How to check if your Android smartphone has RCS

You may have heard of RCS and how it is a huge update from SMS, the old standard for text messaging. But how do you know if you can actually use RCS? We will show you how to check easily.

In short, RCS (Rich Communication Service) is the future of text messaging. It brings a lot of features that you’ve probably used in instant messaging apps, like read receipts, typing indicators, and high-quality pictures, to standard text messages.

RELATED: What is RCS, the successor to SMS?

Rolling out RCS to phones has been long and complicated. For starters, iPhones don’t support RCS at all. Instead, Apple uses its own iMessage standard. Carriers have bogged down the rollout to Android devices, but Google is working to fix that.

So to get RCS you will need to use an Android device. In addition to that, you must have set the Google Messages app as the default SMS app. Third party text messaging applications cannot take advantage of RCS.

With all of the above in mind, it is very easy to see if your Android device supports RCS. First, open the Google Messages app and tap on the three-dot menu icon at the top right corner.

Then select “Settings” from the drop-down menu.

If you see a section called “Chat Features” at the top of the Settings menu, you have RCS. “Chat” is the term Google uses for RCS features.

In the “Chat Features” settings, you can enable or disable several of the RCS features or disable them completely.

That’s all we can say about it. If your device does not yet support RCS, you will probably see a pop-up message in the Messages app where you can enable it.