iOS 27 adds inline replies and full Tapbacks to RCS chats with Android phonesiOS 27 adds inline replies and full Tapbacks to RCS chats with Android phones

Messages in iOS 27 supports inline replies and full Tapback reactions in RCS conversations, the green-bubble chats iPhones use with Android phones.

Apple's iPhone User Guide for iOS 27 now lists RCS as supporting read receipts, typing indicators, Tapbacks, inline replies, and high-resolution photos and videos. 9to5Mac, which highlighted the change on 5 October, says inline replies and full Tapback support are part of the RCS 2.7 standard and had not been implemented by Apple until iOS 27.

In practice, an iPhone user can now reply to a specific message in a group or one-to-one RCS chat and have it appear threaded for Android participants, as it does in iMessage. Reactions are sent as reactions. Before, 9to5Mac notes, an iPhone user's Tapback on a photo could reach an Android phone as a line of text along the lines of a person having loved an image.

What do you need for it to work?

• An iPhone on iOS 27. Apple's guide is the iOS 27 edition; the features are not listed for earlier versions.
• A carrier that supports RCS. Apple's guide says plainly that RCS is provided by the carrier, not by Apple, and needs a text plan that includes it.
• For encryption, both carriers. Apple says RCS chats can be end-to-end encrypted when both your carrier and your contact's carrier support encrypted RCS.

Messages still sends with iMessage whenever it can, shown by the blue send button. RCS is the fallback when iMessage is not available, and a green send button shows it.

Our take

These are small features with a large daily effect. Most people's frustration with mixed iPhone and Android groups was never about encryption, which few people check. It was about a family chat filling with reaction messages written out as sentences, and replies that lost track of what they were replying to. Fixing those two removes the most visible reasons an Android friend's presence made a group worse.

It is worth being clear about what has not changed. RCS on iPhone still depends on the carrier, so the experience varies by network and by country, and encryption needs both ends. Apple writes that limitation into its own guide, which is more candid than most help pages. iMessage keeps the features that make Apple's own chats different, such as editing, unsending and scheduling, so the gap between blue and green is smaller rather than closed.

Messages has had a busy cycle. We covered Messages Suggestions returning in the iOS 27.2 beta, and RCS is the other half of the same app. APPDOOK's view is that the RCS work is the more consequential of the two, because it improves conversations for people who never chose an iPhone. If your mixed groups still show reactions as text after updating, check that every iPhone in the chat is on iOS 27, then check the carrier: the problem will be one of those two.