Recent tweets from one of Google’s top Android executives should make it clear how badly Google wants Apple to support "RCS" messaging on iPhones, but they may leave many Android users wondering "what’s RCS?"
RCS, which Google also labels "chat features," represents an overdue upgrade to phone messaging. This wireless-industry-endorsed standard adds much of the interactivity that Apple’s iMessage shipped in 2016—see when somebody’s typing, know when they read your message, and respond with tapback emojis—while encrypting messages in transit and, some end-to-end.
But zero overlap exists between RCS and iMessage. Hiroshi Lockheimer, Google's senior vice president for mobile platforms, vented about this in Jan. 8 tweets sharing a Wall Street Journal Wall Street Journal story on the peer-pressure factor of having one's Android-sent messages appear in green bubbles amidst the blue bubbles of iMessage banter.
"Using peer pressure and bullying as a way to sell products is disingenuous for a company that has humanity and equity as a core part of its marketing," Lockheimer wrote. "The standards exist today to fix this."
In a follow-up thread on Monday, Lockheimer clarified that he wasn't asking for iMessage for Android: “We're asking Apple to support the industry standard for modern messaging (RCS) in iMessage, just as they support the older SMS / MMS standards.”
But he left out how little support RCS sees in practice on Android phones. First, it generally requires Google's own Android messaging app—as in, not what Samsung makes the default on its phones, which dominate the Android market.
Last year, Google did persuade the three major carriers to commit to making its Messages app their default: T-Mobile did last March, AT&T followed in June, Verizon in July. But those pledges don’t affect existing phones and, in some cases, remain in implementation.
As a result, until today I had enjoyed RCS messaging exactly once. Courtesy of testing with my colleague Sascha Segan, I now have three RCS… er, "chat features" conversations on my unlocked Pixel 5a on T-Mobile.
Today's two chats required troubleshooting. On a Kyocera on Verizon running Google’s Messages app, Segan had to enable chat features in that app’s settings before each of us could see our sent messages in RCS’s dark-blue bubbles, then reboot it to activate end-to-end encryption. On an unlocked Galaxy S21 on T-Mobile, he had to switch from Samsung’s messaging app to Google’s, then reboot to get full RCS support, “e2e” encryption included.
Meanwhile, RCS remains off-limits in the other number I use on my Android phone—a Google Voice number. Recent, belated upgrades to Google’s calling and messaging service have yet to add support for Google’s preferred messaging standard.
Google’s Lockheimer makes a fair point in calling out Apple for not supporting RCS as a fallback in iMessage. Apple may tout privacy as a human right, but by leaving Android-iPhone messaging mired in SMS and MMS, it deprives privacy from a vast expanse of human interaction.
But Google has a lot of work to do in its own house too.