After critical comments on Saturday, Android chief Hiroshi Lockheimer is back with some “thoughts and clarifications” on RCS and iMessage.
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Messaging is a core part of any smartphone, and it’s something that Apple has really nailed with the iPhone and iMessage. Googlers have voiced their frustration recently over how Apple uses iMessage as a tool for lock-in and while Apple’s resistance to RCS and other cross-platform standards is certainly annoying, the context of Google’s countless failures in messaging don’t really help the company’s case.
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Hiroshi Lockheimer oversees all of Google’s operating systems as Senior Vice President of Platforms and Ecosystems. In recent years, he has been very critical of Apple not supporting the RCS standard to make iOS messaging more interoperable with Android, and the latest salvo on iMessage is the harshest yet.
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In the midst of Hurricane Ida, I’ve found that RCS is not ready to be depended upon, while Google Messages has not thought out all the edge cases for the future.
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Messaging has always been a tough point for Android phones compared to iPhones simply because iMessage is, put simply, very good both for its experience and its security. As Google finally solves that problem with expanded adoption of RCS with end-to-end encryption, the company is pushing for its rival, Apple, to do the same by pointing out that the current fallback method instantly drops security.
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From 2022, Verizon will begin preloading Google Messages as the default SMS and RCS messaging app on all Android phones sold by the US carrier.
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Google and AT&T announced today that the carrier would be using the Messages app and Rich Communicate Services (RCS) on all Android phones in the US.
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After months of silence it seemed all but certain that CCMI, a project from all major US carriers to bring RCS to the masses was probably dead, but now a report seems to confirm as much. The Cross Carrier Messaging Initiative for RCS is — probably — dead.
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RCS is the next big step in messaging, but carriers have delayed the transition time and time again, to the point where Google took its own step to roll out RCS to every Android phone in the world through its own app. Now, Google’s RCS rollout is expanding to a second app, Samsung Messages.
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In mid-2019, Google decided to take over and speed up the launch of RCS. A little over 17 months later, Google announced today that it has completed a global rollout of RCS, while Messages will start testing end-to-end encryption.
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Google Messages has been rolling out RCS support to Android users across the globe and, now, users in Italy are getting in on the fun.
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As RCS continues to roll out more widely around the globe, Google is improving the feature through its Messages app. The latest feature added is a neat trick that lets you reroute an RCS message to SMS in Google Messages.
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RCS is the next big step in improving messaging on Android, but there will be some people who just don’t want it. Recently, Google opened up a form that makes it easy to disable RCS completely on Google Messages for your number by deregistering it.
The rollout of RCS has been slow, but as Sundar Pichai mentioned recently, it’s starting to gain momentum. This week, user reports reveal that Google is apparently rolling out RCS support to Google Messages users in India.
Today, the folks at APKMirror got ahold of an internal “dogfood” build of Google Messages version 6.2. Here, “dogfood” is used in the sense of the phrase “eat your own dog food,” meaning actually use the product you’re building. Of course, our APK Insight team immediately dug in to see what all is coming with the next version of Google Messages. While we’re still actively looking through the many changes found within, one in particular stood out — end-to-end encryption for RCS messages.
Update 5/26: We now have a screenshot of one of the end-to-end encryption settings pages in action.
Google’s initiative to bring RCS to every Android user has been a slow process, but it’s expanded quite a lot, even just in the past few months. Today, T-Mobile has announced a partnership with Google to bring RCS to every Android user on T-Mobile and Metro.
Between the COVID-19 pandemic, ongoing projects, and recent reports, things are kind of a whirlwind for Google at the moment. In an interview released today, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai discussed the future of the Google Pixel lineup, progress of RCS, and how COVID-19 has been affecting Google’s business. Here’s the summary.
For the last few months, our APK Insight team has been tracking Google’s efforts to add emoji reactions to RCS and specifically their own Messages app. Some are now reporting that they’re able to add iMessage-like reactions to RCS messages.
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RCS messaging has had a rocky rollout so far, but Samsung and Google are now teaming up directly to enable the rich text message service on more Galaxy phones.
RCS chat is Google’s latest attempt to fix the Android messaging mess, and slowly the company has been rolling out the functionality to Android users around the world. Now, Google Messages is delivering RCS to users in Spain.
Google has recently begun making progress toward bringing reactions to RCS, or at least their version of RCS in the Google Messages app. In the latest salvo in the petty war of blue bubble vs green bubble, Google Messages is getting ready to send some very iMessage-like reaction text messages, such as “Liked a photo.”
RCS is widely rolled out in the US, Mexico, UK, and France after Google took charge of the rollout last year. There are now reports this afternoon that RCS is down, with many Android users stuck on the “Connecting…” status in Google Messages.
Last October, a trick to enable RCS in the Messages app on any Android phone emerged. Google today announced that it will be killing “unsupported workarounds” by the end of February.
