RCS

Apple announced (via 9to5Mac) today that it’s adding RCS support to the iPhone in a great boost to Android-iOS messaging.

RCS has grown massively thanks to Google’s heavy push of the standard in recent years, and Google is also the one running RCS for a lot of carriers around the globe. Announced this week, UK carrier O2 is handing over the reins on RCS to Google ahead of some potential upgrades from Google.

Before Google started “Get The Message,” its campaign to pressure Apple on RCS for the iPhone played out in press interviews, tweets, and even on-stage at I/O:

In addition to Get the Messages continuing with iPager, T-Mobile announced today that its RCS offering is now powered by Google’s Jibe platform. 

Google started “Get the Message” last year to pressure Apple into supporting RCS on the iPhone, and the campaign continues today with “iPager.”

RCS is available to every Android user at this point, but that hasn’t ended the messaging headaches that come from iMessage and the lack of RCS on iPhone. But now, the third-party app Beeper can support both Google Messages RCS and Apple iMessage on both Android and iPhone, all within the same app.

After testing group end-to-end encryption for the past few months, Google Messages has now fully rolled it out and is enabling RCS by default.

Google is continuing its move to more explicitly label “RCS” in Messages with a very prominent badge noting which conversations are eligible.

While AT&T announced that it would use Google’s Messages app for RCS in June of 2021, the carrier maintained its own backend. That’s now changing with AT&T switching over to Google’s Jibe platform for RCS.

Google I/O 2023 was a place for the company to show off its real strength in AI, and it also brought several updates and announcements on existing Google products. Here are some notable numbers and metrics from Google I/O 2023.

RCS has grown significantly over the past few years, but one gaping hole in the product was support for end-to-end encryption. Now, after a few months of testing, Google appears to be rolling out, or at least testing, end-to-end encryption for RCS group chats in stable Google Messages updates.

Vodafone is pulling the plug on its own RCS implementation in the coming days, with an alert to customers going out now.

A few weeks ago, at MWC 2023, I had an opportunity to sit down with Hiroshi Lockheimer, senior vice president of Platforms and Ecosystems at Google, to talk about RCS messaging. While there was not a lot into the future of what Google is planning with Google Messages and RCS as a protocol, I did get a good look into how RCS came to be and how Google sees it.

Google has struck a deal with Vodafone, a major telecommunications company in Europe, which will expand the footprint of Pixel and Android TV and will update RCS for customers across the continent.

Since last year’s “Get the Message” advertising campaign online and in New York City, awareness of Rich Communication Services (RCS) is growing more mainstream. Google is now making RCS even more consumer-facing by prominently surfacing the name of the standard — a brand, of sorts — in Messages for Android.

Google recently finished rolling out end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for group chats in beta, but the Messages capability currently has a 21-person limit.

Starting today, Google is rolling out end-to-end encryption (E2EE) in group chats for Messages users enrolled in the beta program. 

Over the past several months Google has been pushing hard for Apple to adopt the RCS standard that could greatly improve messaging between Android and iOS, and at CES 2023, Google put out huge ads for Android that further pushed that campaign.

Google Messages is the vehicle that drives the RCS chat experience for millions of Android users around the world, but that experience still isn’t completely done. After bringing end-to-end encryption, Google Messages still needs to support E2EE to group chats over RCS, and it seems that’s starting to show up.

Google is rolling out a handful of new features for Messages today to make the core experience more convenient, like a YouTube PiP. This follows a similar set of announcements back in March.