Just spent way too long diagnosing this. My wife’s iPhone (iOS 18.0.1) could not send or receive RCS messages in Messages while my exact-same phone could. In Settings/About, my phone’s Carrier Status was “T-Mobile 59.0” and, when tapped to reveal IMS Status, read “Voice, SMS & RCS”. My wife’s was the same version number but her IMS Status read “Voice & SMS” only. Re-setting the network settings, having T-Mobile refresh the line…nothing worked.
But turning off PIA worked immediately! And then we switched to WireGuard (from IPSec) and RCS continues to work.
So I’m posting just so others can avoid spending over an hour on this nonsense. If you use PIA and can’t send/receive RCS, check whether PIA is using WireGuard and, if not, try that!
Hello, future person with a stupidly specific problem reading this well-crafted post. I hope it’s helpful to you.
This was an issue with iOS 18. Confirmed to have been resolved with iOS 18.2 beta.
Can confirm Wireguard fixed the RCS issue for me on iOS 18.1.1, too. Glad to be a hyper-specific issue-haver having found your post… “there are dozens of us!”
I’ve also been having issues with CarPlay connecting on multiple PIA servers for the last few months. Why there needs to be a handshake to a cloud server for me to cast apps onto my car’s screen is beyond me but that’s how it works. I just tested it on a server I know hasn’t worked for some time, having switched from PIA’s iOS default of IPSec (IKEv2) to Wireguard and apparently it was all just the protocol!
Isn’t that what Reddit is mostly for? On an unrelated note, do you know anything about flow restrictors in Moen shower heads? Mine is green and I’m told it should be blue.