I’m receiving messages RCS but then my reply is SMS

I was able to fix this by adding the country code to a contact's phone number. Once I changed the phone number from 10-digit to 11-digit the messages going forward then showed as all being RCS with the contact.

I was able to fix my issue with the one contact by removing the “+” from in front of their contact number. None of my other contacts have the + in their numbers saved and their RCS work fine. Once I edited their contact, it immediately switched over to RCS.

before that I tried rebooting, turning RCS on and off, deleting the message thread…..everything. Editing the contact number so far seems to have helped at least three of us for sure.

I have an iPhone 14, I had the same issue for 2 days. With one contact, I finally got tired of it and contacted Apple, they told me to retry everything I’ve found online including in this question and issue thread. They then said they couldn’t figure out the issue and sent me to a senior supervisor, or something like that. He told since it’s only with one contact, it might be an issue with the shared thread they have with android uses (the RCS texting feature). He told me he would contact them and it should be fixed within a day, told me he was in charge of my complaint and to contact him with any updates. In 8 hours the issue was fixed, so I highly recommend contacting Apple.

sbook23 wrote:

Turn off “send as text message” and leave RCS on. Send a test message. And it should fix it. Then you can turn send as text back on.

"Send as text message" has nothing to do with sending messages to Android users. That feature tells the phone to automatically resend an iMessage as an SMS/RCS in the event the iMessage fails.

Same exact issue with my iPhone 16 Pro Max

as well as my wife’s iPhone 16 Pro. My mom no matter if I remove the contact, re add it, turn off settings etc it still gets sent as a text message instead of RCS. Is there any fix for this?

Omg this same thing was happening to me with my messages with my boyfriend. I got all his messages RCS all mine sent to him SMS for a good week after I had one message go through to him as SMS it was like it was permanently shut off for him. I tried restarting my phone, resetting my network settings, turning RCS off, restarting phone, then RCS back on. Nothing worked. Contacted Apple support who offered me basically no suggestions and said I would need to contact my carrier as this wasn’t something they could fix. RCS messaging was still working fine for other contacts. Thank god I found a comment in this thread about deleting his number off his contact. That fixed it! I didn’t have to delete his full contact or anything, just the phone number. Phew! Saved it with no number. Then went back in and re-added the number and it fixed everything. I told the Apple support person maybe you should let people know this simple fix in the future as there are clearly hundreds of apple users having this same issue. After I told them what I did to fix it the person literally said back to me “I am sorry the steps were not shared before. But, yes deleting the contact and re-adding would resolve the issue.” Okay then why did you not give me this tip before? And also I didn’t have to delete his full contact! Just the number! Problem solved without losing all the things his contact was linked to or our message history that I absolutely did not want to lose. Thank you people of this forum for saving the day!

I have tried everything suggested in this thread, I am on the iOS 18.5 update and this is still an issue, however I will say this only became an issue for me towards the end of the day yesterday but I haven’t been able to find a solution to fix it. Anyone still dealing with this? Any new ideas for fixing this?

Reset, basically go to settings, general, transfer and reset phone, the click reset network, surprisingly it doesn’t get rid of anything it just resets the network, then once it powers back on you should have RCS again.

Perhaps instead of trying to upgrade your mac around this issue

hold fast, or try to update the original configuration first.. To go

past the first range of problems takes you into uncharted lands.

IF you had more than one identical Mac, then one could be used

as a Test. Instead of running the mess out of control w/o reverse.

Review original or near similar Update Support articles; try again.

Have you restarted your Mac in Safe mode?

.I'd never run a Beta on my only workable hardware.

I’m having the same issue. It’s only with one contact. When she messages me it’s sent as RCS but when I go to message her it sends as SMS. It didn’t used to do that. I’ve had no problems until this morning. I tried restarting it and everything. Did you ever find a solution?

I'm on a Pixel 9 and seeing this with all of my Verizon/iOS friends. My messages all go over RCS and they get them fine, but their responses all come over SMS. This is a new development in the last week, all was over RCS prior to that.

Same thing with me. Only one contact, which is the person I text with the most. This morning my messages were sending RCS then later on in the afternoon, all my messages were sent SMS and his replies back to me were in RCS. I turned off my phone, switched WiFi connections, toggled the RCS switch. Nothing. I actually saw a one point the message box blink between SMS to RCS back to SMS. I know it’s my phone/network issue. It’s annoying that all this started this week.

Same here. I’ve experienced this on my iPhone 16 Pro, 15 Pro Max and 15. I haven’t been able to find a fix yet. Definitely seems to be a problem on Apple’s end. This seems to be ann issue with only certain people in my contacts list. Often times the message will fail to send all together until I manually send it as an SMS message. Hope Apple fixes this soon!

I'm seeing my RCS status change to SMS and back to RCS after each text message I send to an Android user. Seems like it could be an iOS issue as none of my Android contacts get that. From what I've read online many people are having issues with Apple's implementation of RCS in iOS18 and so far no real fix works for everyone. Mixed results from going into Settings and resetting your cell network.