Android users can now edit texts sent to iPhones, but with a catch

You might remember the #GetTheMessage campaign, which Google launched a couple of years back to get Apple to adopt modern messaging standards. With iOS 18, the iPhone maker finally "got the message" and integrated Rich Communication Services, or RCS. This brought features like typing indicators, high-res photos, and read receipts to green bubble chats.

As of May this year, Google says over 1 billion RCS messages are sent every day. Now, it appears another long-awaited feature is making its way to the platform: the ability to edit a sent message.

The first signs of this change appeared recently, when keen-eyed users like Android Authority's Mishaal Rahman started reporting a new pencil icon next to their sent messages.

The feature gives you a brief window, just 15 minutes, for editing a message up until the cutoff point. The process on the Android phone itself is dead simple: long-press the message bubble you want to fix, tap the edit (pencil) icon, type your correction, and then just edit and resend.

Here is where we get to the "catch". On the receiving iPhone, instead of the original message updating with the correction, the iPhone user just gets a completely new text.

The new message contains the edited text, but it's preceded by an asterisk to indicate a change was made. This is unlike Android to Android, where you can edit a message, and the original bubble just updates itself with an "Edited" label.

The reason for this disjointed experience comes down to technical standards. Apple's initial rollout of RCS in iOS 18 was based on an older spec that did not have a defined protocol for editing messages. This new capability is part of the updated RCS Universal Profile 3.0, a standard that Google is now pushing out.

Google appears to be testing it with a small number of users, so you might not see the option on your phone for a while. For this to work properly for everyone, Apple will have to update its own software to fully support the new standard.

There is no timeline for when that might happen, but as Android Authority notes, it's a safe bet that it will probably arrive alongside the cross-platform end-to-end encryption that both companies have committed to supporting.