The site asks for your account information and general opinions about your carrier. The message says you can get a free smartphone just by completing a simple survey. The iPhone does not support RCS and Apple has yet to make a peep about whether it will. You receive an email or text message from a bad guy pretending to be your wireless carrier. Verizon will need to get on board, too, as will another big company: Apple. Now, with these carrier deals, Google has gone one step further to make it a true default. In all, the RCS Chat rollout has been a huge mess because of politics, corporate fights, and plain old confusing Google messaging app strategies. Google eventually had to take matters into its own hands, years into an overlong transition by offering RCS services directly to any Android user. In fact, in October 2019 they announced a doomed attempt to form an RCS consortium that went nowhere. In any case, despite Google’s best efforts, carriers were slow to adopt RCS. This is not the same thing as Google Chat, the company’s other messaging service.
When Android Messages detects that you’re texting with another phone that supports RCS, your text entry window will switch to say that you are sending a “Chat” and that you have “Chat features” enabled.
Here’s how to manage messages on your phone and use the app on a tablet. RCS has a lot of advantages over SMS: there are no character limits, it can send larger files, it can show typing indicators, offer better group chats, Wi-Fi support, and offer end-to-end encryption for one-on-one chats. We discontinued the AT&T Messages website () on October 31, 2019.
Google has been pushing RCS as its default texting solution for Android for some time now, touting it as an open standard that any carrier can easily adopt as the next generation of SMS. The new deal also means that AT&T customers will benefit from the rollout of end-to-end encryption for RCS that Google is rolling out to all customers this year (that rollout has already begun, in fact). AT&T has supported RCS for awhile now, but that support has been as haphazard as it was half-hearted. T-Mobile made the exact same partnership deal with Google in March, which leaves Verizon as the only US carrier who hasn’t committed to switching its customers to Android Messages by default.Īlong with the switch to Messages comes another important shift: real interoperability with RCS on other networks. AT&T and Google have announced that all Android phones on the network will use Google’s Android Messages app for SMS and RCS services.