alt Hacker NewsI have never seen any of this in real life.
However, all of this is in the RCS spec. If Apple implements the RCS spec beyond the bare basics, all of this should Just Work.
RCS is much more than just "SMS but via weird HTTP" and things like chatbots and interactive components were one of the selling points towards ISPs to bother supporting it.
Unfortunately, nobody seems to bother dealing with the standard. Now Google is at it again, selling "RCS for business" when the RCS standard itself is supposed to be used in a federated, carrier-to-carrier fashion just like SMS.
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I did just manage to dig up a source that says these things are somewhat implemented in iOS 18 with illustrative screenshots rather than actuals, and it seems to be implemented but currently janky:
- On iOS, rich cards have a message length limit of 144 characters. (Implies this is not a limitation on Android.)
- On iOS, multi-CTA might fold some of the options away. So you might give 4 options and it renders 2 options and makes you use a drop-down for the others.
- On iOS, carousels display as cards, which might not be as obvious to interact with.
https://www.infobip.com/blog/apple-rcs
Potentially improved in iOS 26. It's a little hard to work out the state of this, and of course not trivial to test without joining some kind of partner ecosystem.
I have, on my iPhone, RCS messages from businesses that don’t show up as a green bubble, have (somewhat) interactive components, and exhibit non-standard (also non-intuitive) behavior I didn’t expect of either an RCS or an iMessage.
So I guess they did implement all that.
(Not that they are particularly nicely implemented - the layout and padding is all wrong, alignment is off, and it looks distinctly non-native… but that’s par for the course on iOS 26.)