Google takes RCS rollout into its own hands after carriers botch it

[Arthur]

Will Google ditch RCS in favour of a brand new messaging app in 2-3 years time though? 😞

 

Sources: The Verge / Android Police

 

We’ve been hearing about RCS, the replacement for SMS texting, for over a year now, but actually using the next-generation service has been nearly impossible due to complicated carrier and phone maker politics. But now Google is taking over: later this month, Android users in the UK and France will be able to opt in to RCS Chat services provided directly by Google instead of waiting for their carrier to support it.

 

That seems like yet another minor status check-in on the service meant to replace SMS, but in fact it’s a huge shift in strategy: as Google rolls this offering out to more countries, it should eventually mean that RCS will become universally available for all Android users.

 

For the first time in years, Google will directly offer a better default texting experience to Android users instead of waiting for cellphone carriers to do it. It’s not quite the Google equivalent of an iMessage service for Android users, but it’s close. Not knowing when or if RCS Chat would be available for your phone was RCS’s second biggest problem, and Google is fixing it.

 

RCS’s biggest problem is that messages are still not end-to-end encrypted. iMessage, WhatsApp, and Signal are secured in that way, and even Facebook has said it will make all its apps encrypted by default. Google’s chat solution is increasingly looking out of touch — even immoral.

 

But there is hope on that front as well. The product management director overseeing Android Messages, Sanaz Ahari, assures me that Google recognizes the need for private chat within RCS and is working on it. Here’s her full statement:

 

We fundamentally believe that communication, especially messaging, is highly personal and users have a right to privacy for their communications. And we’re fully committed to finding a solution for our users.

 

What it means to you should be simple: if you have an Android phone, the timeline for when the RCS switch will be available has become shorter. Google says that it will release the services to more countries “throughout the year,” but wouldn’t commit to saying that it would be available in all regions by the end of the year. However, as Ahari puts it, the goal is “a great, simple user experience that just works for every Android user.”

 

As with all things related to Google’s messaging strategy in general, and Rich Communication Services (RCS) specifically, none of this is happening with the speed or clarity I’d like. But it’s happening, finally, and there are a lot of details to go through if you want to fully understand how it will work and what it means.

 

How Google's RCS chat service will work

RCS is the next-generation texting protocol that most carriers around the world have agreed should eventually replace SMS. It offers most of the features that you’d expect from a modern messaging app, including read receipts, high-quality attachments, and typing indicators (though, again, it lacks end-to-end encryption). Google’s Android Messages app refers to RCS as “Chat,” which is a more consumer-friendly name for the service.

 

The process will be opt-in. When users open up the Android Messages app, they’ll see a prompt offering to upgrade to RCS Chat. This will also apply to new phones. RCS Chat will be in the default app and offered to every Android user, but for now the plan is not to make it the default. Apple automatically opts users in to iMessage, but Google is going to require an active choice.

 

 

Why Google had to do it

Until now, carriers have been in charge of deciding when to turn on RCS — it’s been their service, not Google’s. Google had made the decision not to just up and replace the default texting app with its own service and seemed committed to it. Whether that was because of concerns over aggravating carrier partners or simple product mismanagement is a question only Google executives can answer — though that answer is surely a combination of both.

 

Unfortunately, and all too predictably, the rollout of RCS has been terrible (especially in the US). Although Google notes that RCS is live in "24 markets", that doesn’t really mean that much because of how many complications and caveats are involved in getting the service.

 

Even if your carrier supports RCS, that doesn’t mean that its chat messages will interoperate with other RCS users. Your carrier has to support the Universal Profile, and not all of them do. And even then, just because a carrier supports RCS doesn’t mean that every Android phone on that network will get it, because they’ve been approving handsets one by one. For example, T-Mobile isn’t supporting RCS on the Pixel 3A.

 

If you want to use iMessage, you buy an iPhone. If you want to use Signal or WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, you install the apps. If you want to use RCS, you’d wait to see if your carrier planned to support it, wait for your carrier to turn it on, and hope that your particular phone was blessed to use it. And the same process applied to everybody you’d want to talk to. It is like the Upside Down, Demogorgon version of the network effect. It is untenable.

 

It is also exactly the sort of mess that we were all worried Google would wade into when it told me about its plans for RCS Chat over a year ago. “The experience is still pretty hard to understand for users,” Ahari admits. “That’s something we also feel the pain of.” Last month, Google’s Hiroshi Lockheimer said “I’ll be honest, and I’ve mentioned this to [carriers], I’m a little bit frustrated at the pace of this. It needs to get better,” during The Vergecast.

 

So instead of making you wait for your carrier to provide RCS services, Google is finally just going to do it itself.

 

It’s the option I’ve always referred to as “going full iMessage”: just taking over texting and carriers be damned. Google’s not going that nuclear — it’s still opt-in and carriers can run their own RCS services if they want, but it’s the most user-friendly thing to do, and hopefully Google doesn’t take too long rolling out support in more countries.

Edited June 18, 2019 by Arthur