mode and it should work.
This is assuming you have the bug where your contact’s messages come through as RCS, but yours still come through as SMS. And make sure they are the one who sent the most recent message, so the latest chat came through as RCS.
If you’re not already receiving as RCS, I don’t know if this will work. Apple pls fix
I too experience this problem with a single contact only. I receive their texts as RCS but send to them just standard SMS.
Restarted phone, tested on and off wifi, tested with 5G and LTE. Noticed the "flipping" of RCS to Text in the send window as some reported.
Deleting the Contact (not the message), immediately restored RCS.
The contact is on Verizon, I am on T-Mobile. A OnePlus device.
I am re-adding the entry to my contacts and see if it remains on.
[Edited by Moderator]
Offering a potential solution for the scenario that you are receiving RCS messages from a specific contact, but sending SMS.
To be honest this could have been a combination of things -- I tried, in no particular order:
In the end, a variation on the simple "turn it off and back on" method worked for me, but maybe you also have to try those first. There definitely seems to be some key order of operations depending on the particular flavor of bug you're hitting.
I also tried this today, so no idea how long it will stick -- fingers crossed.
Turning RCS Business off did not work for me. However the suggesting on resetting the network worked!!! THANK YOU!
This was happening to me too after I woke up to find my phone auto updated. I waited about a day, and then waited for my boyfriend running a Samsung phone to send me a message (making sure it said RCS for it) and I replied back with a photo from my camera roll while connected to wifi. Suddenly it began to work again and my messages towards them are no longer swapping back and forth every time I text.
monist wrote:
Just like their half-hearted support of RCS -- which is probably only out of fear that the EU was about to make them adopt it. I'm here because I can't tell who is sending via SMS and who is sending via RCS on the macOS Messages 'app.' Why is that?
What is half-hearted? iPhones fully support RCS. Any time you send a message to another device that supports RCS it will use RCS for delivery. Any time someone sends an RCS message to you it will be delivered to an iPhone using RCS. There are FOUR players in RCS messaging: The sending device, the receiving device, and the sending cellular network carrier and the receiving network carrier. For RCS to work all 4 need to support RCS.
I can tell with each message; right below each message in the reply box it will say how it was delivered: iMessage, SMS, MMS or RCS. For example, see these screenshots from the Messages app on my MBP (the same on an iPhone or iPad):
[UPDATE from 3 to 4 players]
Yes, after I reset my networks it's always worked. I'm using a 15Pro on ios 18.3.
If yours does but only temporarily I suspect it's your cell provider's fault. It's also possible it's an ios bug, that's why I don't update anymore unless absolutely necessary.
That's really interesting, as the contact I was having the issue with does seem to have the label "phone". Another thing I noticed is that sometimes the Messages app will show "SMS" in the text entry box, and if I type a message it'll send as SMS (even though I don't want it to) but if I kill the Messages app and go back to that contact, it'll show RCS again and then send as RCS. So for now I just know to make sure to restart the app so it doesn't flip back to SMS.
I’ve found something that worked for me, go ahead and delete the contact and then create a new one. This worked for me and I haven’t had issues since!
This is still happening to me on 18.3, to the point where group chats with androids are opening multiple chat threads on the recipients phones. I had to completely disable RCS now or the messages app is pretty much unusable with android recipients.
I solved my SMS/RCS issue by resetting networks:
To reset your iPhone or iPad's network settings, you can do the following:
You will lose saved wifi passwords however.
I had one contact frozen as SMS. I tried restarting, resetting networks, turning RCS on and off. Nothing worked. The only thing that worked for me was going into Messages clicking Edit in the top right. Selecting the contact. Then clicking Unread instead of delete. Immediately switched back to RCS.
Try this: navigate to Settings > General > Transfer or Reset iPhone > Reset > Reset Network Settings. This will remove all saved Wi-Fi passwords, Bluetooth connections, and VPN settings.
This fixed my issue, I did this when my RCS would flip back to sms momentarily after each sent message.
Make sure RCS business messages are off, I was having this same issue and looked and this setting was on for some reason. I turned it off and RCS is back. Hope it helps.
Why do my texts keep switching between RCS and SMS on iPhone?
