Here's how Messages will solve the low-quality media problem in RCS chats (APK teardown)

For years now, Google has been pushing Apple to “get the message” about rich communication services (RCS). Last year, out of nowhere, Apple finally announced it was getting on board. This will allow people who use RCS-supported apps on Android — chiefly Google Messages — to better and more securely communicate with people who use Apple’s Messages apps on iPhones. However, there’s just one problem: Google Messages still sends out heavily compressed media. Thankfully, that is changing — and not a moment too soon.

To be clear, we knew Google had been working on this since at least July. However, we now have seen evidence in the latest beta of Messages (messages.android_20240823_00_RC00.phone_samsung_openbeta_dynamic) to show just how this will work from a user perspective, and we can see that it’s essentially done. This heavily suggests we’ll see this roll out relatively soon, which is great news because Google only has one first impression to give iPhone users the first time they communicate with an Android user through RCS — and it doesn’t want to bungle that up.

First, check out the screenshots below to see what you’ll be greeted with when sending media to an RCS chat in Messages:

In the first screenshot, you can see that Messages will ask you to pick from two options for the media you’re sending:

• Optimized for chat: Send faster with reduced quality
• Original quality: Send with no changes to quality, uses more data

Whichever option you select here will apply to current and future chats. Once you make that selection, you can then caption the media (or not) and then hit send. We can confirm that hitting the “Original quality” option does send a completely uncompressed version of the media in question.

You can see the whole process in the video clip below:

Although we don’t have any confirmation yet, we can only assume you can change this setting at any time on the Messages’ settings page.

We still don’t know when this will appear for users. We also don’t yet know when Apple will switch on RCS support for all iPhones (currently, you need to be in the US on iOS 18 beta). It’s likely, though, that it will be during or around the launch of the iPhone 16 series, slated for September 9, 2024. We can only hope that Google’s new setting will be live when the majority of iPhone users get RCS support, so we’ll finally all be able to share full-quality images and videos with each other, regardless of our preferred operating system. What a beautiful day that will be.